[R-sig-Geo] spatial.tools 1.3.8 now on CRAN

[Jonathan Greenberg]

Folks:

I've pushed a new version of spatial.tools to CRAN (1.3.8).  In
addition to the requisite bug fixes, there are a few new features and
functions:

rasterEngine/focal_hpc:
- Now can output multiple files (return a list-of-arrays, and
optionally specify the output filenames via e.g. the
filename=c("output1","output2")
- easier function debugging via debugmode=TRUE parameter
- creates both a Raster* header AND an ENVI header to allow for
immediate opening in most GIS programs
- force the calculation of the min/max via setMinMax=TRUE
- No longer requires ellipses in the user function
- processing_unit = "chunk" available for focal windows -- this can
help with vectorized operations, since an entire row can be processed
instead of one window at a time.  I'll expand on this in the next
iteration of the rasterEngine tutorial (forthcoming)
- load required packages for your function via .packages parameter
(previously, it required your function having a library/require
statement within it)
- (experimental) by setting compileFunction=TRUE, your function will
be byte-code compiled.  This can shave some time off the execution in
certain cases.

New functions (all will run in parallel if a cluster is running/registered):
-predict_rasterEngine: a direct swap-in for the generic predict()
statement for easier application of models to rasters/bricks
- raster_to_GLT and raster_to_IGM: create GLT (two-band column/row
values for each pixel) and IGM (two-band, geographic x and y values
for each pixel).  Helpful for e.g. geographic regression.

I'm working on updating the rasterEngine tutorial to reflect the new
features, hopefully in the next few days.

As always, if you have any suggestions/bug reports, please report them
to me!  Cheers!

--j

-- 
Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD
Assistant Professor
Global Environmental Analysis and Remote Sensing (GEARS) Laboratory
Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
259 Computing Applications Building, MC-150
605 East Springfield Avenue
Champaign, IL  61820-6371
Phone: 217-300-1924
http://www.geog.illinois.edu/~jgrn/
AIM: jgrn307, MSN: jgrn307 at hotmail.com, Gchat: jgrn307, Skype: jgrn3007