GenericFX/BrainFX/CamBAfx

Just dropping a note to anyone interested in using the reference NifTI library (niftijlib) hosted at sourceforge.net as an Eclipse Plugin that I have created one such version and will give it out as public domain software. Just give me a shout.

Time Series Analysis Pipeline is the pipeline you get when you use File->New menu on the latest development build of CamBAfx. It combines the old fbamm and gbamm to perform a full group analysis. This article describes its development to date.

It is very common for programs developed for the Unix platform to have its own configuration file. These configuration files are often called .XXXrc (e.g., .cambarc) and stored in the user's home directory. Furthermore, as more and more programs are ported from Unix to Windows, we are seeing an increase use of these configuration files on Windows platform. For ease of reference, in this article, these configuration files are referred to as RCFile. Any self-respecting User Interface program, like GenericFX, cannot afford to ignore these files and will try to integrate them into the User Interface. This article outline the strategy used in GenericFX to integrate these files. We used CamBAfx as an example, but the same principle applies to all programs. It is also important to note that alternative strategies can be developed and coexists side-by-side with this strategy.

There is an interesting Eclipse Technical Article on use of Eclipse Form. It introduces the form-like interface in Eclipse. There is potential to use it in the Input Data Spreadsheet.

We acquired www.cambafx.org as the host website for CamBAfx.

After a discussion with the stakeholders, I had decided to dedicate this year to improving the Input Data SpreadSheet.

Following our on-going effort to rework BAMM to use NifTI images, we decided to rename the software. The winner is CAMBA. CAMBA will be the name for the whole package, i.e., the software proper and the user Interface.

Unofficially, I (Cinly) will use CAMBAfx to denote my work on the CAMBA User Interface project.

Please do note that the image converters known as bammpp will be a separate project from CAMBA. It will become an optional plug-in for BrainFX.

This is a follow up of the review of year 2005 and yes, I did write workplans. At present, I have a few possible directions to go on developing the software. I have yet to decide on one yet.

For GenericFX/BrainFX/BAMMfx (the software), year 2005 sees the completion of basic user-oriented features. To tell the truth, there is not much excitment year especially when compared to previous year as we roll out the innovative Input Data Spreadsheet. The excitment is mainly in the development front focusing on how the concept of GenericFX evolves. The year was also spent experimenting with different features offered by the Eclipse Platform such as Update Sites.

The next article will discuss a few development plans worth considering and explore in 2006.

When the decision to use a Visual Pipeline-based Editor for BAMM, the development team is fortunate because it is one of the few very rare instance where one really start with a blank sheet. The brief was a one-line statement: " Build a Pipeline-based Editor for BAMM". This give us the opportunity to evaluate everything from writing a software from scratch to using off-the-shelf software. In fact, we evaluate a few possible approaches and softwares before deciding to use the Eclipse Platform. In fact, the Eclipse Platform was not even on the radar screen until the very last moment.

User interface (UI) development is what GenericFX/BrainFX/BAMMfx is about. Like all UI projects, we are torn between the desire to create a "simplified interface" and to create an "advanced interface". Recently, a thread on GNOME maling list where Linus Torvald (the creator of Linux) says that he do not like "interface nazis" (his words, not mine) efforts in "removing functionality from GNOME" inspired me to explain what we are doing for our UI. [For a differing view point from Linus, read this JEM Report]

As everyone who subscribe to BAMM mailing list know, we are working on a nifti-enabled version of BAMM. Dr John Suckling, Dr Levent Sendur and Dr Alle-Meije Wink and I had been working on it since about July last year. There had been great progress on this front which we will report in detail later.

Today, we are happy to report that a milestone had been reached. The milestone is a simple demonstration data processing using BAMMfx for the fbamm pipeline. This demonstrator is of course available for evaluation on request. Simply send an email to Cinly.

It is almost obligatory that any blogs on a particular software must have an entry documenting the history for the software. As such, I must as well bite the bullet now.

A warm welcome to the blog for GenericFX. GenericFX is a Virtual Pipeline Editor designed to allow users to load and visually configure processing pipelines, and batch process data through it. It is build on the Ecllipse Platform. We, the development team, plans to use this blog to communicate with our users.

This is a combined blog for GenericFX, BrainFX and BAMMfx.