Background and Ground Rules

Background
The contract solicitation Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse is to "design, develop, and implement a web based Clearinghouse of neuroimaging informatics tools and resources" (among other goals).

AFNI is one of these "neuroimaging informatics tools", and this blog is the place for potential bidders to get information about AFNI that they may want/need for their proposals.

Ground Rules
We cannot show favoritism to any bidder, and so will not provide information to any bidder that is not given to any other bidder. Therefore, we will not directly reply to e-mailed questions. Instead, if you as a bidder have a query, you should send it via e-mail to rwcox@nih.gov. The body of the query should NOT contain any information that you do not want made public (perhaps including your identity). I will then post the query here on this blog, and answer it there. The only e-mail reply I will send will be to tell you that the blog has been updated with the answer. (But before asking the question, perhaps poking around the AFNI web site a little will provide the answer.)

Once the contract is awarded, we will be happy to work with the contractor to enable AFNI information, examples, programs, etc. to be easily distributed and updated.

Basic Information

• The current AFNI version 'number' is available from the URL
    http://afni.nimh.nih.gov/pub/dist/AFNI.version
  which will return a (Unix) text file. The current file consists of 3 lines, shown below

  AFNI_2006_03_21_1314
  no date given
  motd=MOTD/MOTD_2005_12_30.txt
  

  The first line is the AFNI version label (the numbers indicate the time and date of the code freeze). The second line is for compatibility with older version of AFNI which expected the date there. The third (and any subsequent lines which may be added in the future) have the form 'name=string'. The 'motd' string is the "message of the day", and is a URL (relative to http://afni.nimh.nih.gov/pub/dist/) indicating the file that contains the latest urgent message we want AFNI users to see.
• However, the AFNI version label does not always change when we make a change to the code. Small bug fixes or feature additions don't warrant a new label, in our view. There is no fixed rule about when I choose to attach a new label to the program -- but usually, it happens every 6-10 weeks.
• AFNI source code and binaries can be downloaded from http://afni.nimh.nih.gov/pub/dist/ in several ways:
  • In the src/ subdirectory is all the current source code files.
  • In the bin/ subdirectory is all the current binaries that we compile.
  • In the tgz/ subdirectory are tar+gzip-ed archives of all the source and binary directories.
  • These could be collected to a clearinghouse via a 'cron' job using the wget program, for example.
  • Please do not automatically download large volumes of files from the server during the hours of 06:00-22:00 (Eastern time)!
• When the interactive AFNI program (and a few others in the suite) starts, it checks with the server here to see if the compiled-in version label matches the current version. If not, a warning message appears. We do not like to support older versions of AFNI!
• The principal way in which we interact with users, especially non-NIH users, is via the AFNI message board. This method leaves a searchable list of questions and answers, which sometimes is useful.
• Not all AFNI programs are well documented, but there is no secret-and-special-to-the-NIH version of AFNI: everything we develop is made available to everyone for download, once we are reasonably sure that it is working (or at least, not crashing too much).