John Lokanis

What are you trying to accomplish, exactly? I have used prebuild and post build actions to add versioning to unversioned things (like web services) and to modify the installer dialog message so it reflects the version of the EXE it will be installing.

I believe if you set a breakpoint in the original, you can cause all the clones to halt at that breakpoint and give you access to them. Kinda annoying but it should work.

I too have longed for a clone browser and tried to implement one but failed...

Me too! See you all there!

Thanks Mark! I'll take a look at it.

I suspect most people--including me--would agree with you. I just don't think it's a realistic goal. How do you propose we do that? The economy is perhaps one of the most complex systems we deal with. It has so many inputs and interactions it is impossible to fully understand. We don't have the ability to manage it, much less control it. Heck, we don't even know how measure it adequately.

I agree that total control of it is impossible. What I am pointing out is the current state of the economy is an under damped system, prone to wild fluctuations. This was not always the case. Between the FDR and Reagan eras we had an over damped economy. This was due to laws and regulations put in place after the great depression to limit what risks banks could take on. Reagan started to erode this, Clinton continued the erosion and Bush2 finished the job. These changes led directly to the economic collapse in 2008. If you want to understand this, there are several good sources. Read ‘All the Devils Are Here’ or watch the documentary film ‘The Inside Job’. Also, there was a recent edition of Frontline on PBS that you might still be able to TIVO when they replay it.

What I am proposing is a return to the over damped economy, where we return to slow steady growth and limit the ‘financial innovations’ that the banks are currently doing.

If you disagree with that, then study up on what the purpose of a bank is. It is not supposed to be a profit center. A good analogy is the power grid. The bank is not the generator and it is not the consumer. It is the transmission line. Its job is to facilitate the flow of electricity (money). Due to resistance (interest) it is not a lossless conductor but is was never intended to function as a source of power (creating money from nothing).

When we let the banks start playing their gambling games with CDOs, derivatives, etc, we invited disaster. This is because companies are now always focused on the short term gain and not on long term stability. The stock market is rigged to enforce this perverse inventive by how they reward or punish companies based on their last quarter’s numbers.

Currently, the banks are fighting against the return of these regulations. And we are still very much at risk for systemic failure. Maybe even more so now that the banks are even bigger than before. If you need an immediate real world example of this, just read the recent news from JP Morgan.

It's not ignorance of scientific facts. It's distrust of scientists who have become political advocates. It's recognition that science is not, and never has been, the arbiter of truth. Beating people over the head with "facts" and "scientific consensus" is useless because it entirely misses the point. (Not that you have been doing that, but it seems to be the tactic most frequently employed by those espousing stronger environmental policy.)

I’m sorry but that is a load of BS. The scientists are not becoming political advocates. They are just laying out the facts. The environmentalists are the ones taking the political advocacy. Don't confuse one with the other.

I don't know what 'point' it is that you think is being missed, but the scientific method is the only process we have for understanding our reality. Science is the pursuit of facts and the creation of hypotheses that fit those facts to allow us to understand reality. As more facts are discovered, those hypotheses are adjusted to fit the new data. I have never heard a scientist lay claim to something called truth. Just the nature of reality. I don’t know what you think ‘TRUTH’ is but I have heard so many interpretations of that word that it really has no meaning to reality. You can believe what you want but don’t mistake those beliefs for what really exists in the world around you.

If you want some simple facts, here are a few:

The planet is getting warmer.

This is happening at a much faster rate than it has ever happened in the history of the planet.

This added energy into our climate system is causing more extremes in our weather.

Over the next several decades, there will be significant impacts to where humans can live and grow food on our planet.

There are steps we can take to mitigate the rate of this change and perhaps avoid the most extreme effects.

So, you can ‘believe’ what you what but the climate doesn’t care what you believe. I, for one, would like to leave my children and grandchildren with something resembling a decent planet to live on. But, I don’t have the ‘faith’ in humanity to fix this. It’s the ‘old frog in the pot of water’ fable.

