michaelgalloy.com

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 the project page demonstrates and documents the capabilities of the template.

Fluid-Forms lets you select a region of the Earth via Google Maps and creates a physical model made of wood. They laminate layers of wood together in alternating colors to produce contour lines when the wood is carved. There are several different models (including a clock).

I would get a model of Boulder if it didn’t cost 191 Euros (about $284 right now).

The values for color tables 10 and 11 of the Brewer color tables were swapped in the last update. The new version keeps YlOrRd as 10 and YlOrBr as 11, but makes the values correct. See below for what the color tables look like.

By the way, I was thinking of adding more color tables. matplotlib has more color tables that have a compatible license. Are there other color tables that people are fond of?

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

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 afternoon.

Since I’m most excited about the IDLdoc features, I will describe them in a bit more detail after the jump. IDLdoc 3.1 (download) is required to integrate with the Workbench.

Continue reading “IDL Workbench 7.0.3 arrives.”

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 example,

For more examples, run the main-level programs at the end of the routines:

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.

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 DocBook output, but intend to write a LaTeX set as well.

Here's an example PDF of IDLdoc output for a library of routines for visualization I've been thinking about.

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 playing around with the texture a bit can be useful. I've been creating the texture with:

Click on the thumbnail image to see the full image.

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:

.. image:: filename

IDLdoc will link to the image and also copy the image file into the output directory (if OUTPUT keyword to IDLDOC routine is used).

1. Added ability to reference images in rst markup. IDLdoc will automatically copy referenced images into the output.
2. In rst markup, illegal characters like < and > are automatically converted to character entities.
3. Added `:Description:` tag for compatibility with IDL Workbench update.
4. Changed default markup parser to rst when format parser is rst.
5. Miscellaneous small bug fixes.