Mil-OSS Re-cap

Sorry for the delay in getting my re-cap out. This is what happens when you attend a conference in the middle of a release cycle for Opticks (you get really bogged down).

The first working group of Mil-OSS was really good. Quite a few people showed up (~150) and everyone was pretty energized about Military Open Source. There was a wide variety of discussions ranging from DoD policy to specific open-source projects. There was a lot to learn, too much in fact, I couldn't see it all. I don't really want to name any highlights, because there was so much good content. I will say this:

If you have any interest in Military Open Source, you need to join the Google Group. From there, you can most of the presentations that were given at the working group. Just look in the files section of the google group. And you need to start planning now to attend the next working group in Spring 2010. The location and dates haven't been determined, but you're going to join the Google Group, so you can be the first to find out, right?

Oh, and don't forget to check out the pics that have been posted to Flickr.

Opticks and IDL - Helpful Hints

I just published documentation on how to combine the free IDL extension for Opticks along with the built-in wizard capability of Opticks, the resulting effect is pretty powerful. If you have any interest in IDL scripting, I suggest you check it out. I actually received the documentation from one of our users, so I'll take this opportunity to remind everyone that every contribution is important and documentation is one of the easiest and lot of times best ways to contribute.

Presenting at Mil-OSS Working Group

I'll be presenting at the Mil-OSS Working Group in Atlanta, GA on 12 August. I'll be discussing how/why we open-sourced Opticks. For those of you unable to attend, I've posted my slides on the Opticks wiki, here. I'm might also be contributing to the "How to open source .MIL" panel discussion. The conference is shaping up to be pretty interesting. I'm especially looking forward to getting some chow at "The Varsity" while I'm down in Atlanta. For those of you interested in "Military Open Source", you should check out the Google Group.

Opticks 4.3.1 - It's Coming...

Coding for Opticks 4.3.1, just finished up. The first release candidate should up and available on the Opticks website by the end of the week (August 7th). From there, it's testing and then barring any problems the final build of 4.3.1 will release on August 25th. Ok, now that I've thrown all the important dates out, why should you care?

Because it's got some awesome stuff in it, that's why.

Here are my favorite features/fixes:

• Mouse Panning - Ok, so I helped work on this feature, so I'm a little biased. But, seriously open an image and press and release the middle mouse button to activate the mouse pan mode (or you can press Ctrl+Shift+E while your mouse is over an image). Give a try, I think you'll end up liking it.
• JPEG2000 Importer - more data importers is always a good thing right? This currently works on the Windows 32-bit version of Opticks and nothing else and will open .jp2 and .j2k files. Currently, this importer loads the entire image into memory.
• Tiled Tiff Support for the GeoTiff Importer - again, loading more data is always a good thing in my book. If you had a GeoTiff that didn't load it before, give it a try in a 4.3.1.
• Control the number of Most Recently Used Files - you can now set the number of most recently used files that are stored by editing the preference in "Tools\Options...". Anything from 0 to 16 is valid, 5 is the default.
• Faster Start-up - who doesn't like faster start-up? I helped work on this one too, so I'm biased here as well. Opticks now does a better job of caching information about plug-ins, so that the start-up time can be improved.
• Dynamic Texture Generation now supported on Linux - this feature has always been pretty cool, but you could only use it on Windows. Now, you can use it on Linux.
• Fixed Import Options Dlg regression - There was a regression when selecting datasets from a file for import in the 4.3.0 release. This has now been fixed in 4.3.1, so that 4.3.1 will behave like 4.2.5. If this problem affected you, it was annoying, but no need to worry about that if you upgrade to 4.3.1.

Check out the list of all 63 issues that were fixed (there's a bunch of other really nice fixes in there) and find your favorite new features/fixes.

You can download a nightly build that has all the 4.3.1 fixes. You can find the nightly Windows installers here. And the Solaris installers here.

Mil-OSS Working Group

I'll be attending the Mil-OSS (Military Open Source) Working Group in Atlanta, GA next week (12th and 13th of August). You can find more details about the conference at http://mil-oss.org/. So, if you're in the Atlanta area and want to talk Opticks, drop me a line. I'm looking forward to the conference, it should be a really good melding of the minds.