Disagree. The laws are--for the most part--adequate. Laws didn't prevent Enron or Bernie Madoff from happening.

More laws and more regulations isn't the answer. It doesn't work. Throughout history people have shown remarkable ingenuity in finding loopholes in the laws (or ignoring them altogether) to advance their own self-interest. The idea that we can create a legal system to force people to behave morally is a fallacy.

Most of those loopholes were put there by lobbyists. I don’t think we need a larger amount of laws. Just better laws with less loopholes. And stronger enforcement of those laws. A good example of this is the current regulations that the financial industry is fighting against. They have been lobbying the GOP leadership to simply not fund the regulatory agencies so they cannot enforce the laws on the books.

Strongly disagree. How do you propose to accomplish this? A corporation is simply a group of people united in a common interest. You cannot legally limit a corporation's ability to influence government without also limiting the individual's ability to influence government. Public participation in government via voting, contacting their representative, political discussion, etc. is what democracy is all about. Corporate influence over legislation is not inherently bad. Can it be misused? Yes. Is it sometimes abused? You bet. Is that sufficient reason to trample all over the first amendment? Nope, not in my opinion.

(By the way, corporations already are more limited than citizens in their ability to affect the political process.)

Corporations are not people. People have first amendment rights. People have the right to speak their opinions freely. As I have been trying to point out, the ‘people’ running a corporation use it as a mask to deflect criticism for their actions. If you or I were to act as a corporation is supposed to (doing everything in our power to improve our financial position) then we would not have many friends and would be rejected by society.

The entity we call a corporation is not alive. It does not have a conscious. It does not have empathy, sympathy or understanding. It is not human. Therefore it is not entitled to human rights. So, if the people who make up the corporation (or whatever collective entity they belong to) want to speak freely, they should be allowed to as individuals. And we should be able to see who they are when we listen to their points of view so we can consider what they are saying within that context.

I personally think the current law that SCOTUS decided on actually hurts the first amendment much more than it supports it. This is because it allows the speech of the individual to be completely drowned out by big money.

Money is not speech. Speech is speech.

Several objections:

1. Corporations *do* pay for things like pollution and they directly affect their profit/loss calculations. They have to purchase, implement, and maintain pollution control system. They pay hazardous waste disposal fees. They are subject to penalties when systems fail or illegal emissions are discovered. They may not pay enough to induce them to behave how you think they should behave, but they do pay.

2. Before you can implement a "change so corporations make better choices," you have to define what a "better choice" is. That's far too vague to be actionable. "Better" is entirely subjective, so you'll have to be specific. You may think it is better to impose stricter environmental controls on industry, but the 400 people down at the paper plant might disagree when the plant closes because it cannot afford the costs associated with compliance.

Really? You seriously think corporations pay for all the environmental impacts of their actions? Have you ever heard of superfund? How about that plant up in Canada that has been polluting the Columbia river. (http://www.uswaterne.../3epabat12.html) Do you really think BP has paid or ever will pay the full cost of the impacts of the gulf oil spill?

Now, granted, many products would cost a lot more if all environmental impacts were factored into the price. So, we instead spread the cost out across the taxpayers. But the problem with that is it hides the price signal. Consumers cannot make a choice on products that have more or less impact on their environment because the true cost is hidden to them. And the result is companies do not choose the methods that have the least environmental impacts because their profit is not effected. Can we ever fix this entirely? Probably not. But should we try to do better? I think so.

I don't personally know anyone who thinks that, though I can understand how the ideas can be interpreted that way. Corporations will act in their own self interest; that is patently obvious. But you know what? Everyone acts in their own self-interest. The only difference is a corporation's self-interest is measured in dollars and an individual's self-interest can't be measured.

If only voters would act in their economic self-interest...

