http://michaelgalloy.com Resources for IDL developers Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:19:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2008/07/01/idl-workbench-703-arrives.html 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 ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2008/06/27/some-hdf5-helper-routines.html 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. http://michaelgalloy.com/2008/06/26/gpulib-comments.html 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 ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2008/06/26/docbook-output-from-idldoc.html 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 ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2008/06/20/smoothed-lic-texture.html 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: .. ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2008/06/18/idldoc-31.html The code_swarm project has created visualizations of the time history of commits to four popular open source projects. It's interesting how each project has its own unique character; there is a large difference between, say, the Python and Eclipse commits. The visualizations were made with Processing. http://michaelgalloy.com/2008/06/16/code_swarm.html I just got the beta release of Versions, a Subversion front end for the Mac. I use the command line interface for Subversion for most of day-to-day work, but occasionally I like a visual interface to do comparisons, show timelines, etc. The Subclipse plugin for the Workbench works fairly well ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2008/06/04/versionsapp.html IDLdoc support will be added to the IDL Workbench in an update planned for June. This will add some really cool features for those who use IDLdoc and the Workbench: enhanced hover help on routines with an IDLdoc header content assistant on ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2008/05/29/idldoc-in-the-idl-workbench.html I have not been a big fan of the online help in the IDL 7.0 Workbench, but one feature I have been using regularly is the "Send us a comment on this topic" link at the bottom of every help page. Now I click it for every problem in the ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2008/05/28/idl-help-fixes.html