Archive for March, 2008
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Preference system for IDL applications
It is frequently useful for applications to store information between runs. In general, if it is important enough to ask the user, it is important enough to remember. IDL provides a handy routine app_user_dir to get a directory to store this type of information, but you are on your own reading and writing these preferences [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in IDL, Objects by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Email visualization
The Google Code project Mail Trends visualizes email in any IMAP mailbox (including Gmail if you have set it up for IMAP). It uses a Python interface to the Google Charts API to produce charts of sent and received email organized by time, sender, threads, mailing list, etc.
Link via Information Aesthetics.
No Comments » - Posted in Information design, Python by Michael Galloy
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Links for 21 March 2008
[shell-fu]$ lists handy, or just plain cool, Unix shell commands. You can learn some shell scripting through the great examples on this site.
FlowingData is giving away a copy of Tufte's
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. To enter, post a comment on any new post on FlowingData in the next ten days.
Terminal tip to have all [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design, Mac by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
Overview of flow visualization in IDL
I've been thinking about flow visualization recently, so I thought I would summarize what I know currently about the current state of making plots of vector fields in IDL.
2 Comments » - Posted in IDL by Michael Galloy
Monday, March 10th, 2008
IDL object graphics to POV-Ray
POV-Ray is an open-source 3D ray-tracing tool (check out the Hall of Fame for examples of its use). After listening to Peter Messmer's excellent introduction to POV-Ray scene creation and seeing VisIt's export to POV-Ray capability, I thought it wouldn't be that hard to make an object graphics destination. To use it, create the scene [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in IDL, Object graphics by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
Displaying images in IDLdoc documentation
The svn trunk of IDLdoc has a new feature that I'm excited about: the ability to insert images without having to stick ugly HTML in your code header or copying an image manually into the output. This is part of the rst markup style (so it won't work unless you set markup_style='rst' in your IDLdoc [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, IDLdoc by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
Theme river
There have been several cool examples of using themerivers recently, so I thought I would make a simple direct graphics version for IDL. One possible use in IDL would be to show confidence intervals around a vector of data (as in the photo to the left). I included a main-level program in the [...]
