Michael Aivaliotis

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.

Here's what we've got so far:

Not sure what you mean exactly. Where was this info located?

I guess you need to increase your rate of posting.

This is on purpose. I don't consider viewing a member's profile something that should be accessible to non-logged in users. This protects your information from casual visitors and Google search crawlers. If people are really interested, they should create an account. Also, that new content you saw was actually the support threads being created by items appearing in the Code Repository. New content is flagged by date, and since the old content was inserted preserving the original date, it doesn't show up as new.

I'm happy to report that the old content is back but it's been placed inside the LAVA 1.0 Content Forum. Moderators will move posts out of there over time. You can still reply to them and they of course will show up in the search. We tried to link the posts to the original author where possible. Those that could not be identified for various technical reasons got assigned to a fictitious user called: LAVA 1.0 Content.

Of course I had to filter based on "small".

Name: JKI Progress Bar Dialog Submitter: [/url] Submitted: 02 Jul 2009 Category: User Interface LabVIEW Version: 7.1License Type: BSD (Most common) Copyright © 2006, James Kring, Inc. All rights reserved. Author: Michael Aivaliotis Instructions: This code has been tested to run under LabVIEW 7.1.1. It will probably work on any newer versions but it has not been tested. Just unzip the code into any folder of your chosing and open the example called, JKI PBD Example.vi. This shows a typical use case where you want to pop-up a non-blocking dialog within a process loop and display a message and updated text from a parallel running task. In addition, you can pass a max value and updated progress value and the dialog will automatically present a percentage complete progress bar. Features: - Contains an abort button on the dialog that can assist in aborting a running process. - You only need to pass the total number of tasks\items and the dialog automatically calculates percent complete. - Can specify a limited preset amount of progress images via the "animation" selector - Can update the status messages and progress in real-time after the dialog has been launched. - Setting an animation value of 0 disables animation and displays only text. - Handles being built into an application - The dialog is not modal when run in the development environment however it becomes modal when built into an executable. Version History: 1.0.0: Initial release of the code. Click here to download this file

Name: JKI Please Wait Dialog File Submitter: LAVA 1.0 Content File Submitted: 03 Jul 2009 File Category: User Interface LabVIEW Version: 7.1 Version: 1.0.2 License Type: BSD (Most common) Potentially make this available on the VI Package Network?: Undecided Copyright © 2006, James Kring, Inc. All rights reserved. Author: Michael Aivaliotis Instructions: This code has been tested to run under LabVIEW 7.1.1. It will probably work on any newer versions but it has not been tested. Just unzip the code into any folder of your chosing and open the example called, JKI pwd Example.vi. This shows a typical use case where you want to pop-up a non-blocking dialog and display a message and updated text from a parallel running task. Features: - Can specify a limited preset amount of progress images via the "animation" selector - Can update the status message in real-time after the dialog has been launched. - Setting an animation value of 0 disables animation and displays only text. - Handles being built into an application - The dialog is not modal when run in the development environment however it becomes modal when built into an executable. Version History: 1.0.2: Renamed VI prefix from MNA to JKI. Added more documentation to diagram and VI descriptions. 1.0.1: Fixed bug where dialog was not centering on screen. Changed dialog behaviour so it updates position on screen before the front panel is open. 1.0.0: Initial release of the code. Click here to download this file

Currently the reputation system has some defaults which don't have enough levels or resolution. Plus they're boring. See image. Can anyone come up with some cool labels and define some levels for reputation? Make them LabVIEW-centric!

See this link.

Yes, this was configured this way. We can allow negative but we won't.

Please upload small under 100Kb zip files

As you know there is a new file upload feature on the forums: The Flash uploader. This allows multiple file uploads to a post at the same time and it also has upload progress bars (very cool). This can be enable in your Settings: However it seems like some of us are having problems with the flash uploader. They get the following error: I'd like to know the extent of the problem: - Please enable the flash uploader (if not already enabled) - Try to upload a small file (a few kb) to this thread using the flash uploader. - If you have success then that's fine, don't post the reply. - If you get an error, then post the reply and specify what browser(w\version) and OS you are using.

The problem was not the dimensions but the size on disk. The limit was set to 50Kb. I've increased it to 200Kb.

In a few days hopefully. There was a reorganizing of the domains. The wiki will no longer be a LAVA subdomain anymore. It will be on a different domain with its own login.

Yes, this is done on purpose by the developers of the forum application (IPS). This data is refreshed hourly I think. This is to reduce calls to the database that stores the views.

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

It shows up in your profile for others to see. Tell the world what you're doing.

This works the same as the facebook status. You can put whatever you like there. have fun with it.

Fixed.

NI's put together a new section on their site called the LabVIEW Idea Exchange: QUOTE Link

QUOTE (Cat @ May 28 2009, 09:40 AM) So http://forums.lavag.org/SCRIPTING-IS-AVAILABLE-t14186.html' target="_blank">scripting is released while Cat is gone... Nice!