Archive for January, 2008
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
An object-oriented template class
The template class is the basis for all the output in IDLdoc. In the process of releasing IDLdoc 3.0, some additions were necessary to facilitate outputting more complex hierarchical data.
Previously, the template process method took a structure argument and substituted variables in the template by the corresponding field name in the structure. The new version [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, Objects by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
opendiff
The diff UNIX utility has been a great tool for me. It performs a task I need to do regularly, find the differences between two files. Unfortunately, despite using it regularly, I am still routinely puzzled by its output. To the rescue: a tool I already had installed, but didn't know about.
FileMerge.app is an [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Mac by Michael Galloy
Sunday, January 27th, 2008
Getting Started with IDLdoc 3.0
I added some more documentation to the "Getting Started" page on the IDLdoc project site. Included is a two minute screencast introducing IDLdoc.
By the way, two minutes of screencast took about two hours of production time. I got a lot of valuable experience doing this though, so I'm hoping to do some more of these [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in IDL, IDLdoc by Michael Galloy
Friday, January 25th, 2008
An IDL style
IDL has never had a single consistent style. There are many styles, none of which I liked (mostly my aversion to ALL CAPS and lack of indentation). I created a style that I would be happy with. I recently uploaded it to the developer's page on IDLdoc project site.
I did not write this to tell [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in IDL by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
Profiler in Workbench
The old Windows DE (I didn't even try this on the UNIX DE) had an interface for using the profiler, but the results window was not very usable (mostly due to the fact that the results window was not resizable, making for a lot of scrolling).
The profiler in the new Workbench displays the [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in IDL by Michael Galloy
Monday, January 21st, 2008
IDLdoc 3.0 released
IDLdoc 3.0 is ready! Highlights of this release:
IDLdoc 3.0 was rewritten from scratch to allow it to be released under an open source license. Source code is available from the project website.
There are multiple formats for entering comments: the normal IDLdoc style, the traditional IDL comment header, and new style based on restructured text.
Ability to [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, IDLdoc by Michael Galloy
Monday, January 21st, 2008
Many Eyes creators’ interview
Jon Udell interviewed Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, creators of Many Eyes, recently about social visualization. I've posted about Many Eyes before. I also saw them at the IEEE Vis 2007 Conference last fall.
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Contact me
Of course, I use email (mgalloy at gmail dot com) and instant messaging (mgalloy at mac dot com). There are a couple other ways to stay in touch with me though.
Twitter is kind of like RSS for instant messaging. I've add my Twitter messages to the sidebar. They're not very visible right now, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Admin by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
Visualization blogs
I read the following blogs regularly (via RSS) and they usually have interesting examples that make me think a bit about the visualizations I'm currently involved in. All have a fairly low volume of posts, but that fits well with their content.
Charts, Junk Charts, and Flowing Data all have a lot of great examples of [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008
2007 in review
Here's my picks for the most important IDL events of 2007 (and a bit of wishing for 2008):
Workbench in IDL 7.0: While the new Workbench helped me immensely from the start, I think the most important aspect of the Workbench is that it provides a platform for future features. Now that there is a common [...]
