http://michaelgalloy.com Resources for IDL developers Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:03:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en While catching up on recent TED talks, I watched two on topics of interest to this website: one focused on data, Tim Berners-Lee's "The year open data went worldwide", and one demonstrating a novel visualization system, Gary Flake's "Is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?". http://michaelgalloy.com/2010/03/09/two-datavisualization-ted-talks.html After the IDL 8.0 overview at the IDL User Group meeting last week, Bill Okubo also asked for a list of features IDL users needed. I think I have all the ideas people gave (along with some pertinent links to proof-of-concept ideas and background material): better map projections geo-browser export (i.e., to ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2010/03/02/idl-user-group-meeting-features-needed-in-idl.html The NSF announced the 2009 winners of the Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. There are definitely some awesome visualizations in the group. Surprisingly (to me), a web comic I read regularly, Piled Higher and Deeper, took the prize for "Information Posters and Graphics". http://michaelgalloy.com/2010/02/26/nsf-announces-2009-visualization-challenge-winners.html ITT VIS had several presentations about IDL 8.0 at this week's IDL User Group Meeting. David Fanning says: Just one word: Wow! It appears that the promise of IDL 5 has finally been realized. :-) David also posted a longer description of the new features, so I ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2010/02/26/idl-user-group-meeting-idl-8-0.html Here are the slides for my "GPULib with IDL 8.0" presentation from the IDL User Group Meeting. More thoughts about the meeting to come... http://michaelgalloy.com/2010/02/25/gpulib-with-idl-8-0-slides.html mgunit 1.1 is available for download. The release notes for 1.1 are: Added an extra argument to ASSERT which can be inserted into the message via C-style format codes. Added XML and JUnit output formats (and corresponding XML and JUNIT keywords to MGUNIT to turn them on). Added ability for a test to determine ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2010/02/22/mgunit-1-1.html VISualize 2010 will be May 19-20 (the first day is for IDL and the second for ENVI) at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, DC: This event is designed to bring together IDL and ENVI users to provide opportunities for networking, sharing ideas, and working on strategies that advance ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2010/02/19/visualize-2010.html Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft gave a fascinating TED talk about where Bing is going with their mapping services. Looks like they are integrating Photosynth into their 3-dimensional maps. Of course, 3-dimensional viewing available on Bing was not supported for any of the browsers on my Mac (Firefox and Safari)... http://michaelgalloy.com/2010/02/14/maps-and-augmented-reality-at-microsoft.html Matplotlib is a popular 2-dimensional plotting library used with Python. While Matplotlib is fairly powerful, I have always had trouble figuring out how to do what I needed from the documentation. I have found the online Matplotlib documentation adequate as a reference, but not very good for getting started (especially ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2010/02/09/matplotlib-for-python-developers.html I found this article fascinating. Basically, there are differences in color perception due to culture/language. Do I have to take into account the native language of the viewers of a visualization when choosing colors for it? Two colors that are easily distinguishable for me, may not be for someone ... http://michaelgalloy.com/2010/02/03/why-russians-see-a-different-kind-of-blue.html