Messages from Usenet group comp.lang.idl-pvwave, compiled by Paulo Penteado
Is anyone using insight or idlde yet (5.0 graphical interface tools)? I'm interested in impressions of others to see if I'm crazy or not. I find insight EXTREMELY slow and unresponsive. One of our users also reports random dissappearing acts for idlde. We're running on Sun Sparc workstations (SPARC 4, 110 Mhz, 64MB of memory in my case) with Solaris 2.5.1. -- Matt Phelps System Administrator Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics mphelps@cfa.harvard.edu http://cfa-www.harvard.edu
In my view, INSIGHT is a complete joke. It is extremely slow and very cumbersumber to use. I was looking forward to a point and click interface that would let me plot,modify and annotate graphs interactively. This kludge of sliders and buttons at best seems 10 years behind. I would have put it in the demo applications box. As a user of IDL who uses it mostly for scientific processing and analysis, the graphic objects interface doesn't help me one bit (At least not that I can tell). Axel Increasingly disgruntled IDL user. David Fanning wrote: > > Matt Phelps writes: > >> Is anyone using insight or idlde yet (5.0 graphical interface >> tools)? I'm interested in impressions of others to see if I'm >> crazy or not. I find insight EXTREMELY slow and unresponsive. >> One of our users also reports random dissappearing acts for >> idlde. > > I agree with your impressions of INSIGHT. I find I don't have > the patience to use it. > > But I couldn't do without the IDLDE, at least in its Windows > incarnation. I think along with the chromochome editor that > this is one of the best things RSI has ever created. It's slick. > It works. It makes programming a pleasure. I like it a LOT! > > Cheers, > > David > > ------------------------------------------------------------ ----- > David Fanning, Ph.D. > Fanning Software Consulting > Customizable IDL Programming Courses > Phone: 970-221-0438 E-Mail: davidf@dfanning.com > Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com > IDL 5 Reports: http://www.dfanning.com/documents/anomaly5.html
In article <33B9A4A9.1565@magellan1.rutgers.edu>, Axel Schweiger <axel@magellan1.rutgers.edu> wrote: > > In my view, INSIGHT is a complete joke. It is extremely slow and > very cumbersumber to use. I was looking forward to a point and > click interface that would let me plot,modify and annotate graphs > interactively. This kludge of sliders and buttons at best seems > 10 years behind. > > I would have put it in the demo applications box. > > As a user of IDL who uses it mostly for scientific > processing and analysis, the graphic objects interface doesn't help > me one bit (At least not that I can tell). > > Axel > Increasingly disgruntled IDL user. > > David Fanning wrote: >> >> Matt Phelps writes: >> >>> Is anyone using insight or idlde yet (5.0 graphical interface >>> tools)? I'm interested in impressions of others to see if I'm >>> crazy or not. I find insight EXTREMELY slow and unresponsive. >>> One of our users also reports random dissappearing acts for >>> idlde. >> >> I agree with your impressions of INSIGHT. I find I don't have >> the patience to use it. >> >> But I couldn't do without the IDLDE, at least in its Windows >> incarnation. I think along with the chromochome editor that >> this is one of the best things RSI has ever created. It's slick. >> It works. It makes programming a pleasure. I like it a LOT! >> >> Cheers, >> >> David I was at a local idl presentation (in the bay area) and was pretty impressed with insight. It is indeed slow now, but wait 18 months, and I bet the cpu's will start catching up. I also liked very much the live_surface function. It is usefull in data analysis and visualisation. regarding the editors on win95, emacs with font-locking is also very nice. I use it as my main editor. mirko -------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====----------------------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
In article <33BBAA0E.CD4@sg1.cr.usgs.gov>, Jonathan Rogness <rogness@sg1.cr.usgs.gov> wrote: > > mirko.vukovic@grc.varian.com wrote: >> >> I was at a local idl presentation (in the bay area) and was pretty >> impressed with insight. It is indeed slow now, but wait 18 months, >> and I bet the cpu's will start catching up. > > I'm not sure we should be congratulating RSI for writing some code that > runs slowly on today's machines but, given future technology, might be > usuable. Anybody can write code that's slow and inefficient; the trick > is to write programs that are quick and useful! Point well taken > > My only experience with Insight came last week, when we finally got the > upgrade to v5.0. I was anxious to see if everybody's complaints had > been accurate. I started IDL, started insight, and then tried to open > one of the example projects. Almost two minutes later, nothing had > happened and I killed the process off. > > This is running on a SGI Power Challenge supercomputer with 9 > processors, 640 MB of physical RAM and twice that in paging space. Now > granted, there were (many) other users on the machine at the same time, > but if it runs that slowly on this machine I have to believe that it's > going to be more than 18 months before insight will run at a decent > speed on, say, a Windows 95 machine. > > Jon I run on windows95 and 133MHz pentium and got the examples going in 15-20 seconds. Mirko -------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====----------------------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
> is is running on a SGI Power Challenge supercomputer with 9 > Processors, 640 MB of physical RAM and twice that in paging space. There must have been something wrong with IDL or insight on the SGI power challenge. Though insight was a bit slow on my 180MHz 604e Macintosh (I would even say annoyingly slow) it certainly did not take two minutes to open the first example. I did find lots of bugs that RSI confirmed in Insight in the Mac Pre-release version. Also, a group down the hall was "beta" testing IDL 5.0 and they run on a bunch of SGI machines also. They told me that the beta version was unstable enough to be unusable in IRIX. Perhaps the IRIX version is still buggy. I think Insight shows some promise, especially for the new idl user. Making plots come out the way you want is clearly the steepest part of the idl learning curve. It does need some work before I will want to use it. It would also be nice if insight could output an idl script that would draw the plots. David Theil
mirko.vukovic@grc.varian.com wrote: > > I was at a local idl presentation (in the bay area) and was pretty > impressed with insight. It is indeed slow now, but wait 18 months, > and I bet the cpu's will start catching up. I'm not sure we should be congratulating RSI for writing some code that runs slowly on today's machines but, given future technology, might be usuable. Anybody can write code that's slow and inefficient; the trick is to write programs that are quick and useful! My only experience with Insight came last week, when we finally got the upgrade to v5.0. I was anxious to see if everybody's complaints had been accurate. I started IDL, started insight, and then tried to open one of the example projects. Almost two minutes later, nothing had happened and I killed the process off. This is running on a SGI Power Challenge supercomputer with 9 processors, 640 MB of physical RAM and twice that in paging space. Now granted, there were (many) other users on the machine at the same time, but if it runs that slowly on this machine I have to believe that it's going to be more than 18 months before insight will run at a decent speed on, say, a Windows 95 machine. Jon