Jim Kring

Since those topic seem to be amoung the most popular here (in that order. Chris is that your doing?) well at lest the last two...

Since it not easy to find an audience that can appreciate such things, I hope Y'all enjoy the story below that came to me via a long e-mail chain.

I'd cite the source if knew of one other than my wife!

Have fun!

Ben

Ben,

There is an interesting article that I think you will enjoy, which is called "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy". It examines how free discussion will inevitably digress to the more base subjects and how groups need to organize themselves in order to overcome such entropy.

:beer: Cheers,

Jim

Foiled! :headbang:

Being a little "pessimistic" about our community site launch is very much an honest and understood reaction.

What we are trying to do here is simply add another avenue for the community to collaborate. It has been said before, but I will say again that we do not want to compete or otherwise step on the toes of our partners on the web. I hope you understand this is not the goal.

What I always would want is to talk with you all about the usefulness of the site, your concerns with posting, and the like.

Of course, my true intentions in LAVA is to communicate with you all and help develop a better partnership. Ocassionally, I may EVEN be able to offer a LV hint or two...

PS. The community.ni.com site is built on an open-source technology called Plone, and we developed with the company Michael mentioned. It's a very impressive tool in my opinion.

Colin: You speak of "partnership" repeatedly. So, what has NI done (or is NI planning to do) to partner with LAVA and other independent LabVIEW resources? There are several NI employees who do provide regular high-quality contributions to LAVA, in the form of forum participation, and I think that's great. However, I think that NI could do a whole lot more. Also, NI needs to realize that we are not very interested in partnerships that co-op our efforts for NI's direct benefit.

...Search and replace String.vi has both modes. Selected by right-click on it....

OK, that's new for LabVIEW 8.0. It's really starting to frustrate me how many of these hidden little gotchas NI has started putting into primatives. Adding right-click options to nodes is such an awful way of circumventing the 4-2-2-4 conpane standard. At least with Search and Replace String the function icon looks slightly different (having an RE "pattern" asterisk), but the Read Text File function has similar options for conveting EOL characters and this just drives me nuts. Who is going to think to right click on a node to see how its configured? These are worse than Node Setup Options.

A firm wag of the finger to whoever decided to add right-click options to nodes, especially without any distinct visible change of the icon

Jim,

Thanks to your precious hint I made the attached VI. Note however that I changed "[\s\t]+" into "[ \t]+" to get the newlines preserved.

Note also that "[\s\t]+" is the same as "[\s]+" because "\t" is a part of whitespace "\s". But your idea works great.

Every time I try to use regular expressions I learn new stuff.

thanks for your help

henning

Henning. Search and Replace does not use regular expressions. Also your interpretation of \s and \t is not correct, with respect to their usage in regular expressions:

\s is the space character (not all whitespace)

\t is the tab character

\n is the line feed

\r is carriage return

...and, there are some others.

Please see the attached example, which meets your requirements.

Download File:post-17-1147276416.vi

Another (and probably best) option is to use Search and Replace Pattern.vi.

In a string I want to replace any sequence of blanks or tabs (\s or \t) by a single character (for instance a ; ).

So a string like

123	456	 78

becomes

123;456;78

irrespective if the whitespace is tabs or spaces.

This should be possible to do with regular expression gymnastics, but I have not been able to figure it out.

Any suggestions are wellcome.

I need this to read 2D arrays of numbers from text files. Similare to the "Spreadsheet String to array" function, except that "Spreadsheet String to array" has either tabs or space as delimiter, not both.

In a text file it can be hard to see the difference between tabs and spaces, and thus you may end up with both, in which case "Spreadsheet String to array" fails miserably.

/henning

Use the regular expression "[\s\t]+" to find the next instance of one or more consecutive space or tab characters. Do this in a loop with a shift register until you've replaced them all.

It's worth mentioning that I am contacted on a regular basis from people that found my info on the CLA listing on ni.com. That's pretty good marketing.

Here is a bug that I've noticed in LabVIEW 8.0.1.

Download File:post-17-1146793345.vi

-----Original Message-----

From: LabVIEW-Announce@opsserver.magnet.fsu.edu [mailto:LabVIEW-Announce@opsserver.magnet.fsu.edu]On Behalf Of Scott Hannahs

Sent: Wednesday, May 03, 2006 3:04 PM

To: LabVIEW Announcements

Subject: Info-LabVIEW Problems

As some of you may have guessed there is an administrative problem with the info-labview mailing list.

The lab switched its DNS to a new windows based active directory system but they forgot to update the nhmfl.gov domain. Since this does not point to the new name server the domain has temporarily vanished from the internet.

The data was updated today but it does not appear to have made the 4PM cutoff time for updating the master nameservers for the .gov zone. This means that the fix will not take effect until 4PM (EDT) on Thursday (5/4). After that the changes should propagate rapidly down the chain and all should return to normal. As soon as the nhmfl.gov domain returns to the internet all should be well.