It may be they currently have too much control over the regulations, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed input into the process. Does a judge lose objectivity because he listens to a defendant's argument? The only way a judge can act fairly is to hear arguments from both sides. Why should regulatory agencies be any different when making decisions on regulations? Regulatory agencies are in a position of power, and any form of power is subject to abuse by those who hold it. We can put checks in place to try and prevent abuse, but they are all imperfect and corrupt people find ways around them. Taking away a corporation's voice isn't the answer to corruption.

They can have a voice, but the current process is to let them write the legislation themselves. Why are we even paying the lawmakers anymore? All they do is solicit money and cast the occasional vote.

http://www.bloomberg...state-laws.html

Read the article--unimpressed. Listened to the podcast--still unimpressed. Downloaded the study and read it. Now it makes more sense but I'm still unimpressed by it, and even less by the NPR article because it appears to willingly overlook the realities of the situation. (And I usually enjoy NPR.)

The article's tone strongly suggests that corporate lobbying is used to exert unethical control over legislation, broadly painting corporations, lobbiests, and congress as immoral for participating in the activity. In reality, congress' real choice was to either pass the bill allowing them to bring in the money at a 5% tax rate or not pass the bill and let the money sit offshore. The study even points out evidence that businesses often leave their offshore earnings in foreign accounts rather than pay the 35% tax rate to bring them back to the US. NPR doesn't mention that at all. Furthermore, the intent of the bill was to allow the businesses to repatriate the funds for the purposes of creating jobs. (It did not achieve that goal for a variety of reasons outlined in the study.)

The NPR article is a classic example of a false dilemma. It presents the businesses as having the option between 'being selfish' and lobbying congress for the 5% tax rate at the expense of Joe Q Public or 'being good corporate citizens' and paying the full 35% tax rate. That is inaccurate, misleading, and irresponsible. It also feeds the public perception that corporations have undue influence over the legislature, when the study doesn't claim or support that idea in any way. Who is the real immoral entity in this scenario?

Well, I disagree. Why shouldn’t they have to pay the 35% to bring the money back in. In reality, with all the loopholes in the tax law, US companies pay a much lower rate than that. (http://thinkprogress...-low/?mobile=nc)

Now, if you think the rate is too high, then that is a discussion we could talk about. I would be in favor of a lower rate and less loopholes. That would even the playing field between companies who can afford the best tax lawyers and those who can’t. But this crazy 5% rate with little more than a promise to use the fund for job growth is ridiculous. If you want to do that, then force them to spend it on expansion. But that again is stupid. Taxes have little if any impact on job creation. We have had massive job growth when taxes were high. And we currently have the lowest rates in decades but slow growth. Growth is based on one thing: demand. If a company can make more money by hiring and producing more, then they will. The line about how an entrepreneur with a great idea will only create a company if his taxes are low is BS. If I have a million dollar idea and the tax rate is 40% instead of 30%, I’m still going to do it because 60% of a million dollars is still more than 0% if I don’t even try!

Oh, and if the so-called small business owner reinvested their profits in the company instead of extracting them as personal income, then they would not have to pay taxes on that money in the first place. But again, there needs to be demand for there to be growth. So, the 1% are not job creators and never will be. The consumer is the job creator and always will be.

Oh, and remember the bank bailouts? Remember Paulson saying we gave them the money and they promised to use it to lend? How well did that work? Guess there wasn’t any profit in supporting main street (the taxpayers).

While this thread has been interesting, it is taking up a lot of my time. Don’t you have work to do too Dave?

I'm getting a decidedly anti-corporate tone from your posts. Forgive me if I'm reading too much into them.

Yes, you are. I am not against corporations. They are just out of control right now in our society. We need to keep them on a much shorter leash. I would much rather have slow steady growth and a planet we can still survive on then this crazy roller-coaster economy with massive concentrations of wealth and increasing ignorance of scientific facts that point to a worse future for everyone.

If I understand correctly, you are essentially criticizing corporations because they are inherently amoral and you believe they should be held to a moral code outside of the law.

Nope. Quite the opposite. I think we need better laws to govern them and limit their ability to influence those laws. I don't believe there is one standard moral code. But I know there are external costs (like pollution) that corporations are not forced to incorporate into their profit/loss calculations. This should be changed so corporations make better choices.

