Gary Rubin

Actually, if you re-read my posts in this thread without the filter that you seem to have applied to them then you'll notice that I don't come down on either side - I'm asking questions, just like you are, I'm just asking them in different ways. I'm not a socialist, democrat (in the true definition of the word), a republican (in the politicized definition of the word), a Labour, Liberal, Green, Independant, Tory or anything else for that matter (well, maybe a constitutional monachist for the moment ). In fact, I'm about as anti-political as you can get. I'm disgusted like you are that some moron fiddled the numbers for whatever reason (you'll notice that from some of my posts) and that that moron, in a way, represents the field of engineering, but I'm also not so political that I'm going to assume that means that all of the research in the field is bogus. I'm also not going to try to use emotionally-charged terminology to try to bait a response out of anyone.

If you want to apply this horrific root issue to other socialtal problems like redistribution of wealth then I gotta say that I'm way out of my depth there, so I choose not to engage (since, it seems, that any attempt at conjecture on my part is assumed to be my staunch politcal and sociatal view of the world, which it most-certainly is not). I'm all for debate, and I live to to think outside the box - but don't for a second assume that every question I post in the LAVA lounge is representative of my views - they're questions, not statements.

That said, if the conjectures and ideas in this or any other thread form your view of me, then so be it - there's nothing I can do about that other than state my case and let you make up your mind. Until then, I'd ask you to keep away from personal profiling - if you want to talk about climate change, redistribution of wealth, systems of government or whatever other topic then go for it, but don't try to characterize me, especially since I haven't even done that myself.

Well said, Crelf

So I've been using Windows 7 on my desktop at home and I like it, and haven't had any problems yet. At work we are starting to roll it out on a trial basis. So I got curious about what useful tweaks there are to Windows 7 and I found this page.

http://www.maximumpc..._uncovered_date

Some of the "tweaks" are not very useful, or are common knowledge. But the first page is a ton of hotkeys, some of which I didn't know about. Most of which if you had your hand on the mouse already are redundant, but I found a few new ones I may use. (Windows key + P is one for sure)

Thanks for sharing

It seems my bug is not a bug, but, "a result of the change of the Cursor Legend from LabVIEW 7.1 to 8.x". I dunno. If going to a newer version changes how my GUI acts, in a way that I can't directly access to fix, that's not a good thing. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Anywho, the very nice NI App Engineer says he will file an internal product suggestion to change this change.

In the meantime, I've coded around the bug, uhh, change.

Cat

I think bugs are things that they didn't intend to introduce. Because this was intentional, it's probably considered an "enhancement".

My wife would mostly just use it for word processing and email, so a lot of those Windows 7 Starter limitations might not matter too much.

I saw that HP just announced a model based on the new Atom. I guess others will be following suit soon.

Have you considered this one?

Well, that probably reduces the chances of it being stolen, especially since most people would mistake it for an ugly throw-pillow. And there's no need to worry about figuring out which is yours at the airport security line.

Hi all,

I'm seriously considering getting my wife a netbook. Anyone have any recommendations? Any models to avoid?

Thanks,

Gary

Sorry, Cat. No answers for you - just a comment.

Based on some of the past posts, I'm not convinced that the modification to the cursors between version 7.1 and 8.x was necessarily a good thing.

I like the idea of ultrasonic sensors, coupled with a webcam equipped with facial detection software and tied an el/az positioner with a pellet gun on it... So what if you have to wear 50 lbs of batteries to power it all...

I'm looking at a job that would have a cRIO chassis on a crash test sled that's hurtled into a barrier (pretty standard stuff), but the power supply on the sled will go from 12V DC to 0V DC on barrier impact. I'd like to continue acquiring data for at least 250ms after the power goes to 0V DC, and I was wondering if anyone out there has experience with a UPS/rechargable battery/capacitor network that can deliver 12V DC (not sure about the current - think an 8slot cRIO chassis with 4 modules in it) for at least 250ms and (here's the kicker) is okay with 30g shock in x, y, & z... Surely something like this exists, right?

Sounds like fun testing to be a part of. cRIO chassis + modules are rated at 30g?

It turns out I was generating each target 16 times, when they only have to generate once.

Any hints or directions how I can do a polar intensity plot? A good analouge is a weather radar.

