Justin Goeres

Robots are SRS BZNS.

Oh dear....

Sounds like we need a Step Back in addition to Step Into/Over/Out! You know, kinda like Suspend When Called.

My copy is signed by the author, which is no end of amusement to me as we'd never met yet when I won it at the BBQ in 2006.

A few people approached me at NIWeek asking for a receipt for the BBQ to submit for reimbursement. I don't remember who all of you are, so if you're one of those people (or someone else who didn't think of it until now) please feel free to use this completely authentic looking one.

There are 16 tickets left for the BBQ and online ticket sales are now closed. If you do not have a ticket and you want to come to the BBQ, find me (Justin) at NIWeek and pay me $30 in cash. The best places to look for me are: The JKI Booth, #923 (the big green one). My NIWeek session at 2:15pm in Rm 14, "Beyond State Machines: Building Modular Applications in NI LabVIEW" The post at the top of the thread has been updated to reflect this. Again, the ticket count may or may not be kept updated, so if you want a ticket act fast!

Everyone should be advised that it's looking like it's going to be dangerously hot in Austin this year during NIWeek. And I don't just mean crelf. That means that for everyone coming to the LAVA BBQ, we should all be aware that it's a bit of a walk (~1 mi) to get there. This isn't as bad as it sounds, and really, you can use the exercise. But it's going to be hot so take that into consideration. A good time to set up transportation is during the Block Diagram Party on Tuesday afternoon before the BBQ. Tons of LAVA people will be around, and you can probably work something out. Here are the transportation options I'm aware of. Austinites or others, chime in with your tips! Walking - The old stand-by. Carpooling - Find a (new) friend who has a rental car. I know that a few people have done this in the past; perhaps they've organized it on this very board? Pedicabs - There are fleets of pedicabs (example) that patrol the downtown area, and will take you to Scholz Garten if you want (assuming they haven't all died of heat stroke). Tip them generously! Taxicabs - It's a lot like carpooling, only you don't know the driver.

If you're presenting on Monday or Tuesday at NIWeek 2011 and you'd like to do your part to pimp the LAVA BBQ, please use the attached PPT slide as the last one of your presentation! This slide replaces NI's standard "last slide" that has all of NI's social media links on it. The links are still there, but this one adds a fade-in banner for the LAVA BBQ along with time and ticket information. 2011 Final Slide BBQ.ppt

There are now 28 tickets left for the BBQ. Still on the fence? Make up your mind! The post at the top of the thread has been updated to reflect this. I will try to keep the count relatively current, but it's not real-time or anything fancy like that. All of those tickets could already be gone!

JKI is donating the following items: A(nother) signed copy of LabVIEW For Everyone. We're not quite as connected as Fabiola--or at least we don't plan as well--so this one will be signed by Lisa Wells (1st ed) and Jim Kring (3rd ed) but not by Jeffrey Travis. Call this the "Second Place" LabVIEW for Everyone . An AppleTV. Rent & buy movies and TV shows, share your own music & movies, watch Netflix titles instantly, and more! Maybe some other stuff! If you don't buy your ticket, you'll never know!

Reminder: The 2011 LAVA/OpenG NIWeek BBQ is now only eight days away! If you have not bought your ticket yet, please consider buying it by the end of this week. After this Friday, the number of tickets available will become limited. Don't be that guy (or girl) who's chasing me around the convention center trying to grab the last .Buy your ticket at the top of this thread!

The most sincere high-five is a self-high-five!

If you have not yet bought your 2011 LAVA t-shirt, DO IT NOW. You will probably have to get the expedited shipping to get it on time unless you, like, already live in Austin. Don't be the only person at the BBQ without a sweet shirt! Some of us are childish and petty, and you may be openly mocked!

