Author Archive
Friday, September 26th, 2008
NSF Visualization Contest
Winners of the NSF’s 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge were announced yesterday. Maybe this will give some inspiration for the Image Competition with ITT VIS’ User Group Meeting. Deadline for submissions is today!
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
IDL 7.0.4 for OS X
ITT VIS announced an update for IDL on OS X today:
A new update for IDL on Macintosh computers is now available. The IDL 7.0.4 release adds support for Macintosh Intel 64-bit architecture on OS X 10.5. IDL 7.0.4 also fixes two issues that impacted all supported Macintosh platforms: CR49844 - “Creation of Semaphores Fails under [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in IDL, Mac, News by Michael Galloy
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
Mac OS X 10.5.5 and X11 2.3.1
X11 2.3.1 addresses X11 issues in Mac OS X 10.5.5.
In general, keep your X11 updates around after installing them because you need to re-install it if you install OS or security updates through Apple’s Software Update.
1 Comment » - Posted in IDL, Mac by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
IDL User Group Meeting and contests
ITT VIS is hosting a full day IDL User Group Meeting on October 16. The agenda includes talks by David Fanning, Ronn Kling, Rob Dimeo, Peter Messmer (GPULib), and a couple by ITT VIS engineers.
There will be a presentation and image contest associated with the meeting. Entries are due by September 26.
Seminars about the IDL [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in IDL, News by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
IDL Developer Network RSS feed
The IDL Developer Network RSS feed came alive this morning after being dormant since early January. The three new items are:
Multi-threading whitepaper
A useful whitepaper about the thread pool in IDL.
IDLdoc 3.0 release
This is an old release (we’re on IDLdoc 3.1.1 now), but it’s nice to get some press!
New tutorials
A few new iTools tutorials.
I have [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, IDLdoc by Michael Galloy
Monday, September 8th, 2008
New IDL operators chart
I made a new version of the IDL operators chart that adds information about which operators use the thread pool and cleans up the graphics a bit (over the old version).
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, Information design by Michael Galloy
Friday, September 5th, 2008
Flow movies
I recently stumbled across some great flow visualizations on the Visualization section of NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division’s website. I couldn’t find any references to what was used to produce the animations or how much CPU time they took to render.
I would also like to see the “hyperwall”, a 7 by 7 grid of flat-panel [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Friday, August 29th, 2008
CPU-like vs. GPU-like painting
Here’s the difference between computations done on the CPU (like plain IDL) vs. those done on the GPU (like with GPULib) painted out by the Mythbusters crew at the NVISION conference this week.
Link via kottke.org
1 Comment » - Posted in IDL by Michael Galloy
Friday, August 29th, 2008
IDL type promotion challenge
I'm looking for a better solution to a sticky question. I had a fairly short "clever" solution until I realized it wasn't correct in some cases i.e. it was wrong.
I'm creating a function to return the type code of the variable necessary to contain the precision of variables of the two input type codes passed [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in IDL by Michael Galloy
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 [...]