I've done my own using sines and cosines to convert from rectilinear to polar coordinates. It's slow, like you indicated. I have no experience with picture controls - there might be a smarter way to do it there, but it seems you still have the same remapping issue.

Can you post example code? There are many tricks to make LV run faster, but we'd have to see what you're doing to know what might be slowing things down.

Maybe we need this guy to weigh in on the nerd vs. geeks discussion...

An answer to both "question" is FIRST Robotics. Dean Kamen started this as a mechanism to get kid interested in science in general (and in computer science since there is a programming part to the challenge). NI, from a year ago, has become a partner and is donating cRIO with LabVIEW copy for programming and control the robot.

There might be other effort(s) from NI side, but I do not know about it.

PJM

I think it would be a good thing to get LabVIEW into the middle schools or high schools outside the scope of the FIRST program.

I don't have any experience with FIRST. I would expect, however, that it provides a cool project for the computer geeks (or is it nerds?), but how many non-computer geeks does it bring in? I'd be curious to hear from those who are involved in FIRST.

Back to the original topic (sort of). The Washington Post had an article about the decline of computer science classes in high school.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/20/AR2009122002477.html

Does NI push LabVIEW at the high-school level? Seems like it would be a great introduction, allowing students to learn the concepts without getting bogged down in syntax.

I am bracing for the cocktail party where after answering what I do for a living them asking the follow-up question (paraphrasing form Glenda ?sp? from the Wizard of OZ")

Just tell them you're a physicist. That seems to end the conversation pretty abruptly.

Then you'd be just like you were on the racquetball court yesterday: very very wrong.

Trash-talking on LAVA?

"You call that a wire! I've seen better wiring from a 3-year-old! I'll show you a real wire!".

"Your mother was a global, and your father smelled of sequence structures! I GOOP in your general direction!"

What are the clear differences between nerd and geek? do you mean women engineers are nerd while men engineers are geek?

Gotta love the topics of conversation on LAVA!

One thing that occurs to me is to have a two-part Spec.exe. One very non-resource-intensive part would run all the time, and when Control.exe demands it (still using VI server?) that part would open up the main part and run that.

We are doing something very similar to this. Computer A is running C code. Computer B has 2 or 3 different LabView EXEs that can be run, depending on what the C code wants done. We have a very lightweight Labview EXE on Computer B that's just listening for a TCP/IP command from computer A, then launching the appropriate EXE.

TCP/IP in LabVIEW is very easy.

I'm a bit busy putting together NI Week presentations about OO features at the moment, but if I get time next week, I'll try to write up a big summary document of queues and notifiers, pulling together all the various parts I've posted over the years.

Wanted to bump this up, in case AQ has time in his life again.

I have to know how to use "indefatigable" in a sentence in 8th grade?

"We're knights of the round table, we're in-de-fati-gable"...

http://www.innergeek.us/geek-test.html

12.82051%. Does that mean I passed or failed?

I'm not sure where you got your sources for this information but I'll believe it.

Grace Hopper

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Grace_Hopper

was the one who came up with the idea of a compiler that would translate human readable code to machine language. She invented COBOL. Prior to her idea it was one's and zeros.

Ben

You could go back even further:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

I personally find it more than "potentially" interesting.

As the parent of a 13 year old daughter, I find it, and the accompanying article

http://www.livescien...girls_math.html

fairly disturbing. My daughter is quite smart (not just bragging here -- she's in all honors or gifted/talented classes and gets straight A's) and has always shown an interest in science. But I've seen it decreasing over the past couple years. Maybe I'll print out these articles and talk about them with her.

On a somewhat related note, I did that science talk for my daughter's kindergarten class. When I asked if anyone knows what a scientist does, I got 3 answers:

1) Tries to learn about things by studying them

2) Makes potions

3) Mixes things together and makes explosions.

I'll bet that the kid who provided answer 3) got her information from watching cartoons.

I don't think that rule is different for subroutines.

If it's a performance issue, put the indicators into a conditional-disable structure.

According to LV8.6 Help:

In addition to not sharing time with other VIs, subroutine VI execution is streamlined so that front panel controls and indicators are not updated when the subroutine is called. A subroutine VI front panel reveals nothing about its execution.

I figured that if the front panel indicators are not updated and the indicator is not connected to a terminal, there's no need to allocate memory for that indicator. I guess that's not the case, because a disable structure around the indicators did speed up my process considerably.

Also, welcome to LAVA.

Gary