Author Archive
Monday, August 25th, 2008
Tufte-style LaTeX template
The distinctive style of Edward Tufte’s books has inspired a project to create a LaTeX template to make mimicking his style easier (Tufte quote: “Don’t get it original—get it right”). Installation is simple (just drop a .cls file into the same directory as your .tex file), though there are many prerequisite packages.
The example given on [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Wooden DEMs
Fluid-Forms lets you select a region of the Earth via Google Maps and creates a physical model made of wood. They laminate layers of wood together in alternating colors to produce contour lines when the wood is carved. There are several different models (including a clock).
I would get a model of Boulder if it [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
Another update to the Brewer color table file
The values for color tables 10 and 11 of the Brewer color tables were swapped in the last update. The new version keeps YlOrRd as 10 and YlOrBr as 11, but makes the values correct. See below for what the color tables look like.
By the way, I was thinking of adding more color tables. matplotlib [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, Information design by Michael Galloy
Friday, August 8th, 2008
New articles
I have recently finished some projects at work, so should have some time to write. Look for new articles soon.
No Comments » - Posted in Admin by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
IDL Workbench 7.0.3 arrives
IDL Workbench 7.0.3 arrived today via the automatic software update mechanism in the Workbench. It provides HDF and netCDF library udpates, better path support, IDLdoc support (rst format only), and even faster code analysis when the Workbench starts. Everything seems to be working well for me during use this afternoon.
Since I’m most excited about [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in IDL, IDLdoc by Michael Galloy
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Some HDF5 helper routines
I use HDF5 quite a bit and have developed some utility routines, mg_h5_dump (docs, code) and mg_h5_getdata (docs, code), that are quite useful for me.
mg_h5_dump gives similar output to the command line utility h5dump with -A set. mg_h5_getdata allows slices of data to be extracted using IDL's normal indexing rules.
For example,
IDL> f = filepath('hdf5_test.h5', subdir=['examples', [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL by Michael Galloy
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
GPULib comments
Mort Canty, author of Image Analysis, Classification and Change Detection in Remote Sensing: With Algorithms for ENVI/IDL, is using GPULib and has started blogging his comments on it. So far, so good!
Full disclosure: I work for Tech-X Corporation and worked on the IDL bindings and examples for GPULib.
No Comments » - Posted in IDL by Michael Galloy
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
DocBook output from IDLdoc
I have the framework in place to have IDLdoc produce output besides HTML. This has been a long process beginning in IDLdoc 2.0 when I switched to using templates instead of embedding the HTML code in the IDL code. I have started by writing a set of templates for DocBook output, but intend to [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, IDLdoc by Michael Galloy
Friday, June 20th, 2008
Smoothed LIC texture
While producing some flow visualizations lately, I've found that smoothing a random texture gives less pixellated looking result than using a purely random texture. I added a texture keyword a while ago so that a common texture could be used for several LIC images, but now I've discovered that playing around with the texture [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, Information design by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
IDLdoc 3.1
I just released IDLdoc 3.1 (see full release notes are below). As per this short blog post, IDLdoc is getting integrated into the IDL Workbench. This release adds some rst markup features that the IDL Workbench will use -- my favorite is to be able to link to images with:
.. image:: filename
IDLdoc will link to [...]
