Justin Goeres

Well, well, well. We've hit on a topic here that is at the foremost of my thoughts lately. And of course, it all happens while I'm on travel and away from LAVA. :headbang: I recently left an Alliance company to start freelancing. I've been doing LabVIEW for around 7 years now, and at my previous company LabVIEW development was my primary job, although I never got any certifications (took one TestStand course and enjoyed it very much). I'm considering it now, but I'm daunted by what the certs will do in the short term to (as someone else put it) my bottom line. It doesn't particularly matter to me whether NI says I should or not. It's a matter of what the certifications bring me in terms of my personal and professional goals. So far, I have not had any experiences where I missed a bid or anything by not being certified. Most of what I have to say has already been touched on by others, so I'll just make some comments I strongly agree with this. The fact is that LabVIEW is getting really large and really versatile. I tell people that there are probably 1000 ways to do everything in LabVIEW, but that most of them are wrong. "Wrong" is subjective a lot of the time, but you all know what I mean. All of us homegrown LabVIEW jockeys have our own ways of doing things, and those evolve and grow as time goes by. (I, for instance, had a brief and torrid love affair with Global Variables about 6 years ago. It didn't end well.) A lot of what we come up with is "pretty good." It gets the job done, it's probably fairly reusable (because Engineers Are Lazy), and it might even be efficient or elegant. But there are people better than us at these things. Some of their techniques are what NI teaches in the Cert courses. Why wouldn't it be a good idea to go to the mountaintop for advice? What's the possible drawback? I don't really see one, from a technical standpoint. This is a great point, too. Part of my problem at my last job was that, as the only LabVIEW developer, a lot of my methods seemed OK. I guess they got the projects out the door, and I guess we made money. But I wasn't involved in the LabVIEW community, and I didn't reap the benefits of knowing where I stood relative to my real peers (the LabVIEW World, not the other engineers at the company). I think Certification is a great way to maintain a check on oneself to ensure you're not getting tunnel vision (ha! A structure joke! :thumbup: ) about software engineering, LabVIEW, or your own abilities. It forces you to interact, and the best stuff happens when you collaborate. I disagree with that. I think it's a bit cynical, although I'll also register my vote for (what I've been told is) the ridiculousness of the MS certifications. I see it a different way. I think that we should be celebrating the fact that LabVIEW has finally reached a point where it's useful to have certifications. There are lots and lots of people using LabVIEW now, and the crowd continues to grow. That's terrific, but the problem (to hijack Jim's metaphor) is that as more people start to use LabVIEW, more people start to do it BADLY. Certification is a way of (A) standardizing practices that are known to be "good," and (B) differentiating the professionals from the rabble. If there is a problem with NI's cost structure, that's a different topic. But charging too much or requiring frequent renewals (which I'd be glad to discuss) doesn't undermine the value of the certifications themselves. This is an excellent point, and is a big part of the reason I'm leaning toward certification. I'm smart enough to know that there are still whole subpalettes hanging around that I've basically never used. Surely they're good for something.... Michael touches on an important point here. What counts is the credibility of the certs. For some companies, the certs are a joke either in terms of cost or difficulty. But in my experience, the CLAs I've met are without exception very, very good LabVIEW developers (that sounds way more obsequious than it's intended). That gives the certificaiton credibility, and if I see a CLA in someone's credentials I can be confident they know what they're doing. Give it 10 years or so, when there's 100k CLAs in the world, and colleges offer CLA certification to all seniors majoring in LabVIEW. Then we can all complain about the good ol' days.

I think I know who can help you. Please visit this site. I suspect you will find you have things in common with these people. You may also want to avail yourself of some of these fine products. Cheers! :beer: Justin P.S. If people really are monitoring you or following you around, especially "secret police," you should really call a counseling service and speak with them. That's no joke.

Maybe. It's Lingo, on GSN (Game Show Network). If you've got digital cable (or satellite) you're fairly likely to have it. In the Bay Area it's even on regular cable. I won a trip out to LA to be on a taping, after qualifying playing it online. It was an awesome experience. The episode airs late next month. Like I said, I'll probably try to shop up the trainer program and post it here, and I'll include show details when I do . (I suppose this thread is officially hijacked now )

Nice. I've always found that a lot of my ideas (architecture- or structure-wise) start out from thinking about "How would I do such-and-such if I was developing a game?". A couple of months ago I hacked together a little self-training program to prepare myself for an appearance on a TV game show. In LabVIEW, of course. I've been thinking I need to clean it up (hardcoded filepaths ) and post it here.