I apologize for the snafu. I just set up these temporary mailing lists to get this message out from a real named machine. This should be the only message you get as an "announcement".

-Scott

--

Dr. Scott Hannahs, National High Magnetic Field Lab

Info-LabVIEW List Maintainer <http://sthmac.magnet.fsu.edu/labview>

Subscribe: <mailto://info-labview-on@labview.nhmfl.gov>

Unsubscribe: <mailto://info-labview-off@labview.nhmfl.gov>

Is there a Microsoft-based interpretation of Godwin's Law?

This would only be possible by first comparing Microsoft to Nazis, which means that you would have to invoke Godwin's Law on yourself, which means that you automatically lose the argument. It makes for quite a paradox. I suggest that we simply offer to buy AMSLLC a beer and debate the issue at NI Week ...mmmm.... beer. :beer:

Super thanks Chris once again, great link. I suppose it would help if I actually looked at all the NI mailing on certification since I kind of just keep them on a pile or two, or circular file.....

The existence of that resource is just one example of something that one learns while preparing to take the certification exams Doesn't it makes you wonder what else you might not know? As Einstein said (I am paraphrasing), "As the radius of the circle of light increase, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it."

I am not sure why people use "She", since most majority LabVIEW people are "He". If you happen to mean me, then I can tell you that I have never thought I am a great LabVIEW programmer, I know there are people who can make a lot nicer user interface and some other people have a lot more experiences on engineering which is more important as a LabVIEW programmer. But that doesn't matter to me, there are more things to make you good other than a certification.

By the way the person Ben mentioned with initial RK, that definitely not me, but if that is the person I would guess, I do think he is a great person. So hiring people maybe should consider more than just LabVIEW certification. Some people are just so unpleasant to work with that would depress the team work.

I also don't think certification is the most important thing, some people work better without stress. If a boss takes the certification so seriously, it properbly not a good and wise place to work for anyway. (by the way, I am not saying this because I failed many certifications in my life, as a matter fact, opposite side...)

Irene

Irene, no, I was not trying to single you out. Notice that I switched from "she/her" to "he/him" in my second paragraph. I'm just an equal opportunity kind of guy

If you were your own employer instead of an employee I think you would be saying the same thing as me. It is one thing to play along with the office talk but entirely another to run ones own business.

But I hear the voice of the practical too....

I probably understand more about your perspective than you give me credit.

-Jim (James) Kring

James Kring, Inc.

Well you are entitled to your opinion, but.... I just don't see it. I saw the same thing with network engineers I knew, and it is somewhat analogous. That is: people who came into network engineering just from years on the job, only to find some guy who passed a test and never did a thing would get a better job. That is just not how it works. NI certification says nothing about commitment. I am committed because I stay with NI material from job to job, company to company, then my own company. Commitment is not a test. I don't see your point really but it is one the larger NI alliance members are taking. I respect some of it, but don't really agree.

I also feel that the NI certification path says there is only one way to program. I saw all kinds of labview programming over the years; some bad, some good. But most of the best was not from guys taking tests.

NI Certification is an important milestone on the path to LabVIEW enlightenment (which is more of a journey than a destination). If someone thinks she's good at LabVIEW and she hasn't taken any courses or obtained NI certification, then chances are she's not as good as she think's she is and she probably doesn't have the experience that our organization is looking for. (I'm also responsible for hiring LabVIEW developers.) A certification requirement for hiring certainly makes for a good filtering criterion (and you can't have too many). At our organization, we require that every LabVIEW developer be on a professional path to become a Certified LabVIEW Architect.

Bottom line, certification is an absolute must for anyone serious about calling himself a LabVIEW expert -- if only to understand the process and expose him to a variety of concepts. Certainly, I gained a lot by obtaining my certification (I am a CLA, and have previously held my instructor certification) -- I learned about areas of LabVIEW that I was weak in, and I subsequently strengthened those areas.

Cheers,

PS - please don't compare LabVIEW to IT (I can say this without getting in trouble because our company doesn't have an IT dept.)

Try using the MSI Installer Builder from OpenG. This will allow you to build an installer in LabVIEW 7.1 from anything.. yes, anything.

Here's a VI that should work for you. It's saved in LabVIEW 7.0 format.

-D

That's a five star reply!

I have found another variant of this bug.

Download File:post-17-1145600287.vi

What do we call it?

niwdoG's Law?

Kring's Law?

How about Beer's Law?

Some of you may have heard of Godwin's Law. I think there should be an inverse law, which dictates that whenever the discussion degenerates to a discussion of beer, the topic is officially closed to all discussions other than beer, the person who brought up beer is declared the winner, and we all toast to them.

