Stagg54

On 3/21/2022 at 3:42 AM, Mads said:

Wow, I would *never* program in pairs. Who can stay in the zone with someone else messing with the flow (see item 8 on this list...)  Working together while discussing the work and writing pseudocode is good, but while actually programming? Yuck.

To work well I need to keep and manipulate 110% of the problem in my head  (the extra 10 percent (or 200%) is the array of continuously variating attacks on the project my fantasy throws at it while I am working on it to find holes, weaknesses and opportunities in the plan 🧐) , and to do that I need to be "alone inside my head".... 

The Joel test was good for its time, but it's 20 years old. I think it's time we reevaluate it.

Number 8 is probably one of the most outdated. Remote work didn't even really exist back then.

Here is a more modern take on it.

https://www.sasworkshops.com/joel-3-joel-test/

On 3/21/2022 at 12:33 AM, Antoine Chalons said:

Do you do that?

In 15 years I only met one LabVIEW Dev who was in a job where management organised pair programming. I'd like to hear feedback from people who do that 🧐

I have done pair programming with clients and it works quite well. Granted these were one-off sessions working to solve a very particular problem. I mostly work alone so I haven't used it in a wide spread way, but I know people that have and are successful with it. Given the fact that most corporate management is still stuck in the industrial age, it's not very widespread. 

Seperate projects is not that uncommon, but I second what Neil says. Innosetup works great if you are still building installers. Much nicer than the NI build-in one and the results are orders of magnitude smaller. Offers you a lot more control too.

Lately I've just migrated to doing NI Packages instead of installers. They seem to work fine. Although you would still have the same problem with multiple devs working in parallel. 

One other often overlooked solution to the whole working in parallel problem is pair or mob programming. No need to worry branching, merging or stepping on each other's toes.

Apparently it's contagious!

On 3/2/2022 at 7:40 PM, X___ said:

quoted from this video (not my input):

Well NI just solved the distribution and licensing problem didn't they? No one's complaining about that any more.

I think it is totally worth watching the NetFlix documentary on Boeing, much of the same sentiment.

On 1/13/2022 at 7:23 PM, Stagg54 said:

if they haven't put out a call for presentations yet or mentioned anything in the press or to the community by now, it ain't happening in May.

The convention center probably only shows that because they probably signed a multi-year deal and just haven't officially cancelled with the convention center yet.

I stand corrected. If you are not going to have external, I guess you don't need a call for presentations.

On 3/8/2022 at 9:57 AM, hooovahh said:

Not necessarily but I see what you mean. The conference usually has several presentations happening at one, in different rooms and you pick the one you want to go to knowing you can't see them all.  At NI Week the popular presentations would be presented more than once, but most were presented once with slides available afterwards, and in some cases a recording.  I haven't attended a GDev Con so I don't know if they differ from this. 

You pick the presentation you want to go to based on the one sentence summary, and whom is presenting.  I have walked out of more than one presentation that looked like it would be one thing, but wasn't.  I assume a presentation by a prominent NI employee, on the subject of LabVIEW future made it a popular session.

We only had 1 track. Maybe in the future we'll graduate to 2 or more. 

As far as Eric's presentation, a. we didn't have a whole lot to chose from (being our first year and generally a smaller conference due to COVID) and b. as you mentioned a prominent NI employee talking on the future of LabVIEW seemed an interesting proposition. We knew the general topic of his presentation but didn't know exactly how it was going to go. 

Having been there, I haven't watched the video, so I don't know how it comes off in the video, but I thought it was an alright session in person. Looking back on it with all the things that have happened since then, I can see why you might look on it with a negative light. For all the talk of listening to their customers more, they don't seem to be heeding that advice.
 

On 3/7/2022 at 5:31 PM, JB_1592 said:

 

Yikes... I've never gone to one of these conferences. Is the privilege of sitting in a terrible focus group for an hour what people buy tickets for?! 😲

Anyone else find it hilarious that "you're talking about a different file format, it's really hard for us to do" was his explanation of what would stand in the way of... A different file format. 🤣

(And is it just me, or are most of his responses to questions/concerns just complete nonsense? Either completely misunderstanding the question, or not relevant at all. Does he really believe that anyone commenting that the way NXG implemented a feature wasn't ideal is concerned about whether they will literally just copy over the source code?)

If you don't like the presentation selection, you are welcome to submit your own ideas for this year. Deadline is April 30th so you have plenty of time.
https://gdevconna.org/present/

Early-bird discounted Tickets are now available!

https://gdevconna.org/

if they haven't put out a call for presentations yet or mentioned anything in the press or to the community by now, it ain't happening in May.

The convention center probably only shows that because they probably signed a multi-year deal and just haven't officially cancelled with the convention center yet.

I forget to mention it does count for 20 recertification points.

