Re: [IMP-dev] patches to embed

[Daniel Russel <>]

On Jul 16, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Ben Webb wrote:

> Daniel Russel wrote:
> > Ick. Currently only the header is byteswapped if the machine stamp
> > says the endianness is wrong. It seems like the data probably should
> > be too. And then the heuristic applied.
>
> MRC files suck, so whatever you do will only work some of the time.  
> You
> will also find MRC files with byte-swapped headers but not byte- 
> swapped
> data, for example. There are also two different file types that use
> 'MRC' format (some of the header fields mean entirely different  
> things)
> but of course there is no way to reliably tell the difference. The  
> best
> we can do is to write out correct files, and do our best to figure out
> the inputs.
Sure. I was just questioning if flipping the bytes in the header  
entirely independently from the body (as is currently done) is really  
the right way to go about unmangling the files. I would have thought  
that the two would use the same ordering most of the time. But with  
biologists writing code, you never know :-)