Justin Goeres

QUOTE (shoneill @ May 19 2008, 12:52 AM) Or, if you prefer, it's reflective of the human mind's legendary ability to find patterns where there might not necessarily be any . QUOTE (shoneill @ May 19 2008, 12:52 AM) I suppose my root problem is the bundling of religion and belief and chuch. Why these three should build a unit is truly beyond my comprehension. Churches (for the most part) are about acquiring and controlling power, wrapped up in nice scripture quotes. Religion is simply a mechanism provided for worship. Bleief is where it's at. You've touched on a huge issue that probably goes back to the first time pre-LabVIEW humans saw a lightning bolt and said, "OMFG! WTF wuz that?!? " Religion, at its core, is a way for people to share a framework for understanding things that seem bigger than themselves, and for understanding their individual and collective place in that framework. It provides a lot of psycho-social benefits, such as a feeling of belonging and nicely-formatted answers to many questions, like "Where did I come from?" and "Why am I here?" However, subscribing to any particular religion involves a trade-off between the feeling of belonging and the ability to think critically, and that balance can get dangerously out-of-whack depending on lots of different factors. Catholicism dealt with this rather famously right around the time of Martin Luther and The Reformation , but all the different offshoots of Lutheranism, Baptism, Methodism, Mormonism and the like (I'm only really familiar with Western religions) are the result of that tug of war. So to say that "Churches (for the most part) are about acquiring and controlling power" as a blanket statement is something I'd disagree with. But you're right in the sense that the issue of power & control over the people is something that all religions deal with in their own way. Some (many of the fundamentalist Christian organizations in the US, currently) deal with it, as you pointed out, by wrapping things up "in nice scripture quotes" and using those as a way to dissuade anyone (true believer or otherwise) from even having a well-reasoned discussion about Belief (or Faith ). QUOTE (shoneill @ May 19 2008, 12:52 AM) As to teaching a child what you believe, there's not really any other choice for a parent. But the child's entry int o a chuirch should NEVER be taken for granted. It should always be optional. But the problem is that, depending on what religion you're talking about, that choice can be explicitly not optional. It's obvious for people who are able to look at the issue from an outside perspective, but if someone's entire world-view is informed by, "Jesus said, 'Bring me all the little children,'" and "The Bible is the Holy and Everlasting Perfect Word of God," it's hard to find a place to even begin the discussion. QUOTE (shoneill @ May 19 2008, 12:52 AM) PS Athiesm is a belief. It's not (as Justin has pointed out) a lack of belief. It's a belief that there is NO god. Even the idea that believing in NO god does not qualify as a belief is something which atheists have fought against for years. "What do you believe in" in a belief sense is never moot. Of course, if you assume there can be no religion without God(s) then of course in a religious sense it's moot. Fair enough. QUOTE (shoneill @ May 19 2008, 12:52 AM) PPS A lack of belief in any deity is much closer to Agnosticism, not atheism. Agnostics may choose to believe in the existence of a deity, but they refuse the absolute truth of their belief, saying they can never be certain. In short, belief without faith. I see the point you're making, but I just frame the issue a little differently. I guess my main point is that atheists (at least in the US) have trouble finding a place to fit into the Great Religious Debate because they're frequently confronted with, "Atheism is just faith that there is no God, so you're a hypocrite for dissing religion," or "Atheists are really just agnostics with attitude problems," or, "There are no atheists in foxholes."

QUOTE (crelf @ May 19 2008, 05:45 AM) The refnum is like a lifetime ticket to an amusement park. You can come & go (read & write) as you please, but if they close the park down (close the connection) you won't know about it until the next time you visit. Your ticket (refnum) still looks the same as it did before (same address, same promises of happiness, same terrifying mouse character) but trying to visit the park (read & write) causes errors (and disappointment). What's more, it may be necessary to inspect the error information ("You are not allowed to enter the park because...") at a deeper level to determine why the error occurred (too many people in the park right now / you are not the right ticket holder / the park is closed forever / etc.). Is that a tortured enough analogy? QUOTE (Giseli Ramos @ May 19 2008, 05:17 AM) May be a dumb question, but for which specific things the "Not a Refnum" is made? Only to know when don't use it. <Not a Refnum> is what you would get if you went to your city's (Operating System's) ticket booth (Open TCP Connection) and said, "I wish to buy a ticket to Giseli's Super Fun Center," if that particular park didn't exist. Your ticket agent (Operating System) would say, "There is no amusement park by that name," (error) and would give you back... nothing (<Not a Refnum>). That's just one example. There might be situations where you want to check whether a refnum is valid before reading/writing (to prevent errors before they happen rather than just detecting them after they happen). That's when you would use Not a Refnum?.

