Siliceous and Delicious

Had a tricky decision to make this morning—get the interface finished and done, or tackle one (even just one!) of the list of deliverables I committed to for DSA last week? Well, it’s been a very busy week with non-thesis commitments, so I decided to put off the non-thesis deliverables for just a little bit longer, and give priority to the one thing that really needs getting done more than anything else.

Knocked the first item off the list before 10am, which was to sort out how the magnification/scale information was going to be saved to the filename. I wanted a way to make absolutely sure that the scale was being set for each image that was opened . In almost every case there will be multiple images per individual, and quite possibly multiple images between write-to-pipe events, so it wasn’t sufficient to use those file-write events as a trigger for a filename change. I thus had to dig around the interwebs quite a lot for a way to get at the somewhat lower-level file opening event as a trigger for running my script. Eventually found a java class “Image Listener” that will do just that, and after a bit of tinkering I got it to both work perfectly, and also to compile automagically upon startup (to avoid having to install the plugin every time ImageJ is opened).

Next on the list was to write a function for the R interface that writes a backup of the SQL database tables to CSV files, to avoid any disastrous things from happening should the .db file become corrupted or some such nasty yet unforeseeable thing. This was not difficult to accomplish and was done by lunchtime.

Next, I tried to improve the “New slide…” menu item to allow for accidentally adding a slide that already exists, and for choosing an existing slide to work on. Completed this task after DSA, and it seems to work fine. I’m ready for testing!