Justin Goeres

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.

thank Ton!

In fact ...

I want to ask

Could u help me to explain what is the program doing (including the functions of VIs in details) step-by-step in words ??

This program was created at a laboratory following a guide sheet

but i don't really know what are the little icons mean and how are they function.

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!

Well, it seems like Google took part today in the fun.

http://www.google.com/romance/

While you're there, don't miss the tour.

Wikipedia also provided fairly comprehensive coverage of hoaxes around the web here.

Nice Job!

I haven't seen this one in many ages.

The beauty of this puzzle is that it requires no guessing or permuting, it is 100% logic.

Now, can anyone write a program to solve it, (pure G of course) without brute force permutation?

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?