My main point is a corporation will never make a moral choice. They must be forced to control themselves by a society who enacts laws to govern their behavior. Too many people think corporations will do what is in the public's best interest if you leave them unfettered by regulations. That is pure fantasy.

I believe expecting a corporation to behave morally outside of a legal framework is irrational and impractical. Just as well to criticize a tiger for eating meat.

Agreed.

First, there is no universally accepted moral code....<blather deleted> ..."Life isn't fair. Get used to it."

I would simply counter with the fact that most people in our society are either unaware, uneducated or unmotivated to take any action that will result in 'free market forces' affecting corporate behavior. Try to keep in mind that you and I live in a very nice bubble of well educated and somewhat politically aware members of our society. We do not represent the majority of our country. So we cannot expect them to act in these ideal free market ways like you listed. We need specialists who understand these complex issues to help create solutions so we have a stable economy.

I assume you're talking about the recent supreme court decision regarding corporate political donations?

Yes. And all branches of government need to consider the consequences. There is an interesting story (http://www.thisameri..._Transcript.pdf) about how McCain and Feingold sat in the court the day that was decided and commented to each other how it was clear the justices had very little understanding about how campaign financing worked.

Often regulation agencies are captured by the industries they are designed to oversee...

Yes. Best way to prevent that is to audit the regulators and to remove the perverse incentives (like allowing corporations to choose who regulated then and then having the regulatory agency budget determined by how many companies it regulates. This is one area where competition is VERY bad.)

I understand how you feel corporations should have some say in what regulations are imposed on them, but in the real world, that just does not work. Giving them the power they have now has guaranteed failure of regulatory agencies. It is just way to profitable for them to invest in lobbiest than to deal with the costs of a regulation. Go Read this: (http://www.npr.org/b...t-in-a-lobbyist)

There's little market for a soda that blathers on endlessly when you open it.

Agreed.

In a feeble attempt to get back on topic, I wonder if the incentives for the convention center to 'green up' their facility will also lead NI to do the same at their corporate headquarters? (yes, I know nobody other than myself and Dave are reading this thread anymore, but at least I tried)

Now get back to work! That FPGA must have finished compiling by now!

You're an employee of a corporation. Have you shed all your morals? Contrary to popular belief, I certainly didn't check my morals at the door when I was part of Microsoft. I've run across people who seem to have few moral guidelines, but they didn't become that way because they were part of a corporation.

My point was the people who run the corporations hide behind the construct to justify immoral or more correctly amoral behavior. Even CEOs will say not to blame them for what their company does to the environment, citizens, other entities as long as they follow the law and do these things in the name of 'increasing shareholder value'.

So, since corporations are amoral, we need to take away these 'human rights' that were incorrectly granted them. We need deal with them for what they really are. That is one reason I get upset at people who deride government regulations. "We the government" are the only thing keeping corporations in check. You cannot expect the free market to enforce moral behavior on an amoral entity. If you try that, you may find yourself in a can of Daklu soda...

Of course as soon as I asked that question, I figured out the solution... Here is the updated project...

Prep for reuse.zip

I have been re-factoring and cleaning up some old code for packaging into reuse libraries. After doing several common edits to each file, I decided to automate the process a bit. The result was a simple tool to adjust the controls, panel positions, connector pane, add error clusters and comments.

I decided to share it here so others could borrow some of my ideas and suggest more. As it is, this is saving me a lot of editing time. I hope you find it helpful too.

Prep for reuse.zip

-John

One improvement I would like to make is for it to scan all open VIs in all application instances on the machine. Right now, it must run in the same app instance as the target VI.

Any ideas how to get references to all app instances active on a target machine?

Usually I prefer to believe people are generally good and, for the most part, those in government are trying to do the right thing. I may disagree that what they are doing is the right thing, but I believe they think it is the right thing.