Irene, I, too, am freelancing. I've been doing it on paper for just over a year, but in a more practical sense, for about 9 months. And I'm one of the young 'uns, so perhaps my perspective is a little different. I agree with everything the other replies said. The flexibility and autonomy are unbeatable. If you can keep the pipeline full of work (but not TOO full), it's a great way to do things. But there's also a downside (aka, there is no such thing as a free lunch). I miss the daily office interaction with colleagues. Because of that, I've found I have to be more conscientious with my outside-work social life, because I'm not getting any social interaction in my office at home (other than an occasional visit from a kitty-cat, which is not to be underestimated). But there's a component of professional interaction that I haven't found a way to recover yet. I can't walk down the hall and bounce ideas off of another engineer like I used to, and I think that's significant. That also means more effort to keep abreast of what's going on in the rest of the LabVIEW world, because if I don't read it myself, no one else is going to tell me about it . That's why I try to spend a bit more time in discussion forums like this one than I used to. Also, I personally hate doing sales calls. While I love personally supporting my customers, I'm averse to the kind of self-promotion that freelancing requires. It's a skill that I'm picking up (and I'd rather be good at coding than at making people think I'm good at it ), but when you're on you're own you find out a lot of things through trial by fire. Finally, bookeeping more or less sucks. It's not terribly difficult, but it's terribly distracting. My advice is to find a good CPA -- not just knowledgeable, but someone you really click with on a personal level. They can give you good advice on how to simplify the financial side of things. Ask me again in another 3 years how I feel about it . Justin P.S. I have a friend who ran a small NI Alliance company out west for about 9 years (for those of you who know me, it's NOT the person you're thinking of), and then freelanced for a few more. He recently went back to work for a startup company, and while the steady pay is nice and there's a bit more of a safety net, he recently advised me to NEVER quit freelancing. His words: "Don't get a real job. I tried that, it doesn't work."

You Are Fozzie Bear "Wocka! Wocka!" You're the life of the party, and you love making people crack up. If only your routine didn't always bomb! You may find more groans than laughs, but always keep the jokes coming. I'd say that's accurate, within the bounds of uncertainty.

Actually, most of what I can say by looking at the code is already contained in the caption: Quadrature Encoder Program. It looks like the code is initializing some hardware that's used to read an encoder (quadrature encoders are frequently used on servo or stepper motors for position monitoring). Everything to the left of the While loop is involved in that. Inside the While loop, the program reads the position of the encoder and outputs it to the screen continuously until the user clicks the "Switch" button. Then the program exits. Since what you've posted is labeled as a Figure, is it fair to assume that you need to recreate the functionality of this code, but you don't have the original source VIs to work from? If you have the original source VIs, you should be able to use LabVIEW's online help to dig through the code and see what's going on. If not, you'll need to find more documentation on how the encoder works and how it's connected to the DAQ hardware you're using (of course, having documentation of your hardware is always a good idea!). Good luck!

While you're there, don't miss the tour. Wikipedia also provided fairly comprehensive coverage of hoaxes around the web here.

I used to do puzzles like this all the time way back in grade school. Nice blast from the past. I think I even had a book of them once. It would be very interesting to write a program to solve these. Step #1 would be to set up a standard grammar for them, although writing the language parser would be fun just by itself. I remember I used to solve them by constructing matrices where there was one dimension for each parameter (color, cigarette brand, etc.). Then you can fill in rows/columns from the info in the problem...

I've found the source of the problem, but now there's a new question: Is this a LabVIEW bug? It looks like one to me. It appears that the Waveform Graph control stops responding to the Zoom to Fit tool any time there is a control/indicator overlapping (and in front of) the plot area of the Waveform Graph control. I've tested this in LabVIEW 7.1.1 and 7.1. I'd be interested to hear if it happens in other versions, because I swear I should've run into this before. A demonstration VI is attached. Anyone care to verify? Download File:post-2992-1131134022.vi

I have a kind of "graph display gadget" that I've developed for reuse -- I can spawn multiple copies of it via VI Server, and it displays a scalable graph of whatever data file I point it to. But it has developed a problem that is driving me batty :headbang: . Perhaps somebody here can shed some light on it. The problem is this: all the zoom tools (in the graph palette) work fine EXCEPT that the "zoom to fit" is completely nonfunctional. When I select it, the WaveformChart just simply doesn't respond. The behavior is the same both when the VI is running, and when the VI is in Edit Mode, and is not affected by the number of data points or number of plots in the indicator. I've toggled virtually every property of the indicator both through the Properties dialog and programmatically, and nothing makes the Zoom to Fit come back to life. I even tried replacing the indicator with a brand new identical one, but the problem is still there. (That, I suppose, points to something in my code.) Furthermore, the it USED to work. Several changes happened in the code, however, between when it worked and when I noticed it was broken (and none of the intermediate ones are in CVS ). I'm about to start a diff between the old and new versions, but thought I'd throw this post up in parallel. So my question is this: Is this situation at all familiar to anybody? It's hard to get a bead on the source of this, so I'm wondering if anybody has at least seen something similar. Thanks (and apologies for the long question)! Justin EDIT: Driving me batty, not driving my batty.

Greetings all. Sometime lurker, first time poster. I need to get some basic information from a flash application running in a browser window (on Windows). I know there are probably several various ways to skin this cat, but the one I've settled on is to scrape the image of the window (screen) into a bitmap and check target pixels on that image for color. This just needs to be a quick 'n' dirty hack (for now). So, with that background, does anyone know of a way to get a screen image (or window image) into LabVIEW in some kind of usable form? I've tried sending PrintScreen key events, which basically gets me as far as having the screen image on the clipboard, but then I can't figure out how to get it off. Another option might be to save the image to disk (with ScreenPrint32 or something similar) and read it in, but all this needs to happen in a few hundred milliseconds. Any ideas?