QUOTE (Gavin Burnell @ May 18 2008, 06:13 AM) Good point, although my problems with real estate usually stem from the number of open windows, not the size of the diagrams .

QUOTE (JDave @ May 15 2008, 11:17 AM) As funny as that is, it highlights one of the main problems with any discussion of (non-)religion, at least in America. The question is usually framed as "What do you believe in?" which requires atheism to be cast as a set of beliefs. It's not. Atheism is a lack of belief in the existence of a deity. To an atheist, the very question, "What do you believe in?" in a religious context, can be moot.

The time is fast approaching for me to upgrade my main development machine (i.e. my laptop) and there's a couple questions I'm having trouble answering for myself. Can y'all give me your experiences? I do most of my work at my desk, but a fair amount of it in the field. However, a fair amount of that fieldwork also involves traveling by plane. I've always had the biggest laptop screen I can get for doing LabVIEW development. But in this day and age, 17" laptop screens and airplane tray tables don't mix. In fact, many coffeehouse tables and 17" laptop screens barely mix. In fact, anywhere outside of my hotel room and the customer site, traveling with a 17" machine is kind of a hassle. So I'm thinking of moving to a dual-external-monitor setup for my desk, but buying a 15" laptop. At my desk, the dual huge monitors will be enough for me, and on the road I'll have the increased portability of a svelte 15" machine. Unless the confined space of the 15" machine will suck so much that I'll hate myself for the next 2 years for choosing it. My questions are these: Are any of the rest of you doing anything like that? Is it even possible to enjoy doing LabVIEW development with less than 17" of real estate?

QUOTE (Val Brown @ May 16 2008, 05:07 PM) I'm mostly in a single-developer situation, using Subversion & TortoiseSVN, but my repository lives on the server in my office and is externally accessible. From a security standpoint I have zero fears about it, for the following reasons: I access it using https. (is that the webDAV-enabled version? I always forget.) The SVN directory on the server is sandboxed away from everything else. I use strong passwords. That having been said, if you prefer to keep the repository locally, Jim's linked advice above is good.

QUOTE (Yen @ May 5 2008, 11:03 AM) Yeah, I realized about an hour ago that my script was assuming all the avatars are JPGs . Some are PNGs (like yours) or GIFs (like Jim's). So if you see some missing, that's almost certainly why. If I go any further with this, I'll pay more attention to making sure I have the images I think I have.

Here's another partial idea I had. I downloaded the avatars of the top 60 LAVA posters (or rather, the 33/60 of them that have avatars -- thank Dog for wget) and started to arrange them inside the LAVA logo. I got as far as this and decided it was worth uploading as a proof of concept. This could be a portion of the shirt design as a whole. At the very least I would need to get the right font (or a clean source image) of the real LAVA logo to make it look right.... Comments/ideas? P.S. If anybody wants them I'll be glad to send you the avatar jpgs and/or my source file (I use the GIMP, but we can convert to Photoshop if necessary).

I'm neither an artist, nor do I have time (at least in the next week) to offer, but something along these lines popped into my head:

So my hometown (Cedar Falls, IA) and surrounding areas are flooding. That happens every so often, and apparently some areas are getting hit pretty hard. Too bad . I hope the DISTek people are all OK . But I think it's cool that the NWS/NOAA have live water level data and forecasts right on the web! There's really a ton of data there. Junk like this is part of what the Internet is really good for. I wonder if there's any NI hardware in the system?

QUOTE (Phillip Brooks @ Apr 25 2008, 04:57 AM) That represents about a 30% increase in the numerical Rating! Also, their headline is interesting... QUOTE Lua hype seems to be over (fallen out of top 20). What is next? Groovy, Erlang? Any hope our little baby can crack the top 20 before either of those?

QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ Apr 24 2008, 09:35 PM) Well played, sir. In about a week I expect a follow-up post (or at the very least, a PM) from you letting us know how many outbound clicks that link receives. I hope the LAVA admin tools can tell you that.

QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 23 2008, 12:27 PM) And how the 21st century actually started in 2001. Actually, it's like that in 2 ways. I do grant that it's a semantic difference. But then again, so is counting in any two different bases .

