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Meet Lilah Kring, the newest member of the Kring family: Born Monday, 10/5/2009, at 11:30 PM GMT -7 I can't guarantee she'll use LabVIEW, but I'll do my best [insert object-oriented programming puns, here]

Congratulations, Jim. I'm sure she'll be wiring in no time. You know peek-a-boo is just a lesson in object persistence.

New Parents: In between changing diapers and cleaning burp rags, take a moment to consider your child's future. Will your little one be able to make it in the rough and tumble world of the future? Yes, but only if you provide the right tools. And what could be more important to your child's future than LabVIEW? Sure, you could make a couple extra house payments, but will that help your child's education? No. Good parents know that a child's work prospects depend on a fully licensed copy of LabVIEW. You can help them out tomorrow by your actions today! Just start sending annual checks in the amount of $3000 every year to "National Instruments." We'll hold onto those funds for you and when your child is old enough to need their own block diagrams, you'll have built up a tidy nest egg, which NI will generously apply to the annual Software Subscription Package. If you make this easy payment of just $250 each month, by the time your child is 18, you'll likely have enough saved for them to have six or even seven years of LabVIEW enjoyment*, more than enough time for them to establish themselves in the industry. Act now, and you can also establish separate trust funds for your child's TestStand, Diadem and MeasurementStudio! Why would you wait? Even while you think about the value of this offer, your child is getting older. Start sending those checks today!* * accounting for likely increases in SSP cost ** This message not endorsed by NI, its affiliates or my managers *** Congratulations, Jim!

I had to make this dicision a while ago...and never looked back. I set up my own "Test" network which I got IT to link to so that anyone with a browser and login on thier network could view test results and other test information. This is still in use and is incredibaly scaleable. I set up an old PC with a webserver using Xampp. Its a fully functioning webserver including Apache, PHP, CGI, SQL,mail SSL and well, everything. But more importantly it is really easy to install and FREE. About 10 minutes and your up and running. Part of the Xampp installation is an SQL server. I set up a set of "Test" databases (we had 3 product lines at the time so I decided to have a different one for each...personal choice to partition the data better. You could have one or you could have one for each station..its up to you how you set it up). The test stations (18 of them, 6 per line) all pushed thier test data into the various databases using the Labview SQL toolkit. I just made a drop in module for the existing test stations so that instead of writing the results to a file, they wrote it to the database. I then wrote a few webpages (started as two, is now about 80 and quite sophisticated with graphs, process capabilities, searchable queries etc) that queried the databases so that any user could view the results in a web browser. The thing about this setup was that it operated perfectly fine on its own as a standalone system, but once it was up and running, IT really took an interest (especially after the big guns wanted to see the pretty graphs on their laptops in the office ) and they have now taken the responsibility of managing and updating the webserver. From my point of view (and ITs) it creates a defineable partition between the test network and thiers and it is a technology they understand. The big guns loved it because there was no captital cost (well, apart from the SQL) although I did persuade them that they should make a donation.