No more IDL...

Recently I've got fed up with IDL 6.2. The list of things that have eventually pushed me over the edge is as follows:

• lack of HDF5-1.8 support (not entirely true, if you browse thoroughly hdfgroup's server you can find updated DLMs )
• lack of HDF5 compression support (unfortunately the previous remark does not apply)
• IDL's direct graphics requires archaic version of ''libGL.so'', which I can provide in 32bit and still have working x86_64 system, but as a result:
• I get SegFault every time sb is exiting from IDL, which nicely contaminates system's logs
• I can allocate only 4GB of memory (wall that Dominik hit just recently)

I've reached the point when I couldn't visualize my data anymore. But after some googling I've found a solution: Pytables & Matplotlib. The results are astounding and come with ease, not mentioning that now I have plots as a vector graphics... See for yourselves and sense the difference ;)

Original image from IDL
Matplotlib version