If you still haven't gotten tickets to GDevCon NA, ticket sales end Oct 5 at 11:30 PM MT.

https://gdevconna.org/

Yes, it was still occurring w/o db browser running in parallel. It appears to happen when reading an empty view composed of other views, but I have several views composed of other views and not all of them exhibit this behavior. My work around it just to catch the error and clear, since it only seems to occur when the view is empty. 

to Dr Powell, I could give you the VI. It is a simple SELECT statement. The trick is the database. It's rather complicated and involved. I was unable to distill it down to a simple example.

fixed. Thanks.

I am involved in 2 different community events coming up soon and I just wanted to get the word out.

The first is an in-person conference and that is GDevCon N.A. This is following in the footsteps of the original GDevCon in Europe, except it is going to take place in Boulder CO on Oct 20,21. We have a speaker lineup with a lot of the usual suspects. You'll recognize most of them, but there are a few newcomers as well. We also have some workshops going on. You can get more information and purchase tickets at https://gdevconna.org  We are also still accepting sponsorships if anyone is interested.

I realize a lot of people either aren't able or are hesitant to travel to GDevCon N A. If so, you are in luck. There is virtual event coming up on Nov 15/16 and that is the GLA Summit. It sprouted up last year in response to NI cancelling the CLA Summit due to COVID. It promises some great presentations and is open to all LabVIEW and TestStand Enthusiasts. It is a fully online event that lasts for 24 hours. We are still looking for presenters. You can register or a submit a presentation at https://glasummit.org

Hope to see you all at one or both of these. 

If you have any questions on either, post them here and I'll try to get you some answers.

Sam

Why does this work in the SQLite DB browser, but not in LabVIEW?

And why I am getting this error, that basically should never happen? This: https://sqlite.org/rescode.html#mismatch says it should only ever happen when trying to set a rowid to something other than an integer. I'm not doing that.

DQMH Coupling Explained.

Lookup the LabVIEW Python Node for calling Python from LabVIEW. That may not meet your needs on a CRIO.  Under the linux-rt the VI runs in a chroot jail and so you have to do some tricks like using SSH to call python. Google and the NI forums should have some information on that. Another option is to pass data via TCP/IP.
 

Also there is a DAQmx driver for Python, if you want to do everything in Python. The latest CRIOs (at least some of them) support DAQmx within LabVIEW. Not sure if that support extends to Python.

Hope that helps.

On 2/3/2021 at 1:51 AM, Antoine Chalons said:

Do you have access to any hardware?

 

"Technical task" is a bit vague... A few years ago I started playing around with https://projecteuler.net/

It was a fun way to practice algorithms with LabVIEW, I think I solved the first 50 or 60. I'm not sure if this is "technical"

 

Any idea on what you like to do? Any special interest? What's your course?

Project Euler is good.

So is Advent of Code.

You can also check out any of the code katas. There's a ton out there.

Also there is a book called "Automate The Boring Stuff With Python." It is in Python, but the projects are very practical. They could almost all easily be translated into LabVIEW.

Any list we put together is probably still going to have false positives. All we can really hope for is to flag things for further review.

It could point out some problems. For instance, a math library that is using TCP/IP is probably an instant red flag.

Also any list if we make it public, will just result in a cat and mouse game, because people who are determined will find ways around it. All we are really doing is just making it harder and picking off the low hanging fruit. That is all cyber security in general is doing. A determined and skilled attacker with sufficient resources will always find a way in. 

Another thing we do need to add as you mentioned is some sort of publisher verification.

So we had a discussion during Virtual Coffee about malicious packages and vetting.

How do we verify that code is not malicious?

What might flag something as malicious?

We can use VI analyzer to check for certain things such as:

• PW protected VIs
• Removed BDs
• Call Library Node
• .NET nodes
• Network nodes (TCP, UDP, etc)
• File I/O nodes
• Shell commands
• Run on open
• Subvis with no icon or hidden under other objects

What should we add to that list?

Also we need to be careful with the fact that people can use #vian_ignore to ignore specific tests, so maybe we need to add some randomness to naming tests to avoid that.

We will also need

• A system for revoking or removing packages
• A way of notifying users if a malicious package is found.
• Flagging packages that depend on malicious packages

Any thoughts from the community about security and package management/distribution?

unfortunately I had inherited a giant project. The main VI had a 17 frame deep stacked sequence structure. Frame 17 was the main logic but it needed 16 frames to initialize all the global variables in the correct order. It was written in LabVIEW 5 and upgraded to 6.1 with no SCC. It was my introduction to all things LabVIEW.

It was a fun project.

also why did they take the bite out of the upper left corner of the N? It looks weird. Maybe just to help differentiate from the garbage company?

5 hours ago, Dataflow_G said:

I wonder if NXG will get a green coat of paint.

 

It could use a dose of any kinda color over that boring dull gray.