That's hillarious - I wonder if "gingerman" was thinking of that photo when he wrote that entry

I remember my first trip to NI-Week (subsequently my first trip to the States) - I was introduced to Shiner Bock at the Aliiance party (Maggie Mays if I remember correctly). I had my CLD exam the next day, so about half way through the night I switched from Bock to a light beer. That was my mistake: in Australia, "light" means less (usually half) alcohol, whereas the US deems it to mean less calories. Sure enough, the next day I not only cancelled my CLD, I missed half a day of the conference. That said, I did feel quite buff...

That reminds me of a time where I spent the whole day curled up on a couch in the convention center. Somehow, the night before, I switched from drinking beer to long island iced tea... bad idea.

BTW, a wise man once shared this secret with me: if you alternate between beer and water (1-for-1) you can last all night and wake up refreshed in the morning.

Jim,

You are correct that currently LabVIEW 8.0 only allows global source control configuration. While this can be annoying to those that have different configuration per project , the usability of the source control integration is much better than what it was in 7.x. There are LabVIEW options such as prompting on edit of a VI, checking out callers during a check out, and so forth that can only be taken advantage of if you use source control in LabVIEW :thumbup: . There are many in R&D who want project level configuration. Those on the "inside" do work on multiple projects at one time as well, so the motivation to add this support is there. It'd be great to have your feedback on a project where global configuration is ok to have.

Regarding different repository types, users typically only use one repository type at a time since sites typically standardize on one source control provider. There are those who do need to switch between types, but they are the exception rather than the rule. I am not aware of an IDE that supports projects connecting to different providers. What I've seen is that IDEs, such as Visual Studio, use the default configured provider for the OS. They read this from a registry key and typically don't allow the user to change this (again going on the assumption that users typically will only use one repository at a time). That's not to say the feature would not be useful, just not typical.

Maybe LabVIEW's feature set is definining what users typically do with LabVIEW. Unnecessary coupling that is the product of legacy will only help you hold on to the past and keep you from moving forward.

Bring it on! I've walked past it before - sounds like that was a mistake! Mmmmmmm - beer

Be careful, Chris. This is what happens after an evening of drinking with Mike at The Gingerman. Next thing you know, you'll be famous.

Check out http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/26e...625706e00743997. Starteam is on the list of providers that were tested with LabVIEW 8.0.

I would highly recommend not using LabVIEW's support for SCC API. It is a real pain to use, since it assumes a single repository per LabVIEW installation. Unfortunately, this only reflects reality for the LabVIEW R&D team at NI . For those of us on the outside, we typically have different repositories for each project, not to mention the possibility of different repository types (CVS, SVN, ClearCase, VSS) for each project.

Hi All,

As we all know we must document our code...

For loops I normally use the Label option.

But for larger loops with more code in them I thought of the description item (tip strip is not available)

I prefer the description over the free labels because they only appear if you want....

or well that is what I expected. If you hover over the while loop it will show in the context help, and not my description but the help information about the loop.....

Does anyone know how to alter this? Or should this be on the bug list??

Ton

> Does anyone know how to alter this? Or should this be on the bug list??

No, it cannot be altered. It is a feature, not a bug.

We've got multiple sites and a SCC database that you are using is often in another state. I use VSS on the server side and Source OffSite on the client side (it has a server-side broker). The client looks and feels a lot like VSS, but with a few extra features (a progress bar for one - why did they leave that out of VSS?!, as well as the ability to see full paths in the status window) and because it's a broker-based system, network outages don't corrupt your database (the broker talks to the DB and then serves everything, optionally encrypted, over the network to the client). So - if you are forced by an organizational restriction to use VSS on the server side, then SoS is an excellent option.

> So - if you are forced by an organizational restriction to use VSS on the server side, then SoS is an excellent option.

...or you can find an organization that strives to use the very best tools and is continuously improving its process.

We've already talked and looked into subversion. We haven't ruled it out yet, but we want to try a get everybody on the same system, and the majority of the company (they all code with words, it's really wierd ) is currently on VSS and most of them like it, or at least say it good enough for they use it for.

I guess the one big issue we're having with the CVS and why we just haven't made the switch is so far, our IT guy has not been able to get it up and running so we can try it. Though we've all been so swamped lately we really haven't had time to try and work the issues out.

Ed

> I guess the one big issue we're having with the CVS and why we just haven't made the switch is so far, our IT guy has not been able to get it up and running so we can try it. Though we've all been so swamped lately we really haven't had time to try and work the issues out.

Sounds like organizational/cultural issues, not SCC issues . Also, if people like VSS, there are a variety of GUI's that have a VSS-like feel (explorer-style interface). Personally, I like SmartSVN (which is also cross-platform/Java). But for windows, there's no contest that TortoiseSVN is the best.