R-sig-geo'ers:

I've pushed a major update (version 1.2.1) of my spatial.tools package to
CRAN.  The biggest change is the inclusion of the rasterEngine function for
making parallelized pixel/local window raster functions easier to
implement.  I've also provided a tutorial for this function at:

http://www.geog.illinois.edu/~jgrn/software-and-datasets/rasterengine-tutorial/

Many of the functions in spatial.tools are parallel-ready, so by
registering a parallel backend with foreach, you should see speed boosts in
many situations.  I include a helper app "sfQuickInit()" to start a
parallel cluster (using 1/2 of your local CPUs) and "sfQuickStop()" to stop
it.

There are also a few other helper functions some of you might find useful:
- list.raster.files : provides a way to spider all raster files in a path
and (optionally) return a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame of the bounding boxes of
each raster in the search path.
- projectRaster_rigorous: provides accurate reprojection/resampling of
categorical data (the output pixel contains the categorical value that has
the highest *area* inclusion from the higher resolution source dataset)
- spatial_sync_raster : take a set of raster files of differing
projections, extents, and pixel resolutions and "syncs" them to a common
CRS/resolution for use with map algebra.

As always, if you have any feature suggestions or bug fixes, let me know!

--jonathan

-- 
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@hotmail.com, Gchat: jgrn307, Skype: jgrn3007

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

