michaelgalloy.com

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.

I like using links to the IDL online help when posting to comp.lang.idl-pvwave, but it’s often hard to find the link that corresponds to the online help page I’m viewing in the IDL Assistant. You can use some of the advanced features of your favorite search engine to narrow a normal web search down to just the IDL online help, but that’s a lot of typing for getting a simple link. So I made a “Custom Google Search” that searches only the online help for IDL. Check it out in the sidebar on the right.

I’ve returned from a great family vacation out east (Boston, Vermont, Cape Cod, and Brooklyn). I should start posting more articles next week, though the frequency may decrease as other work starts picking up.

RSS is a web technology to allow for distribution of regularly published information: web pages, audio/video files, PDFs, etc. The main advantage is that subscribers easily see when new material is posted.

There are many applications, known as aggregators, which will watch an RSS feed and list all the content available from each site. Popular aggregators are NetNewsWire, SharpReader, and Straw. Even modern browsers such as Safari and Firefox can handle RSS feeds (at least to some extent).

An alternative to downloading a dedicated aggregator application is to use a web-based news reader such as Bloglines or Google Reader.

The O’Reilly Network has a nice description of RSS.

Here are the article RSS feed and comments RSS feed (they are always found in the column on the right too).