michaelgalloy.com

The site will be down for routine maintenance this evening, July 1, around 10 pm MDT for approximately 6 hours.

Here are the most popular posts of 2009:

1. Apple Keynote templates for posters
2. Overview of flow visualization in IDL
3. Path management
4. IDL roadmap
5. Google Earth user function for ENVI
6. 1RM: Mac OS X Dashboard widget
7. Processing with Javascript
8. Regular expressions
9. Response to Why IDL Sucks
10. A simple 3D object graphics example

Only one of these was actually posted in 2009, 4 in 2006, 4 in 2008, and 1 “page”. So maybe this is like Star Trek movies, where only the even numbered years are good? Good thing we are in 2010 then!

Here are some (corny) science jokes for those who ended up working this week.

Link via BoingBoing.

I have always been amazed at how fast a new Mac OS X update is adopted by the community, so I have been checking the statistics for visitors to this site (all statistics quoted here are for the month of September). Among Mac users, Snow Leopard has passed Leopard (it happened over a week ago, but hasn’t changed much since then):

10.6 Snow Leopard  47.0%
10.5 Leopard       44.2%
10.4 Tiger          7.3%
Other               1.5%

While looking through the stats, I thought it would be interesting to share some other information about our rather unique demographic.

Continue reading “Reader statistics.”

I have recently finished some projects at work, so should have some time to write. Look for new articles soon.

I’m in Seattle for the rest of this week and part of next week. See you next Wednesday!

I’ll be at NASA Goddard on the evening of Feb. 13 and during the day on the 14th. Drop me a line if you want to meet up in Greenbelt.

I can’t help but point out yet another hilarious comic by the excellent xkcd. So is there an IDL mode for butterflies?

Of course, I use email (mgalloy at gmail dot com) and instant messaging (mgalloy at mac dot com). There are a couple other ways to stay in touch with me though.

Twitter is kind of like RSS for instant messaging. I’ve add my Twitter messages to the sidebar. They’re not very visible right now, but I’m planning to re-organize the site soon to make them a bit more prominent. Of course, if you use Twitter, just check me out there.

Especially if you were my student back when I was teaching IDL or have otherwise worked with me, I have a LinkedIn profile.

Also, check out the project sites for IDLdoc and mgunit. There is a user mailing list for IDLdoc.

Feel free to introduce yourself!

I have always found Carl Sagan’s image of the “pale blue dot” to be inspiring. Here’s part of a public lecture on October 13, 1994 about our small dot in the universe:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

This post is motivated by the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon.