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Tom Bress

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Everything posted by Tom Bress

  1. Great job! I like the title of your post. "Can I program in LabVIEW?! I'm certifiable!" QUOTE (jgcode @ Aug 13 2008, 10:15 AM)
  2. Yes, the rules have changed. That will be the subject of my next post. Stay tuned... QUOTE (Phillip Brooks @ Aug 12 2008, 12:29 PM)
  3. I've just started a new blog called The Paper Chase, stop by and check it out. The focus of the blog will be LabVIEW certification and other issues relevant to the LabVIEW community. I recently gave a talk about the certification process at NI Week 08 and it sparked a lot of good conversations with LabVIEW programmers of all levels of experience and with NI employees. This blog is an attempt at continuing and expanding that conversation with the broader LabVIEW community. My hope is that the blog will be a place for discussion among the already certified, a place to make suggestions on how to improve the current system. I also hope that it will be a place for all those "how do I prepare for the CLAD/CLD/CLA exam" discussions. I currently have a poll on the blog. Is certification a good idea in general for the LabVIEW community? Stop by and vote. I plan on having a series of such polls on the blog. If any of you premium members out there would like to create LAVA polls of the same questions I would appreciate it. My ultimate goal with this blog is to compile the results and suggestions and share them with the certification people at NI.
  4. I sometimes listen to an internet radio station called Radio Dismuke that plays vintage jazz and popular music from the 1920's and 1930's. It is surprisingly good music to code to. It's light, upbeat, bouncy, smooth and entertaining. And since it is a radio station it doesn't get repetitive or stale.
  5. I use Subversion and TortoiseSVN, both of which are open source. Subversion does the actual source code control and TortoiseSVN lets you access the Subversion SCC functions on your desktop through the mouse right-click menus. I've found SCC to be extremely useful even as a solo developer. The list on the NI website says that you need a low-cost third-party plug in to use Subversion with LabVIEW, but this statement is incomplete and somewhat misleading. What it means is that if you want to access the SCC functionality of Subversion from within the LabVIEW development environment then you need a plug-in. But if you read Jim Kring's blog posts on the subject, as well as the comments of others in the LAVA forums, I think you'll see that the beauty of using TortoiseSVN is that you DON'T do your SCC from inside LabVIEW. TortoiseSVN makes it easy to do your SCC from your desktop without opening an SVN client program. Bottom line: you can use Subversion and TortoiseSVN for free, effective SCC without any other plug-ins or programs. One last point: be aware that there are two different SCC philosophies out there. One is a rigid "Check out, edit, check in" model that prevents two developers from ever working on the same file at the same time. The other is an "Edit and merge" philosophy where two developers can work on the same file at the same time, with the software managing a merge of the two files if possible. The "Edit and Merge" philosophy seems to be more popular among practicing developers. Subversion supports both models, but the default is the edit and merge behavior. LabVIEW itself provides Merge functionality that can be used by Subversion. Some people try Subversion expecting the other kind of behavior and think that it is broken when it allows two people to work on the same file simultaneously. QUOTE (normandinf @ Aug 12 2008, 09:02 AM)
  6. Here's the University of Michigan flag.
  7. QUOTE (crelf @ Jul 29 2008, 12:00 PM) Yes, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I met Dan at the last Developer Education Day in Livonia. There might be some opportunities there, but I think our typical members have different backgrounds and needs. The membership of my group is transient and there is a broad range of experience. UM doesn't offer a LabVIEW course, so most of the students who have come to the meetings are looking for very basic instructions on how to get started. That's why I'm taking the Professional Instructor training at NI Week. I would like to offer the official LabVIEW courses on campus (with NI's permission) as a kind of "LabVIEW Bootcamp" for students who need assistance but don't want to spend an entire semester getting up to speed.
  8. QUOTE (ASTDan @ Jul 29 2008, 02:32 PM) This could be the start of something! LAVA wagers, with the loser having to fly the flag of the winner. Here's a general question: do these flag icons exist already, or would we have to make them ourselves? If we have to make them, could someone post guidelines for the icons?
  9. I like the country flags that show up under our avatars. How about adding university flags to the mix? Go Blue!
  10. I started a a student LabVIEW users group here at Michigan (it's called M-SLUG). When I tell students about "normal" DAQ VIs and Express VIs I use the stick shift/automatic transmission analogy. An automatic transmission makes decisions and takes actions for you, a stick gives you more control and more performance. Students appreciate the Express VIs, they are usually trying to "learn LabVIEW" to build one specific, often quick and dirty, application for a research or team project and Express VIs make the DAQ part of their projects easier. Personally I avoid them because it is too difficult to change the configuration parameters programatically.
  11. That sounds like an interesting idea. One thing you would have to watch, though, is the error priority level. When you merge errors one of them "wins" and gets passed on and the rest are lost. With the Merge Errors vi you choose the priority by deciding which error gets wired to the lower numbered terminal. With an automatic error merge you would have to rewire every time you didn't agree with the automatic result, making the automatic error merge less useful.
  12. This will be my first NI Week! I'm giving a presentation on Tuesday afternoon at 2:15 called "From Spaghetti Code to State Machines". I'll be taking the Professional Instructor training on Monday, no plans yet for Monday night. What's the LAVA hot spot going to be that night?. I'll be at the BBQ on Tuesday, of course. See you there!
  13. Exactly. There are no pop cultural references, just the "geek cultural" reference of Death by PowerPoint. "The medium IS the message" to the nth degree. QUOTE (Yair @ Jul 14 2008, 12:06 PM)
  14. This will be my first NI Week. Any recommendations on local hotels? I saw the list on the NI website, but I've never been to Austin before. Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.
  15. Hi, my name is Tom Bress and I'm a new LAVA member. I'm a Certified LabVIEW Developer working at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I provide engineering support for the lab classes in the Mechanical Engineering Department. I've written a suite of LabVIEW codes for the lab classes, mostly data acquisition using SCXI, CompactDAQ and GPIB hardware. I've recently been promoted to supervise a team that will support the lab classes, design & manufacturing classes, and mechatronics classes in the department as well as a new bio/nano facility. That means new hardware to play with! I'm looking forward to working with the mechatronics hardware and writing applications for that area. I'm also trying to finish a PhD in mechanical engineering on my own time, hopefully I'll be done this summer. I'll be giving a presentation at NI Week '08 about my journey through the certification process called "From Spaghetti Code to State Machines". I'll be presenting on Tuesday at 2:15. Stop by and say hi! While I'm at NI Week I'll be taking the Certified Instructor training. I've also been working on the LabVIEW Advanced I materials. If I think I'm ready by then I'll take a shot at the CLA test as well. I've had some experience with text-based languages, but I have to say that LabVIEW is a lot more fun. Part of it is the graphical programming, but I think I prefer LabVIEW because of the types of projects it is used for. I've done a lot CFD and FEA programming, lots of simulations and such. That's useful, but in the end all you have are pretty pictures on the screen. With LabVIEW I get to DO stuff. I reach out and pull the outside world into my computer, measure things, make decisions, maybe send out signals to manipulate the outside world in return. I get to play with hardware as well as software and produce software that is truly useful. What's not to love? As I've worked my way through the training and certification process I've started to discover the LabVIEW community, and that's what led me to LAVA. I'm glad that LAVA exists, I'm a lone-wolf programmer and I'm happy to have a chance to be part of the larger LabVIEW community.
  16. Thanks, your assurance that something is wrong and that I don't need to switch to Perforce is exactly what I was looking for. As I said, I'm new at source control and I wasn't sure if my problems were due to something I did wrong or something inherent in Subversion. I'll go back and try again. Thanks guys, for all the help. QUOTE (jdunham @ Jun 18 2008, 01:21 PM)
  17. BTW, I enjoy your Thinking in G blog. My repository looks like this: >LabVIEW Repository >>branches >>>MyBranch >>>>Applications >>>>VI Library >>tags >>trunk >>>Applications >>>VI Library My working folder contains just the MyBranch: >Applications >VI Library QUOTE (Jim Kring @ Jun 18 2008, 12:10 PM)
  18. Yes, I did a switch to the branch. Then when I tried to open the main vi from within the project I found that the main vi couldn't find the sub-vis, apparently because it was looking for them in the trunk and not the branch. QUOTE (Omar Mussa @ Jun 18 2008, 10:52 AM)
  19. I've just started using Subversion and TortoiseSVN, and I've got a question. I've organized my vis into projects and have placed them in the trunk of my repository. If I make a branch and open a project in the branch it looks like the sub-vis are all still linked to the trunk. The cross-links did not migrate to the branch. That makes branching inconvenient. Is this just a problem with Subversion? I don't have PushOK installed, LabVIEW doesn't know I'm using source control, and I do all of my source control operations outside the LabVIEW environment. Does this problem exist in supported source control packages like Perforce? Thanks.
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