QUOTE (Jim Kring @ Apr 23 2008, 08:58 AM) Nope. 4096 would be the beginning of the 13-Bit Post Count Club by my math. E.g. 11 bits would hold everything up to b111 1111 1111, i.e. 211-1 = 2047. So at Post #2048, Michael crossed over to b1000 0000 0000, or 12 bits. And there he shall toil for 2047 more posts, while crelf races off over the horizon.

Am I the first to notice that Michael is the lucky second member of the 12-Bit Post Count Club?

QUOTE (PaulG. @ Apr 23 2008, 06:30 AM) If Michael hadn't done it, I was going to do it myself .

QUOTE (crelf @ Apr 23 2008, 05:44 AM) I considered doing exactly that, but like AQ I thought it was important to have all the code (or as much of it as possible) visible in a screenshot. Stupid LVOOP and its pesky encapsulation... QUOTE I really like the queue-based method - it's a bit outside the box. That said, I think the spirit of the site is to compare the simplicities of languages and this might confuse people a little. That said, I'd like to see a flat entry (like all the other ones here) as well as a couple of other methods (queue, OO, ...) I agree. The queue one came to me in the moments between crawling into bed and falling asleep, and I felt like I had to get up and get it out before I could nod off. Some of the simpler ones are straightforward enough that I think non-dataflow people might be able to understand them a little. The queue version, not so much. QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ Apr 22 2008, 10:27 PM) uses string subsets and string concatenation Golf clap for these little tricks: even if it is in fairly serious need of commenting for the unwashed mashes .

I lied. One more . Why just sing it, when we can simulate it?! Attached VI: Download File:post-2992-1208924348.vi EDIT: Cleaned up the redundant Queue Status and reposted. I'm treating this thread like an ad hoc code repository .

Well, look who's gone all OCD on this . Not as clean & purdy as the previous one, but manages to use Interleave 1D Arrays and some OpenG functions. :ninja: Attached VI: Download File:post-2992-1208914716.vi EDIT: That's it for tonight for me.

Here's another whack at it, with a bit less duplicated code. It also trims the two extra linefeeds at the end, for those who are counting . Attached VI: Download File:post-2992-1208912496.vi

Can't stop now! Here's mine. Like orko's, this generates canonical lyrics. Credit where due: I started from normandinf's fine work. Attached VI: Download File:post-2992-1208907382.vi EDIT: After a few of us have a go at this, we should have a poll to decide which version to submit.

QUOTE (normandinf @ Apr 22 2008, 02:25 PM) That implementation doesn't catch the special cases at N=1 and N=0 bottles of beer on the wall. I would humbly suggest that if anybody from LAVA submits a new example to that site, it would be cool if the credit was for all of LAVA. :thumbup: If Michael's OK with that, of course.

QUOTE (Antoine @ Apr 18 2008, 08:22 AM) I occasionally see the same problem in Firefox 2, as well, but I'm not using that power toy. Usually closing/reopening some tabs gets it back to normal, but in rare cases I have to restart Firefox entirely. I usually just chalk it up to the general psychosis of Windows, and move on. But I'm disappointed to hear that someone is still seeing it in Firefox 3. I was sort of hoping it would magically disappear.

QUOTE (crelf @ Apr 10 2008, 05:33 AM) Normally I disdain quotes and aphorisms, but a good one I heard recently was along the lines of, "If meet someone and you think they're not an interesting person, you haven't listened to them long enough."

While sidestepping a debate about the Tibet issue itself, I don't think the protests that are following the torch around the world should be a surprise to anyone. There are a lot of people around the world who believe the situation in the Tibet Autonomous Region is an illegal military occupation, and who see China's record on human rights (in general, not just relative to Tibet) as one of the worst in the world. For those reasons alone, protests should have been expected. But the situation with the torch is even worse than that, because of the way China has handled the monk protests that started last month. If people already think China is an oppressive, militaristic, authoritarian regime and then they kick all the foreign journalists out of the areas of unrest and blame all the injuries & fatalities on the protestors then China shouldn't be surprised when all the people who already don't like them get even angrier. If there's a lack of understanding of the situation on the part of the protestors at the torch runs, I think there's an equal lack of understanding in the Chinese government and the IOC about what it would mean to bring the Olympics, "a symbol of peach and cooperation," as an IOC official called it the other day, to a country with a history of misunderstanding the degree to which the Western world perceives it to be the exact opposite of those things. Just my :2cents: . And Irene, I don't think you're a spy .