[VoxBo] new VoxBo pre-release

[Daniel Kimberg]

Hi all.  I've made a new VoxBo pre-release available for download.
This is version 1.8.5pre7 (i.e., the seventh pre-release of 1.8.5).
It's already installed on the CfN cluster at Penn, for others it can
be downloaded as a complete set of binaries for Linux and OSX via
nitrc.org:

http://www.nitrc.org/frs/?group_id=73

or a la carte from our server:

http://voxbo.org/download/alacarte/linux
or
http://voxbo.org/download/alacarte/osx

The release notes for 1.8.5 are coming along nicely and should give
you a pretty good idea what's new:

http://voxbo.org/index.php/Release_1.8.5

Unlike the previous 1.8.5 pre-releases, this is a complete
distribution.  If you just want to run some of the command line
programs, then all you need to do is put the binaries somewhere.  But
if you want to install the scheduler (for queueing jobs), you're best
off renaming an existing installation, installing the new one, and
migrating your settings.  Please let me know if you'd like updated
documentation on how to do this.

I've also restored the single downloads via the wiki pages, e.g.:

http://voxbo.org/index.php/vbview

Outside of the release notes, the documentation for this release is
pretty sparse, although I would draw your attention to the page on
lesion analysis:

http://voxbo.org/index.php/Lesion_analysis

Lesion analysis methods are evolving rapidly, and I'd like to start
using the mailing list to keep everyone up to date (in the past I've
assumed that anyone doing lesion analysis with VoxBo is in touch with
me directly).

For the most part, this is a pretty mature release -- most of the code
has been in use at the CfN for a while, and most of the recently
updated code is stuff that I use a lot.  The one piece of this release
that is really incomplete is the new vbview, which I have been
promising for a long time.  If you install this release, and you need
vbview, I recommend keeping the old vbview around (at the CfN,
"vbview" gets you the old version, while "vbview2" gets you the new
version).  The new version, however, is not bad for looking at brain
images, and produces nice looking translucent overlays (e.g., see the
Schwartz et al. 2009 article in Brain on which I'm a co-author).  It
also does layering, which is sometimes nice (e.g., if you want to switch
back and forth between two activation maps overlaid on the same anatomy,
or if you want to surf a stat map from a lesion map while also seeing the
lesion count in each voxel).

Please post to this list if you have any questions, comments, or
requests.  VoxBo hasn't been specifically funded for a while, so my
effort on it for the past few years has been pretty much restricted to
bug fixes, things I can do quickly, and things that are in service of
other projects I'm working on (especially lesion analysis, for which I
do have some funding).  But I have a fair bit of code lying around
that could be hooked up with minimal effort, so if there's something
you particularly need, feel free to ask.

dan