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Me.

I don't think I qualify for the 'coolest job', but mine is pretty interesting and fun. I work part time (30 h) on a permanent position. I really enjoy not having full-time as this gives me a cool time with my daughter and for private LV projects. I work for a small company, which has the following effects: * I'm pretty much involved in the complete life-cycle of a project from the initial developement (heavy LV coding) until service visits (maintanance, support) at the customer site. * It's a nice 'start-up' culture where you have a lot of freedom but also heavy responsibility. I enjoy the freedom but I've experienced others struggeling with the little structure we have. You need to manage yourself. We are a specialist company delivering high precision measurement setups to the industry. If they can't go with COTS products or know that a certain requirement will be really difficult, they go with us. So work is always full of interesting challanges, and sometimes the developement phase is streched to on-site developement at some big industrial companies. This is interesting because there I see a pretty tightly controlled (managed) enviornment, as opposed to my company. Also in many situations, the equipement is sited in the secret R&D labs of these companies, where I see the products that won't hit the market for some years (or not at all). Needless to say that I meet some really brilliant/crazy scientists there. Felix

Not sure why you say that. Just because it is not all obfuscated or even binarised doesn't mean it is a joke. The OGP format was the first format devised and Jim, me and I think someone else whose name I can't come up right now, came up with it after I had looked at ZLIB and according ZIP library and decided to create a LabVIEW library to deal with ZIP formats. The idea for the spec file format I did in fact derive from the old application builder configuration format and it proved flexible, yet simple enough to deal with the task. Jim came with the idea to put the spec file inside the archive under a specific name, similar to how some Linux package managers did it back then. The rest was mostly plumbing and making it work and it is still in principle the same format as in the beginning. The VIPC is just another similar format to track down packages more easily. JKI goes to great lengths to obfuscate the software in the VIPM but they are to be applauded to not have gone the path of obfuscating the actual file formats.

Or just Ctrl+PgDn in Total Commander Quick look into spec file gives you sufficient information what to do Ok, I saw the emoticon...

Well congartulations to Chris! Although my job may not be the coolest, it fit my needs very well. I work as a Senior Architect at Data Science Automation out of their Pittsburgh PA office. My work consists of helping others get their LV project going. Since I consult in many different areas, I get exposed to a lot of different areas of technology and that is one of the bonuses of my job. For a while we had a signover the entrance to our training room (where we offer the NI training) that read "Through these doors pass some of the greatest minds the world ahs known." That expresion applies to many of my customers so it feels like I am "living in a Levis Dockers comercial" (don't worry if you are not old enough to understand that ref). The variety of what I get to work on can be found if you check out the DSA web-site (DSAutomation.com) but can be summarized with a short story. One of my advisors at the University of Pittsburgh was nominated for the Chancelors Distinguished Teachers Awards (not easy for a Physics type to grab that title), so I wrote a letter detailing how my experience with him has changed to world. After reading it, he replied to me saying "Wow, if that is really true, I have to win!" It was and he did! An example of one of the claims was related to the quality control of DVDs and the cost of production. Before we deployed a LV solution, DVD's had a reject rate approaching 70% and the cost of DVDs was about $80. Not anymore. So I may not have the coolest job, but it is pleanty cool for me, since along with the LV related activities I have "ZERO" managment and slaes responcibilities. Ben

It all fits... :-o... if crelf had enough time on his hands to post 5k messages it must be true : he has the coolest LabVIEW job :-D Congrats!

Here is a demo vi in LabVIEW 8.2.1