| IDL User Group Meeting Huge Success [message #63015] |
Thu, 16 October 2008 22:42 |
David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001
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Senior Member |
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Folks,
I thought you might like an update on today's IDL User Group
meeting in Boulder. What a HUGE success! Kudo's to Harold Cline,
Bill Okubo, and all the fine folks at ITTVIS for a wonderful
day of exciting and stimulating presentations.
The festivities actually started yesterday, when a dozen or
so "early testers" of the new IDL 7.1 Workbench were invited
to do a series of exercises in front of the IDL engineering
staff. I was one of the "testers", and boy did they get
an earful about my ideas for iTools! But not once was I
told, "Now, hang on, Fanning, you are WAY out of line!"
Instead, everyone wrote down my suggestions and seemed
genuinely interested in those things that irritate the hell
out of me about iTools.
I can't tell you how unprecedented and refreshing this approach
seemed to me. Imagine listening to what your customers like
and don't like about your product. It was great. And after
I finished ranting, I felt like I was heard, and--even more
important to me--that the folks at ITTVIS really cared. I can't
say I've converted into a big fan of the direction IDL is
moving in, but I will say I am impressed with the people
currently running the show at ITTVIS. I think they are
doing some very, very important things right. So much so,
that I've even decided to give iTools another chance. (Not
that I have much choice, but I've signed an agreement not
to give away any secrets. :-)
Today was jam-packed with presentations, all of them
excellent. Goodness, people do some interesting things
with IDL! But even better than that was seeing in person
some of my friends from this newsgroup. Ken Bowman was
there, and Mark Buie. Kelly Dean, who is here occasionally,
and with whom I have carried on numerous e-mail conversations
over the years. Amara Grap of IDL Wavelets fame was there.
Ronn Kling and Rob Dimeo, two of the best students I ever
had in IDL classes were there, with IDL programs that put
mine to shame. Vince Hradil, the young man who appears to be
taking over my place on this newsgroup flew in from Chicago for
the day,and I am happy to report you are going to be in good hands
for a long time to come. David Stern even showed up, looking
for a job, I guess, what with the current economic crisis
playing havoc with all the money he made selling RSI.
Lots and lots of fun.
I'm going to be short-changing a lot of people here, but
here were some of the outstanding highlights for me.
Rob Dimeo has some amazing quantum mechanical visualizations
that he runs in real-time on a honking Dell computer, that he
claims is faster than the fastest Supercomputer in 1990. It
was an impressive (if back-breaking to carry around in an
airport) computer. Peter Messmer continues to up the performance
of GPULib, using graphical processors to increase computationally
expensive operations from 20-100%.
Richard Azuah's presentation of how it took him only 3+ years
to write an iTools application (6 months before he could write
a line of code, I heard him say, as he basically had to re-write
the entire set of documentation) not only confirmed everything
I believe about iTools, but pushed it into the nightmare category.
Richard is the only person I know, outside of ITTVIS, who has
ever successfully written an iTool application, and my hat is
off to him. I think we will all be writing iTool applications
now that he has forged the way. ;-)
(It was probably not a coincidence that when I asked an ITTVIS
sales rep how IDL sales were fairing he said the real gain had
been in software consulting. Yeah, I guess...)
Ronn Kling demonstrated some amazingly good software for fitting
ellipses in 2, 3, or N-dimensions(!), and *extremely* fast
software for telling if a point (or, actually, as he demonstrated,
MANY points) are inside a 2D polygon or 3D polyhedra or not. Very,
very slick, but not surprising if you get one of Ronn's Christmas
Cards every year. (I'm not clear where you can find these, whether
on Ronn's web page or in the IDL Contrib Library on the ITTVIS
web page. Maybe he can clear that up. I know I want to use these
programs.)
Finally, the absolute highlight for me was Eduardo Iturrate
demonstrating how to use his Revolution IDL program. This
program was mentioned here a year or so ago, but didn't make
much of a splash at the time. It allows the user to quickly
build a 3D graphics scene from stock "templates". Then, and
this is the best point, you can save the IDL object graphics
code to a file.
I thought it was a neat idea at the time, and I downloaded
it, but I was busy at the time and didn't follow up too much.
I am *definitely* giving this program another look! OK, Eduardo
is a master at the little keyboard short-cuts you need to know
to move around in this program effectively, but this was the
most amazing, spectacular demo of IDL functionality I have
ever seen.
The best thing about it is that is solves the number one
problem with object graphics: it takes a DAMN long time to
get even one object coded up, and there are at least 1000
ways to do it wrong. With at least 999 of those ways, you
see absolutely nothing on your display. So it is massively
frustrating to learn how to code object graphics. (Ok, Ronn
Kling's book Power Graphics in IDL helps. A lot.) But
with this program, you can add an object in about 10 seconds,
and 2 seconds later, you are looking at the IDL code that
does it right! This will squash the object graphics learning
curve practically flat.
I came home *really* jazzed about writing IDL object
graphics programs again for the first time in a LONG time.
This program is named perfectly. It could cause a revolution
in your IDL programming. It is available on the ITTVIS
User Contrib web page.
Alright, I've left a lot of good things out, but you
get the idea. ITTVIS is hoping they can get this going
on an annual basis. I can tell you this, I am not going
to ever miss one. This was terrific. Hats off to the
great crew at ITTVIS for putting on a most productive day.
Cheers,
David
--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
Sepore ma de ni thui. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")
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