Archive for April, 2008
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
IDL Primer by Ronn Kling
I just received a copy of IDL Primer by Ronn Kling. (Full disclousre: I received a free copy because Ronn used my Periodic Table of IDL Operators on the back cover.) It’s a pocket sized “quick reference” that provides a quick introduction to the main functional areas of IDL: the IDL Environment (DE is […]
No Comments » - Posted in Book reviews, IDL by Michael Galloy
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
NSF Science and Visualization Challenge
The deadline for the NSF visualization contest is coming up on May 31. Winners will be published later this year on September 26.
Check out last years winners (and back to 2003) to see the level of competition. Of course, the descriptions of the winning entries concentrate on the science on display, but I wish […]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Monday, April 14th, 2008
X11 2.2.0
XQuartz has an update for X11 on Mac. Remember to re-install this package after further updates to Mac OS X.
UPDATE: it’s been updated to 2.2.0.1 already.
No Comments » - Posted in Mac by Michael Galloy
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Line-integral convolution code
I have finished the line-integral convolution (LIC) implementation as a DLM and cleaned it up a bit (see other articles for background). More work is needed, but it can give useful results now. The movie at the right took about six minutes to generate (300 calls with 300 by 300 images).
The API for the [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in IDL, Information design by Michael Galloy
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
Weather visualization
NovoSpark has a new visualization for the six day forecast. Time is the independent variable and six different weather parameters (temperature, wind speed, cloudiness are included) are plotted on the vertical scale. I see promise in this display, but I wish there were more explanation of the variables displayed, a key to the color, etc.
Link [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
Path management
There are mechanisms in the IDL Workbench (or the old IDLDE) to set the IDL !PATH, but I have not found them useful. I have a somewhat byzantine system to set my path, but it works well for me. Since there has been discussion on the newsgroup recently about problems others are having, I thought [...]
