Bob Dougherty: Software

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I like to write code. Some software development is a necessary component of my research. This includes code for stimulus display, data processing and visualization, as well as various shell scripts. Most of the stuff that I think might be useful to others is available for download from the lab software repository. You should also have a look at the lab wiki, which is the main source of documentation for the lab software.

I also work on some projects for fun. These include:

Vischeck- a website where you can simulate the effects of various color deficits on images or websites. You can also download plugins for running the simulation yourself. The Vischeck code is now part of the Gimp open-source image processing package as a display filter. Alex Wade and I started this around 2000 and it has grown to be a moderately popular website. We wrote and maintain the code that runs the simulations, which is mostly highly optimized c-code (it had to be optimized since it runs on an old server in my garage). We also designed and built the website using PHP, our favorite web scripting language. Our most shameful creation is the perl script that parses HTML for VischeckURL. We would release the code for that, except that it is such an ugly set of hacks cobbled together to deal with HTML in the wild. Our only source of pride there is that it actually works reasonably well.
TinyEyes- a website where you can simulate how a baby sees the world. This image processing site uses the same core simulation engine as vischeck, but uses spatial-color filter parameters that were estimated based on infant vision research.
m4i- a 16MB linux distribution optimized for use on small network appliances. This project mostly involves recompiling existing packages and quite a bit of shell scripting.
I also like to build websites 'from scratch'. I always write my own HTML, and use PHP quite extensively. This site is built in PHP, and I've also built the SIRL site using a similar set of scripts. The scripts for this site are available upon request.
On occasion, I dabble in SQL. MrData is an MRI data management package that I am working on for the lab. I have also built a web-based photo management system that runs on Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP. This started out as a commercial venture, but has since degenerated into my own personal digital photo management system.