Shape Tools - 14 Sep 2005
Shape tools meeting summary, September 14, 2005
Present: Jeff Ma, Roger Woods, Yonggang Shi
Vacation: Ivo Dinov, Craig Schwartz
Bugs
Shape Tools: There is a bug in the parsing of UCF's that have inappropriate extents, which is common because there are many files in LONI that have been hacked to insert covariates for statistical analyses into this field. The error generated describes the file as having a header that exceeds the (15 or 25 line) limit.
Shape Viewer: The edges of diamond shaped UCF's are being displayed incorrectly when viewed as a surface.
Feature Requests before Next Release
The ability to change the direction of the source lighting would greatly enhance the utility of the viewer. This could be either a menu item with a set of predefined lighting source directions or a more general method for changing the orientation of the source lighting
New Progress in Past Week
ShapeViewer: Jeff has been working on pipeline wrapper for the ShapeViewer, expects to complete this by Friday
ShapeViewer: Jeff is working on implementing remote file system browsing via ssh or ftp
R interface: Roger has successfully analyzed some data using R statistical routines with the rShape interface. There are some issues:
1) The rShape interface uses rJava, which is GPL (LGPL) and which had to be modified to meet the needs of this project.
2) Due to a bug in the "headless" implementation, the rJava interface will not work on pre-Tiger Mac systems (though this may now be fixed by yesterday's release of an updated Java version by Apple
3) Easy installation of rJava on a Mac requires that the C compiler be installed. Otherwise that users must copy a precompiled version into an obscure Frameworks subdirectory
4) R will need to be installed on LONI systems and the rJava (as modified) and rShape packages installed in order for users to use this on LONI systems.
Beta Release Delayed
The beta release did not get posted last week. Given the bugs described above, beta will be postponed until next week.
