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It's been tough going through the last month without our beloved LAVA site, but behold, it's back and better than ever. We're calling this version LAVA 2.0. Welcome back! How did we get to this point? Well, there was a serious crash on the LAVA server database and years worth of data was lost. I didn't have a very good backup and data recovery process in place, which meant I couldn't bring the site up the way it was before. There is good news however... keep reading. Just to step back a little to discuss the history of LAVA. LAVA started back in 2002 as an experiment by myself and mostly to provide a web based platform for LabVIEW discussions that could be on the same level as the then popular Info-LabVIEW mailing list. I wanted to host quality discussions where the tiniest detail and minutia of LabVIEW coding could be discussed at an advanced level using the latest web technology. Well, it was a slow start but after a few years it looked like LAVA was a hit. The member levels grew and along with that, more stress on the server and site. Throughout the life of LAVA I was the sole administrator of the back-end system. I managed my own server and performed custom modifications to the forums application framework. However, this could only be sustained for so long. I have a "real job" of course and spending time on LAVA administration is on an as-needed basis. So, after a few months of neglect and a few careless server maintenance actions on my part, the inevitable happened. Data was lost. I didn't know what to do at that point and decided to tap into a few trusted LAVA members and friends for help. Jim Kring and justin Goeres to name a few. It was decided that a more decentralized management of LAVA was necessary to avoid another catastrophe and allow more people the ability to manage and help with the workload. We also took this opportunity to experiment with a hosted community service called Ning. The Premium members and some key LAVA members were invited to try the site out for a week. That went ok at the start but we found that it lacked the power that LAVA users were acustomed to. We also had an issue with how much control they had of all the site data and with how limiting the system was to modifications. At the end of the day we concluded that it would serve the community better to keep the familiar experience of the original LAVA intact. We scrapped the Ning site and took what we learned to relaunch LAVA. Here's the good news part. It turns out I had an off-site backup of the data from Feb 2007. Also, it just so happened, that avid LAVA reader, Philippe Guerit, was keeping all the RSS feed content on his computer since after Feb 2007. What luck! Buy the man a beer! I've managed, using LabVIEW of all things, to extract the old database data. Jeff Plotzke wrote a program to parse through Philippe's RSS feed file. And together we were able to get all the old content imported (yes, the dreaded Alpha thread too). Chris Relf and Mark Balla have also worked hard to manually import the old CR code into the new site as well. That data had to be manually imported. The bright side of this restructuring is that now I have more people to help out in keeping LAVA alive. We now have 6 administrators instead of just one. We have moved LAVA to a hosted Invision (the company that makes the forum software) server account, making it more reliable with regular backups. I have found a new friend in Jeff, who knows PHP, (why didn't you say so a long time ago?). And I have learned how to ask for help I want to assure you that all of us who have worked on getting the site up and running are passionate about keeping LAVA alive. We hope that you welcome the new LAVA, along with some of the new cool features we've added, back into your daily workflow. I'll be creating a separate topic to describe some of the new features in LAVA 2.0. In the meantime, please post any questions or problems with the site here. Note that the only way to login to your account is using your email address. To get a new password click the forgotten password link and fill-in ONLY your email address. Thanks to Jim, Jeff, Justin, Chris, Mark, Philippe and all the Ning beta testers.

Let's try the real stages of LV user development... icons are in parentheses... "Experiencing Blank Diagram Syndrome." (white square, black border) "Closed the pinned palettes. Now what?" (the palette pin) "Tired of just using Express VIs." (LV icon with thick blue border) "Wondering how to stop parallel loops." (Tiny while loop) "Burned by Global VIs." (The globe glyph) "Wishing I knew about Create SubVI From Selection." (white square, black border but dotted line like selection) "Burned by Cross-Linked VIs" (the directory folder glyph) "Lost in LabVOOP." (the class cube) "Inventing my own state machine technique." (two circles with arrows pointing between them) "Burned by refnum race condition." (the document with folded corner glyph) "Searching for design patterns." (online help question mark glyph) "Rewriting my VIs for determinism." (timed loop glyph) "Remote debugging a Built Application." (stethascope glyph used for probes) "Waiting for FPGA compile process." (FPGA glyph) "Digging LV's rusty nail out from left foot." (a nail, rusty) "Needing unreleased LV version to finish project." (LV icon with a +1 beside it)

I think the 1 Million mark should obviously be... "Insane Object" The lowest rating in my mind would be "broken arrow"

So here are my propositions for t-shirts. This is for the front side: As you can see I played a little bit with LabVIEW logo and turned it to something with "lavability". In case when word "LAVA" made of wires is not too readable, I prepared alternate version: And this is for the back side (as suggested in this thread): This is loose variation around Amnesty International logo. As I am not a native English speaker, I'm not so sure what is an exact impression of this slogan. Please feel free to suggest something that sounds better. SVG sources avaiable for request. No bitmaps are used, everything is nicely scalable.

To report a bug about LabVIEW or any other NI product, visit here.

I see there are some new options for "Voting a post up" and giving a star rating to a thread. Each user also has a "reputation" count. How are these things tied together? The reputation appears to be tied to the number of votes a member receives on his/her posts. Does the star rating also contribute to reputation? Gone are the days of making many useless posts to make myself appear useful. -Toby Edit: On a side note...I am able to give a star rating to my own post. That seems odd to me.

Thanks to the LAVA team for resurrecting the Scripting Tools. The latest version is available via subversion on the LAVACR repository on Google: http://code.google.com/p/lavacr/ including an 8.6.1 version. Future releases (as and when I get ownership of the CR entry back (!)) will be for LabVIEW 8.6.1 or higher versions only. With the release of LabVIEW scripting most of this code is now easily reproduced but hopefully some folks will still find it useful.

I've changed it so it opens a new tab.

I love vugie's design for the t-shirt, but the back is a little out of date since NI has, indeed, freed the imprisoned properties (well, most of 'em). So here's my suggestion for the back of the t-shirt (thanks to justin goeres for the avatars and alpha editing assistance!): Like last year, it's a play on the NI-Week theme, but with our top posters' avatars - here's a zoomed-in section: Since we're running out of time, unless there are any strong objections, I'll set the t-shirt up in the LAVAStore in the next few days - vugie's design on the front and this one on the back.

I noticed the default favicon too. I would suggest that the t-shirt image that vugie posted for the 2009 LAVA / NI Week shirt would be an awesome favicon. (It looks sort of like your nicely done avatar)

Gary, we're working on importing the old content. In the meantime, feel free to start new topics.

I am creating a program that will take values from a voltmeter and integrate them over a given time period, dt. I used the From DDT function to convert from the signal (which i just made up for testing purposes) to a single waveform. I then used the Get Waveform Components function to transform it into a 2D array with dt = 0.001 s. Is this correct? My data seems off. Thanks for the help! Most of this is still way over my head..

QUOTE (Antoine Châlons @ May 6 2009, 11:08 AM) QUOTE (crelf @ Apr 25 2009, 07:11 PM) ... You can make it themed so that it ties into NIWeek 2009 if you want, but this is not a requirement. And besides this, it is hard to design graphics for event I have no idea about. Also I won't have a chance to take part in NIWeek, so I decided to design something more general. I used Inkscape - the great open source vector graphics application. Maybe it is little bit slow, but at current stage it is even comparable to Adobe Illustrator which is top of the topest.