While the majority of people may have good intentions, our society has built a construct (the corporation) to allow a group of people to shed all their morals. Now, I am not saying that all companies are immoral, but there is a strong incentive (profit, maximizing shareholder value) to take actions without considering consequence that do not effect profit. So, a corporation is not necessarily evil, but like a shark in the ocean, it will take every opportunity to eat (profit), regardless if it is a fish, a seal or a surfer that it eats. So, it is very dangerous to allow that kind of motivation to go unchecked. That is why I feel government is the peoples response to the corporate construct. Our job is to erect the shark barriers so we don't get eaten in the process.

If it was legal and Exxon could make more money grinding up baby seals and selling them to you as Seal Soda, then they would. Morals don't come into pay, only profits.

An excellent example of this in the news today is the cyber warfare bills. The government want companies to invest in security to protect the internet from cyber attacks. And while these attacks have the potential to be devastating to the country's infrastructure, the corporations don't want to pay for it because it does not lead to greater profits. But, since the internet backbone is privately owned, the government cannot just implement the security measures themselves. So, we are all left vulnerable because there is no money to be made in being safe.

So, what are we (the government) to do? Force the corporations to pay? Pay the tab out of taxpayer money? Or declare eminent domain over the internet and take it away from the corporations?

(I would just like to note that in my last post, I tried to get this thread back on topic. Looks like that didn't work and I admit this post only makes it worse. Let's see if we can get this even further off topic now...)

I'll lay dollars to donuts there is some crisis...

Too many donuts is part of the problem... At least in the US.

Also, too many people in the world. With limited resources (energy, water, clean air, a place to dump our trash), we will always be on a course to destruction until we all learn to limit our population to a sustainable level. If we don't, someday the planet will do it for us. (famine, disease, etc...)

But, on a more positive note and back to the original topic, I hope this means I won't need a sweater when attending NI Week this year!

-John

Interesting comments about messaging. I wonder if NI would ever consider extending dataflow to include 'messageflow'. Perhaps adding another layer on top of LabVIEW to define the flow of messages between actors? Something along the lines of the state-chart add-on? Since there is a push to mainstream the actor framework, this might be on the long term roadmap.

Heretic! Burn him!

Seriously though, competition is a good thing. If the MS product can nudge NI to implement some IDE improvements or accelerate the transition of LV from nitch language to a more widely accepted and available (read: lower barriers to entry) language, then that is good for all of us.

I wonder how this compares to NI Mindstorms environment which uses and MDI interface. Obviously that is designed for novices and children but there seems to be some similarities. Also, look at their web builder IDE for another view at dataflow language IDEs.

The IEEE9001 standard requires "shall" statements to be met, and shown to be met - never violated. You just failed an audit, my friend!

I am well aware of that. I purposely used shall to make this an enforced requirement. But, since I don't have to meet ISO or IEEE9001, this is more of a 'do as I say, not as I do' requirement...

BTW: your post resulted in LAVA sending me 8 emails! Seems a bit excessive for a quoted reply...

Fair enough, but consider the audience too. If most of your devs are CLADs (or equivalent) the best option is to steer them in the right direction for now and worry about exceptions later.

How about: You should strive to keep you block diagram the minimum size possible without impeding the clarity of your code.

I have seen some noobs simply maximize the BD on every VI even if there is barely any code in it.

Personally, I try to keep my FP and BD as small as I can so I can fit more open ones on the screen at once. This helps me with debugging. I also use 2 monitors but rarely let my BD extend to the second one. The main exception being VIs that use a lot of property nodes, as mentioned above.

And I don't make sub VIs for the sake of making sub-VIs. On the other hand, a sub-vi does not need to be a reusable component. It just needs to have a single functional purpose within the application. If you find yourself writing a second of code and commenting it with statements like 'here is where we calculate the blah de-blah blah thingy' then consider that a candidate for a sub-vi.

My end goal is a BD that is a simple string of VIs with the minimum number of connections required between them and that clearly show the flow of actions within the application.

