Gary Rubin

Congratulations!

It seems like a sad commentary that a backup system can't just blindly backup your data.

...and to get back on track...

What?! That must be a first! I don't think I can recall a discussion ever coming back on-topic after meandering off into the philosophies of LabVIEW.

I'm staring at that trying to figure out what makes it "sarcasm"

It's a little known feature that kinda hidden - right click on the horizontal scroll bar of your FP, select "Properties" and you'll get a dialog that allows you to select from some predefined background or choose your own. I'm pretty sure you'd be able to access this property dynamically.

Interesting... I just tried this, and found that disabled controls are semi-transparent. I hadn't realized that.

right click on the horizontal scroll bar of your FP

Of course! That makes perfect sense!

Maybe if I want to see if LabVIEW has a built-in thesaurus, I should try right-clicking on the pi constant.

Incidentally, we're missing a "sarcasm" emoticon.

all you need is a pepsi bottle and a bicycle pump

And a raincoat.

Thanks for all the advice.

I agree with Daklu that it'd be better to try to show them something that captures their attention than to try to teach them something.

An electromagnet would be a good demo too.

I calculated: 98% of population is at animal level.

This means 98% of children are at animal level.

This means 2% of the children have to show a lot of knowledge about theirs past life, astral planes…

Why we don’t see this knowledge to 2% of the children?

Maybe this awareness shows up during the teen years. That's why teens have a reputation for being difficult - they are trying to reconcile their past and current lives.

I'm glad it's you and not me. I would probably end up hurting someone. My luck it would be the local Mafioso's son.

Don't think we have too many of them here in Northern Virginia. We have politicians instead.

Oh, I hadn't thought of magnetism. That would be good.

I guess we can't do the demonstration that was done in my college physics class. It involved a red wagon, a fire extinguisher, and a long hallway.

My daughter's kindergarten class has parents come in and talk about their jobs. Since data analysis seems like it would be hard to explain to kindergartners, I thought I'd talk about some of the things that physicists study. I also want stuff that doesn't require that I go out and spend a fortune on props.

I had a few ideas:

• Simultaneously drop a softball and ping-pong ball (or maybe a crumpled-up paper) and show that they fall at the same rate (Galileo's thing).
• Have kids rub balloons on their hair and show how they stick to things.
• Maybe this: http://www.kidsmakes...icles/show/fedm
• EDIT: Simple machines would be good too - particularly levers.

I may only have about 5-10 minutes.

Any other suggestions?

Gary

I have a chart display that shows 3 plots of data vs time. Two of the plots have a range of 0 - 100 (mV) and the third plot has a range of 0 - 18000 (rpm). The end user does not care for a stacked display and would rather have all three plots on the same display with 3 different colors. No problem, but I wonder if it is possible to have a second y-axis displayed on the right side, which would be for rpms, and the normal one on the left side for mVs. Other than normalizing the raw data for rpm down to the 0 - 100 range and creating a pseudo y-axis and laying it over the chart display appropriately, I see no way to do this from the existing properties for this widget. Anyone know of another, easier way?

It is doable. Right click on the Y-axis numbers. Select Duplicate. Select one of the axes. Right Click. Select Swap Sides.

Wire your inputs into a Bundle. Wire the bundle into the terminal for your chart.

Go to front panel. Expand he Plot Legend so you can see all three plots. Right click on line in legend, select Y Scale, and choose which axis you want that data to use.

The issues are too big for my comfort level.

And there's no CTRL-Z in politics.

If I remember right, you need to put a cmd in front of your command in the LabVIEW call. There might be a switch that's needed after it also. Sorry I don't have more detail - not at work yet.

edit: Did you check the Calling System Exec example?

try 'cmd /C' (without quotes) in front of your command string.

Hi,

Working on win XP Pro with LV 8.6, if I go to "Start >> Run..." and send the command "taskkill xxx.exe", xxx gets killed. Normal.

If I now open the system exec.vi, type the same command, xxx stays, the error out cluster says "no error" the "return error" indicator says -1073741515 and I get this message from windows : This application has failed to start because framedyn.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.

I get the same thing with other commands (e.g. tasklist).

On my colleague's computer (same config) commands work from LabVIEW and Windows. What's wrong on my computer? Do I really have to re-install LabVIEW

EDIT: but some command still work from system exec.vi, such has "C:\Program Files\...\Labview.exe" and LabVIEW is launched...

If I remember right, you need to put a cmd in front of your command in the LabVIEW call. There might be a switch that's needed after it also. Sorry I don't have more detail - not at work yet.

edit: Did you check the Calling System Exec example?

Factor of 6-10, depending on data properties.

To be more precise:

Nice. How much faster?

Factor of 6-10, depending on data properties.

Anyway, my first thought is that engineers are not known for their people skills. I don't mean that in a negative sense at all. I for one would much rather work with other engineers on "stuff" than work with people working on people, sucking up to them for their money and/or their votes.

I think that those of us who are logical thinkers and tend to be more pragmatic would not be interested in doing things just to score political points, which means that we wouldn't get very far in politics.

the problem is, my timestamp is off by 303 years (just a lil off ).

But all the other values are correct?

Saved for 8.0. It might be an idea to set your labview version in your profile so that people know what version you are using.

This is faster:

Bring it ON!

You are averaging 2 per day. Shaun's at 2.4. If I wasn't so lazy, I could write a VI to predict when he'll surpass you. Or I could be like a textbook author and just state that the exercise is left to the reader.

EDIT: To whomever is currently writing this VI (I'm sure someone must be), we'll all be really impressed if it automatically updates based on current post count and post rate

So, if I understand you right, you are currently using "hired guns" (i.e. the programmers who don't have any other involvement in the project), and you want to replace them with free labor by making the grad students work on their own projects as part of their research?

I would tend to agree with Shaun and Cat that you may run into motivational/attention-span issues. The programmers that you're hiring are doing the work because they choose to. Would the grad students be able to choose whether to work on the software themselves (vs. having you do it), or would it be a compulsory part of their research?

Also, you mentioned having hired the programming students for 10-20 hours per week. If the students are already taking 7 years to finish their PhDs, do they really have time available to take on the additional programming/learning without extending their time to completion by another year or so?

I think this could work if your grad students are really interested in doing the programming. Your chances of success also probably go up if you allow their programming tasks to take advantage of the subject-matter expertise that they are developing as they do their research.

You are obviously passionate about your programming work, as evidenced by your describing learning LVOOP as "fun". Remember that the grad students are equally passionate about their research topic but, as Cat's friend said, might not care much about the instrumentation that provides them with their data.

Just broken the 500 posts and vaguely remember a post that said you could change ther title under your icon. Is it still so? And if it is can, someone point it out to a blind man?

Congrats ShaunR! At this rate you'll catch crelf by the spring.

Gary