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What's New › 2004
What's New?
Recent Changes to SCRC Data Capture and Analysis Software
(From October 2000 to July 2004)
G. R. Detillieux
Spinal Cord Research Centre,
The University of Manitoba,
Winnipeg, Canada R3E 0J9
Capture
- Added support for UEI PowerDAQ A/D cards for Linux, allowing up to 256
channels in list, and a maximum scan rate of 2.5 MHz.
- Fixed problems in the free disk space display of the parameter setting screen:
it now correctly handles the df utility's format on newer Linux systems
(it used to show free space as half of the actual amount), it no longer misses
df entries right after one with a filesystem of "none", better handling of
really large disks.
- The parameter setting screen now properly refreshes itself when the window is
uncovered, even if the display server has no backing store.
- The qcap utility no longer asks the user to hit Return to start capture
when running from a script with input redirected away from the terminal,
to allow for automated testing.
Analysis
- Added a small delay when analysis rewrites the run header, to ensure the file's
modification time changes. This avoids the analysis program losing track of
multiple changes to the run header in rapid succession in analysis scripts.
- Changed the "Filter gain factor" handling to allow negative gain factors,
so the Maint/Filter operation can invert the signal.
Also fixed a bug where the gain factor wasn't applied to the signal when the
cutoff frequency was 0 (i.e. when rectifying without filtering).
- Added support for trace reference regression calculations, to handle sloped
reference levels in trace amplitude analyses.
- Added a new analysis script, rawwfplt, to generate movie frames of raw
waveform plots.
- Added the capability to fix scale bar length in raw waveform display to
something longer than selected analysis range, and to get a horizontal
display of the last trace in the analysis range. (This is to support the
rawwfplt script.)
New parameters for these features are "Min W.F. time scale", "Last trace only"
and "Trace display height".
Also added the "Plot pens for W.Fs." parameter to get waveforms displayed in
different colours.
- Added a web-based interface to the analysis help facility, to view help pages
from a web browser.
- Fixed a bug in the blanking operation, where the new waveform file was made too
long if the last blanking interval went beyond the end of the run.
- Added support for importing .spt spike time files into W.F.-activity's
Set/Spikes/Unit waveform parameters, to import data from an external
spike discriminator application.
Also added a wf2sp script to export a waveform to this application.
Frmsel
- Changed manual deletion and undeletion so both allow selection of flags to
set or clear, and both ask for a list of tags to restrict the scope of this
operation.
- Fixed a bug that caused the menu not to fold properly into two lines for
certain window widths.
Isopot
- Added a -n option to the isoprep command, for data which lacks a depth signal.
- Fixed the fixdepths program, and the cubinter program which it calls, to work
properly on QNX and the newer C Library on recent Linux systems.
Raster
- Added a "no reference" option, R, to the Baseline menu, so raster can display
absolute voltage levels without normalizing to a baseline.
- Added an X option to the Clip menu to set the X range precisely.
- Fixed a buffer overflow bug which caused it to crash when reading
very long run descriptions.
Miscellaneous
- System support for the software has been extended to include Mac OS X, running
under X11, for analysis only.
- The xpr utility is now built from included source code, in the src/lptuil
directory, to support X11 screen capture and image conversion on a variety
of systems.
- Added options to genplot for circular statistics, Rayleigh test, fixed field
input and for setting the tick gap.
- Added a mannwhitney program to perform Mann-Whitney circular statistics.
- Added -r, -l and -h options to lsrun, for recursive directory listings,
run length display, and HTML table output.
- Added new HPGL conversion utilities: hpgl2xpm, hpgl2gif, hpgl2pdf, and a few
others.
- Added a sound file generation utility, wf2wav, to get sound output from
waveforms.
- Added the atf2run conversion program to handle Axon Instruments ATF files.
- Fixed the genms script to properly load in macros when making documentation
files in Linux RPM packages, and corrected a prior Y2K fix so it inserts the
correct month in documentation.
An example RPM spec file is now included in the src/util directory.
- Updated build scripts and getkey function to build software on more recent
Red Hat Linux distributions.
- Updated file name length checks for Linux, to allow up to 255 characters.
- Programs now print using the lpvialpr script, on Linux and other systems that
use the lpr command for printing.
This is to avoid conflicts with lp commands which may also exist on these
systems.
- The dsepr utility now reads its input data using the native "little-endian"
format on Intel-based Linux systems. The asc2run program was changed to pass
its data to dsepr accordingly.
Directory of What's New Listings
SCRC WWW administrator:
www@scrc.umanitoba.ca
Copyright © G. R. Detillieux, Spinal Cord Research Centre, The University of Manitoba.