The optical joystick is working well again. The power supply was replaced with a quieter one, and the optical sensors were realigned. They are very delicate! Mishandling of the joystick was at least partly responsible for the noise problems we've been having. Please be careful!

dozscore has been renamed 3dNormalize. It's still a script but now includes a little C utility called stats that's handy on its own. Plus, 3dNormalize can do 3d+time BRIKs now, which means you can average normalized and Talairached samslide movies across subjects.

The firmware upgrade fixed our remaining hardware issues. Yay! The system now boots cleanly every time, and multiple trial recordings with lots of stopping and starting are no longer a problem. Yay!

Two minor bug fixes were added to the ctf2st code. The scaling for averaging multiple subjects was incorrect and datasets with only virtual channels were unreadable. (Thanks JG & SJ!) fred

We've scheduled a firmware upgrade for this weekend. Hopefully, this will take care of the last of our problems.

There's a note on the brainhull page about multisphere inflation. If you use a brain model, instead of a head model, you need to inflate the spheres slightly, because SAMsrc uses the spheres to define a clipping volume, and tries to account for the skull by stripping off an additional .5 cm.

Today's user group meeting has been cancelled. Most of the interesting lab news is on this page, anyway. Note: We are actively soliciting users who would like to give presentations on their results! If you have some results you'd like to share, please let us know.

Kurage has been upgraded to Fedora Core 3. If you notice any problems with the scheduling calendar or the website, please let me know. tomh

A minor fix was added to the ctf2matlab code. A warning about reading an unrecognized data format was removed. (Thanks Masao!) fred

After careful investigation, it appears that the old ctf to matlab code works fine with the new datasets. Please let us know if we are kidding ourselves. A slightly updated version of the ctf2matlab code has been posted.

Presentation has been updated to version 9.20 on Ika, and now runs cleanly on both Win98 and WinXP. Ika defaults to Win98, but you can use WinXP if you wish. The eye-tracker was wired in to the new ADC patch block; gaze x and y (in screen coordinates), and horizontal pupil diameter (uncalibrated) are available as analog signals, and the joystick firmware was updated.

The CTFSoftwareInstallation page has been updated with instructions on what to do if you're running an older version of RedHat.

Most of the hardware problems have been licked. The EEG was fixed, the rack doesn't overheat, and it now boots clean every time. We still have one nagging crash left (possibly related to the earlier heat-related problem) that we hope to have fixed soon.

The website now sports W3C XHTML and CSS compliance links. If it doesn't render well, it's your browser's fault (IE). We recommend Firefox.

Accounts on Tako have been restructured. User names are now the same as on the calendar. The latest software is available; see CTFSoftwareInstallation for more information.

VSM has sent another engineer to work on our hardware problems over the weekend. He'll be here until Monday. He also brought with him an official copy of the analysis software, which I'll be making available here, as soon as I finish writing the installation instructions. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank VSM for their quick response to our problems.

The problem may be heat related. In retrospect, I am perhaps not surprised. We've had heat problems before, very similar to this (repeated head loco failures) and the rack never did boot properly when it was hot. I think I'm going to add smileys to the website…

Update: it's definitely heat related. When the rack overheats, collection fails. So, we've opened the rack doors, and things seem to be working. The engineers are still trying to track down exactly which components are overheating, but in the meantime, it appears to be working. Again, our apologies for any inconvenience these delays may have caused.

Well, we still have some hardware gremlins. We can record, but head localization is not working. It was working on Friday… Anyway, we are working with the VSM engineers to resolve this problem as quickly as possible.

The new hardware is up and running, and we are now in a testing phase. We have a new electronics interface box, which is going to require some changes in how things are connected to the MEG system. Please bear with us in the next week or two as we will all be learning how to use the new system at the same time!

Our hardware upgrade has run into a few snags, from being short one engineer, to missing parts, to firmware failures. We expect to be down the rest of the week. Sorry.

On a positive note, the new website is now live.

Happy New Year. 2005 is the Year of the Rooster.

Presentation on Ika (the stimulus computer) was upgraded to version 9.13. We switched to using a USB License Key; it must remain connected to Ika at all times. Do not remove it.

Design of the new website is almost complete. This site is a Wiki, being run by PmWiki software. It is hoped that this will allow us to keep the website more up-to-date, and to allow a certain level of collaboration from the user community in the documentation both of lab procedures and data analysis.

The new hardware for our upgrade arrived. This upgrade will allow, among other things, head motion correction, solving one of our most annoying collection issues. The installation is currently scheduled to begin 11-Jan-2005. This is a significant hardware change, and may require some Presentation scripts to be changed slightly. More on this as it develops.

MEG system shipped from CTF in Vancouver. Time begins.