There's no plan for transportation; last year some people worked out carpools. Taxis are probably also an option but I can't speak to that personally. Last year I just walked to the Scholz Garten in a group with some other people. It's about 1.2 miles by foot, so roughly a 30-minute walk (depending on which side of the convention center you start from ). As far as I know, no one died last year, but survival is not guaranteed.

I PM'd you.

In BBQ news, the 2011 LAVA/OpenG NIWeek BBQ is in the "LabVIEW News" RSS feed in LabVIEW's Getting Started Window this morning! This is a pretty big step forward for us (with more surprises on the way!). Thanks, NI! You can also see the actual blog post here.

We strongly prefer you pay in advance if you can, for a couple reasons: We have to give a headcount to the restaurant before the event so they make the right amount of food. There may be a upper limit on the number of people we can accommodate, so you don't want to miss out . If you absolutely can't pay in advance, you're eligible to play "Find Justin on the convention floor and pay him $30 before all the seats are gone," but PayPal is better. We understand that everything gets kind of crazy around NIWeek, but it gets crazy for us, too, and so we try to corner people into committing to the BBQ to reduce some of the noise in the system. If NI wanted to sponsor the bar tab, I think we could definitely work something out.

This strikes me as the kind of debate/discussion that probably raged inside NI a couple decades ago . I'd love to hear how the decision was made. I don't have much to add (and I like the current behavior, thank-you-very-much), but as other people have pointed out the notion of all of a nodes' outputs blocking until every output's data is ready is a fundamental part of LabVIEW's semantics. I would note, though, that this is exactly the kind of question I hear from students and LabVIEW novices (like on my FRC team). We all take the current behavior for granted and it's useful once you start to understand dataflow, but I'm not sure it's super-intuitive right off the bat. As a thought experiment, what would it mean to put a breakpoint on a subVI (Steve's dual adder.vi, for instance) if the output data arrived asynchronously?

We are now accepting ticket purchases for the 2011 LAVA/OpenG NIWeek BBQ! It's $30 per person, payable via PayPal. See Chris's updated post at the top of this thread, or just click this purchase link. Don't wait! Reserve your spot now!

"Gravity's smart! You settle stones just like a genius."

That's my understanding too, but I also have never tested it to see for sure.

Thanks, everybody, for all the feedback. Everything is pretty much along the lines of what I already suspected, but it's good to see the discussion. We've been discussing this internally at JKI, too, and I've sort of come to the following take-home points: Good code always beats bad code (this is obvious, and yes, I ruled this out in the original question, on purpose) A faster computer will definitely help in the case I specified. Also, more RAM never hurt anyone. Being careful about transparency and tab controls (especially nested ones) will probably help, too. A powerful graphics card will probably not change things much.

I'm confused by this suggestion... hiding the front panel (which is where the graph is being drawn) would kind of defeat the purpose of trying to show the data in the first place, no? Am I misunderstanding?

One of my customers asked me a simple question the other day, and I realized I didn't have a good answer. He's writing some LabVIEW code that is doing some pretty intensive plotting, and it's crushing his (admittedly anemic) CPU. So he wants to know: Will a faster/better computer fix it, and what features should it have? Now obviously, the standard answers here are: Debug the code to find bottlenecks and/or acceptable tradeoffs, then optimize. Buy the fastest/biggest thing you can afford; computers are cheap. It occurs to me that I'd like a better answer than that, though. NI's LabVIEW requirements page recommends a Pentium 4/M (and elsewhere implies 4/M at >= 866 MHz) with at least 1 GB of RAM. That's fine, but it's only part of the story. Can anyone help me fill in the rest? Here's what I'm looking for: In general, what's the biggest limiting factor in LabVIEW's execution? Is it RAM? CPU speed? Bus speed? Specifically with regard to graphing/UI stuff, what's the biggest limiting factor? Is it the UI controls themselves? Does accelerated graphics ever matter at all to LabVIEW? Given a problem with CPU railing during intensive plotting (not 3D picture control), what's the best way to tackle the problem other than code changes?

That's a cheap shot.