UNIVERSIDADE
DO ALGARVE
?AQs
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Nov 2004, Joaquim Luis
email:
?AQs
? Stands for questions that may arise to your mind and match to what I guessed you may have wondered. AQ is nothing more than the trivial Asked Questions
|
Who developed Mirone? |
Mirone is was developed by me, a Geophysicist and amateur programmer, Joaquim Luis. |
| How is Mirone supported ? | I wish it was but the truth is: although they don't even suspect, it is supported by the University of Algarve trough my salary. |
| Does Mirone need GMT? | Well, originally Mirone functioning depended on a GMT installation. Starting on 0.9 version that dependence was (almost) removed. At version 1.0 Mirone no longer uses the eventually existing GMT installation EXCEPT to get the coastlines database. So if you want this (very helpful facility) you need to either have GMT installed or/and read the .../gmt_userdir/coastline.conf file. |
| What OSs can support it? | Supposedly, all OSs. In practice it currently runs only under Windows. For running under other OSs we need volunteers to compile the mex files that Mirone needs to run. |
| Is it RAM gourmand? | Potentially a big YES. However, many countermeasures against Matlab's RAM voracity has been taken. and now I think (hope) that it can run even in modest resourcered computers as long as they have enough memory to hold the grids you want to load. |
| Why Mirone. |
The Web is full of ImageViewers, GridViewers, CadDems, DemCads, 3DViews, View3Ds, TerrainView, ViewTerrain, ViewThis, ViewThat. So the ultimate viewer is naturally a Mirone. |
| Why was Mirone written in Matlab? | Very simple. Other graphical languages are beyond my learning capability. Matlab is far from having good windows capacity - particularly in the compiled codes - it's a shame but that's the way it is. On the other hand, it is very easy to learn and use. |
| Why drawing lines is so slow (or flicker) when I have a world basemap with plate boundaries? | This is just an example of when the Matlab engine is slow. The reason apparently rely on the fact that when we have many individual elements the redrawing mechanism has to search trough theirs minimum/maximum coordinates, which is much slower than to search through a single element, even if it has many points. If you know what I mean, calling functions is a very expensive procedure for Matlab. |
| I saved a session with Save session but don't recover everything back with Open session | A session is a file with information (and data) for restoring the current working state. However, it doesn't backup all your data (otherwise it could be huge). For example, grids (or images) are not stored, only the information on how to rebuild them. In the same way, coastlines and Database data are not kept because you can easily rebuild them. The other reason is that I add new options to the program faster than I update the Save session facility. |
| The manual is a bit short | I am a lazy writer |