As for BD size, our coding guidelines officially state:

Size considerations

The block diagram shall not exceed the size of a standard monitor. This would be 1440x900 in most cases; however this could change in the future. The size of the diagram should be kept to a minimum while still including a reasonable amount of white space for readability. If the diagram becomes too large, sections of the code should be refactored into sub-vis.

Obviously, I sometimes violate this standard, but it is a good rule to try to live by, if for no other reason than it makes the code more 'portable' when viewed on other dev's machines for code reviews.

All good points Dave. Thanks for the feedback.

Bringing this thread back from the dead...

So, I am still planning to do this, it just got put off a bit. In the meantime I have been collecting more ideas and information. One area I want to address first is coding standards. I want to get my coding guild-lines down on paper, reviewed by the group and used to do future coding. I have lots of ideas of what I want to include but would welcome your thoughts. If you have a coding standard doc you want to share, that would be great! I am always happy to steal borrow ideas I find worthwhile.

Things I plan to address:

Style (mainly what is included in Peter Bloom's book)

Commenting

Documentation

Unit Testing

Use of VI Analyzer

Organization of source code on disk and in projects

Code reuse

Code review process

What else should be included?

thanks for the input.

-John

Try using a Variant to represent a tree. Make the attributes of the variant also be variants. And so on. You can model a tree of any shape/dimension this way.

Thanks. I will post an update once I get the other features added. My long term goal is an automated build system that is script driven and will let you do nightly builds, beta builds, release builds, including pushing them out to network drives for distribution. Now if only I could so silent installs on targets I would really have something!

Ok, so I think I have this working. At least the part of dynamically updating the installer message to reflect the version of the EXE we just built and are packaging. I also am updating the installer target folder to reflect the EXE version. This way you get a new folder every time you build the installer. So, no more clobbering the previous build output. Now I need to rename the EXE target folder based on the version. This will be harder since I will need to point the installer to the new folder each time. For now, this seems to work well. Let me know what you think.

Project Version Demo.zip

-John

Thanks for the ideas. I like the idea of the EXE verification. But, I am trying really hard to stick with native LV build specs and the installer. I just think we should have this kind of feature. Not sure I will be able to pull it off however. Can you modify the installer portion of the build spec from the post build action VI and have the change take effect before the installer build runs (when doing a build all)?

So, here is the problem:

I want to access the build version of my EXE with a post build action VI. My goal is to modify the welcome message in the installer build spec to include the build version. If that fails, I want to at least generate a file that can be included with the installer to label the build version. Ideally, I would like to place the build in a folder that incorporates the version in the name. Not sure yet how to accomplish this in an automated way, but the first thing to tackle is getting the version of the EXE.

I have come up with three ways to do this:

1. use project properties to extract this information (so far, a major PITA)

2. extract the information from the project file using XML tools. (also a PITA, just in a different way)

3. after the EXE is generated, use .net calls to read out the version information.

My question is, has anyone already solved this? Do you have a stable and elegant solution you can share? If not, do you have any other suggestions on how to do this?

For the NI guys, why is this so hard? Shouldn't this info be easy to access? Why should it be hard to make an installer that tells the use what version they are about to install?

Does anyone else have their own custom build system that does automated builds to new folders every night/week/etc? How do you do it?

thanks for any help or ideas.

-John

I will be there! And I use OpenG in almost all of my projects. Have been using it for many years. I would like to learn more about the process of turning some of my reuse code into OpenG packages.

Glad to hear to found the right solution for you. It really comes down to what device does what you want to do and does it well. It really does not matter which one has the most RAM, CPUs, ports, etc. If it does not do it's job well (web browsing, email, apps, whatever) then all the 'spec's in the world do not matter. The best thing you did was to try them side by side. Same thing goes for smartphones.

Now, if you have kids, you will need to buy a second iPad. I cannot get mine away from them. At least the apps they love are teaching math, reading and basic physics. I have high hopes for the next generation of engineers who have had much better access to information than we did. Now to just get LabVIEW running on a tablet...