Archive for November, 2009
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
SCOPE_VARFETCH issue fixed in IDL 7.1.2 patch
An issue with using SCOPE_VARFETCH inside the IDL Workbench (discussed in this comp.lang.idl-pvwave thread) has been fixed in the IDL 7.1.2 patch: The fix is CR56369 and it is now available in the IDL 7.1.2 patch release. Please note, you will need to contact ITT VIS Technical Support (TechSupport at ittvis dot com) for the [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL,News by Michael Galloy
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Science jokes
Here are some (corny) science jokes for those who ended up working this week. Link via BoingBoing.
1 Comment » - Posted in Admin by Michael Galloy
Friday, November 20th, 2009
Microsoft patents sparklines in Excel
Microsoft has patented sparklines in Excel and Edward Tufte is taking suggestions on what to do about it. The patent specifically mentions “sparklines in a grid”, evidently the patent is for sparklines attached to a cell not floating like standard charts in Excel (here’s Microsoft’s blog post about the feature). I think this is a [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Visualization by Michael Galloy
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
3rd Annual IDL User Group Meeting
The 3rd Annual IDL User Group Meeting will be February 24, 2010 at LASP in Boulder, CO. The call for presentations is open. There will also be an image competition again—winner will receive an iPod Nano. Submit abstracts and image entries to events@ittvis.com by January 30, 2010. There will also be a pre-conference day of [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL,News by Michael Galloy
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Read IDL save files in Python
IDLSave is a Python module to read IDL save files from Python. IDLSave converts IDL types to Python types: arrays are converted to NumPy arrays, structures are converted to NumPy record types. NumPy is required. (Mentioned by Brian Larsen in this comp.lang.idl-pvwave thread about migrating from IDL to Python.)
No Comments » - Posted in IDL,Python by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Mort Canty’s book goes to 2nd edition
From the CRC Press site for Image Analysis, Classification, and Change Detection in Remote Sensing: With Algorithms for ENVI/IDL, Second Edition: This popular introduction to the processing of remote sensing imagery has been updated to include coverage of the latest versions of the ENVI software environment. This new edition covers support vector machines and other [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books,ENVI,HPC,IDL by Michael Galloy
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
GPULib at SC09
If you are going to be at Supercomputing this year, check out GPULib (including a demo on a GPU “supercomputer” I spent some time working on earlier this week). From the press release: Tech-X Corporation invites you to visit us at our booth (Booth #1713) at the SC09, November 14 – 20, 2009, in Portland, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in HPC,IDL by Michael Galloy
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
Version control for solo developers
This article is right on about version control. I would go farther: every person writing code should be using it—there are a lot of scientists doing ad hoc code that should be in version control too.
No Comments » - Posted in IDL by Michael Galloy
Friday, November 6th, 2009
Guido on Python in science
Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, recently showed up for a Py4science meeting in the San Francisco Bay Area (video, slides). There are several accounts of the discussion by attendees: Guido himself; Matthew Brett, of Neuroimaging in Python (NiPy); Jarrod Millman, of NumPy, NiPy, and SciPy; and Fernando Perez, of IPython. It looks like people [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Python by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Timeline creation
Recently, I’ve been wanting to create some timelines for various projects of mine. I needed something fairly flexible and I wanted the timeline to be generated from an input file, not from source code or a GUI. I settled on MG_TIMELINE which accepts an XML input file and generates a PostScript output file (which I [...]
