VMD-L Mailing List

From: Rob (spamrefuse_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jun 16 2009 - 21:23:22 CDT

John Stone wrote:
>
> If you can send me some test files, I would be happy to test your
> code on both big- and little-endian machines to verify it can
> read the binary DEN files with either endianism, etc.
> If your code doesn't explicitly handle endianism yet, it shouldn't
> be too difficult to add.

> If the test files are small enough, just gzip and email them to me, otherwise
> put them into the VMD Public project on biocore if they're too large.
> Also, let me know if you're interested in having this included in VMD 1.8.7.

I'm not sure it should go into the soon upcoming 1.8.7, because I'm still in
heavy testing phase and I'm sure lots of little bugs and inconveniences
need to be ironed out (Axel already pointed out a few!).

Also, I'm learning how to use ABINIT in the meantime....

So let me continue a bit and whenever I have a useful version ready,
I'll announce it here; people can then compile and add it manually to vmd.

I'm now working on the code to make the binary reading flexible toward
endian-type (little or big) and record marker length (4 or 8).
This is a little tricky, because I'm not an expert in this. I noticed on my linux
system that the first 4 (or 8) bytes of a binary file are a fingerprint of its
endian-type and recordmarker length.
Can I assume that this observation is machine independent?

Rob.

PS: why is there such a long time delay between me sending email to
this mailing list and my email appearing in the mailing list's archives?