Author Archives: Mark

About Mark

I solve scientific programming and visualization problems with IDL.

Where am I?

Posted on May 16, 2013

Well, more accurately, “where on the filesystem is the source for the currently scoped routine?”, but that’s not a catchy title. In IDL 8.2.2, the ROUTINE_FILEPATH function was modified to return this information when called without any parameters. Here’s a … Continue reading →

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The bigger picture in 2013

Posted on May 9, 2013

Regular readers of this blog know that I love to show off the neat things you can do with IDL, usually with some code. I thought I’d try something different today, though. As product manager, I help set the agenda … Continue reading →

Posted in VIS | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Coming soon: IDL 8.2.3

Posted on April 30, 2013

IDL 8.2.3 is scheduled to be released on May 21. While this is primarily a maintenance release, we’ve included several new routines. They are: BUBBLEPLOT VOLUME FILE_ZIP FILE_UNZIP FILE_GZIP FILE_GUNZIP FILE_TAR FILE_UNTAR ZLIB_COMPRESS ZLIB_UNCOMPRESS IDLffVideoRead class QUERY_VIDEO READ_VIDEO WRITE_VIDEO TERMINAL_SIZE BUBBLEPLOT … Continue reading →

Posted in VIS | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Modifying the size and position of a plot

Posted on April 25, 2013

In IDL 8 (a.k.a. New) Graphics, you can interactively move and resize plots in a window. For example, make a test plot in red: IDL> p = plot([0,1], ‘r’) Select the plot by clicking the mouse in the interior of … Continue reading →

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A column sort routine

Posted on April 18, 2013

In spreadsheet programs like Excel or LibreOffice, you can apply a sort on a column to every other column in the spreadsheet. IDL’s SORT function doesn’t provide this functionality, but with a little code, we can make it so. The … Continue reading →

Posted in language, programming | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Locating NaN and Inf values in an array

Posted on April 11, 2013

(This week’s post is brief because I’m out learning a lot at the 2013 NOAA Satellite Conference!) The ubiquitous WHERE function can be used to quickly locate values in an array. However, you can’t directly search for the location of IEEE NaN (not a … Continue reading →

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2013 NOAA Satellite Conference

Posted on April 4, 2013

My colleague Thomas Harris (@t_harris) and I will be at the 2013 NOAA Satellite Conference in College Park, MD, next week. We each have a poster: T-9: A Rapid Cloud Mask Algorithm  for Suomi NPP VIIRS Imagery EDRs (Piper) [PDF, 2.5 MB] … Continue reading →

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An update to the CURRENT keyword

Posted on March 28, 2013

(Note: I’m out of town this week; this is a short post I banked earlier in the year.) The IDL 8 (a.k.a. New) Graphics CURRENT keyword got a useful update in IDL 8.2.2: instead of being a Boolean, it now accepts … Continue reading →

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Stern Special

Posted on March 21, 2013

A visualization from an article by the famous (infamous?!) Prof. Mike Brown of Caltech (@plutokiller) is featured on the cover of a recent issue of The Astronomical Journal: That’s IDL color table 15, Stern Special.

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Solar wind visualization at NOAA SWPC

Posted on March 14, 2013

George Millward and his colleagues at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) use IDL, among other tools, to study, monitor and forecast solar events that impact GPS, power grids and communications networks on Earth. On the WSA-Enlil Solar Wind … Continue reading →

Posted in visualization | Tagged , , | 2 Comments