Aristos Queue

LV 2015 (re-)introduces the ability to write plug-ins in G that affect the edit time panel and diagram shortcut (aka popup) menus and the run time diagram shortcut menus. Some plug-ins ship with LabVIEW, but dozens more (as of this post) are available here: http://ni.com/lvmenus If you wish to write and share your own plug-ins, you can upload them to the community, though it won't surprise me if LAVA develops its own repository for such things.

And JK Rolling wrote, "Never trust anything if you can't see where it keeps its brain." (Harry Potter Chamber of Secrets)

There's a few of us at NI -- in several different products -- that saw this trend a couple years ago when Adobe first started trying it out; we preemptively raised objections to LabVIEW moving in that direction, even though there were absolutely no plans to do so at the time. I'm glad we did... because although I can imagine NI will have some products at some point that follow this model, but I do not expect LabVIEW to go that way. Speaking as an R&D insider: I observe enough of an "allergy" within NI to LV adopting this model that it is unlikely to happen. Now, taking off my R&D hat and putting on my LV user hat: I don't like the software as service model. I get why businesses like it though. If you also don't like the software-as-only-a-service model, please mention your objections to your local Field Sales agent, as a ward against future ideas. There are a lot of advantages to *customers* to the software-as-only-service model, and Adobe was able to make the change because it got the customers who liked the portability/upgradability/no-IT-involvement-ability of the service model excited about it first and closed down a lot of the objections before they even got raised. By the time most Adobe users even heard about the change, it was fait accompli, with blog posts from users excited by the change holding top search result slots. So you might want to occasionally mention to Field Sales, "You know, I really like owning my own software." Express not just objections but also advantages with the current situation. Doing so will help keep the allergy strong!

Microsoft has launched a new website. At http://how-old.net/# , you can upload a photo and the site tells you how old the person in the image is. I've been playing with various photos. The thing is extremely accurate as far as I can tell. I'm impressed with how far facial recognition has come.

Maybe. I'm not interested in facilitating that kind of positive serendipity when weighed against the negative serendipity. It's my preference.

I can do a better presentation for a specific group than I can for a general group... just like I can do a much better presentation 1-on-1 than I can for a specific group. I heavily tune my presentations for my audience. I have five different versions of my "intro to OO" presentation, and I generally don't present any of them without at least a couple tweaks for the specific group. Maybe not everyone does that, but I consider it to be good teaching. Being able to tune for a specific audience is a big reason why I and others are able to get so much out of the CLA presentations. Unfortunately, when I tune for a specific group, I often tune out another group completely, and that has with some regularity lead to some communication problems, even to people choosing completely inappropriate architectures for their projects because they heard something I said in one context and tried to cross-apply it to some totally different context that I never intended to cover. So I've learned to be MUCH more circumspect when a presentation is being video taped and MUCH MUCH more circumspect if that video is going to have general circulation. If others want to post their presentations publicly, I'm not going to object. Just don't expect me to follow suit. And if you think that is harsh or unfair, I'm ok with that. There will be other presentations; maybe you'll be in the target audience for one of those.

I already presented counterexample for this theory. See first post from me in this thread.

I'm fine with it being posted to the CLAs that were there and shared to the broader community. Essentially, I recognize that limiting the spread of information is nigh impossible in this day and age, but I'd prefer that there be some way of not just stumbling on the presentations without surrounding context. I.e., enter through a portal that explains what is going on, not just getting the video directly in some search engine result.

My own presentations to the CLAs are very different from the ones that I have given at NIWeek. One particular instance I can think of: I made a serious sounding statement once in a CLA presentation about how "there might not be another version of LabVIEW next year." Everyone in the room knew that was a joking reference to my reluctance just a couple hours prior to commit to a release date for any given feature. But I can easily see that statement worrying someone watching the video without that background context. There are a lot of content differences, also -- I'll skim over important details of things in a CLA presentation that I wouldn't in a general presentation, on the assumption that everyone in the room knows the background. In a general presentation, I generally at least throw in a line of "there's more here and you should go research it." Given that, I prefer that the CLA presentations not be generally posted.

I figured it was an insult of some sort, but I was sort of holding out hope. You either a) didn't understand what I was proposing or b) did understand and decided to be insulting about it anyway. Either way, your comment isn't relevant to what I was proposing.

Automatic type propagation does not require a different code segment and a potentially different block diagram. Generics do. Auto type prop doesn't make any changes to the block diagram -- poly VIs do not shift, wire types do not change, charts/graphs are untouched, etc. Generics actually produces a whole new VI with the new type running through it.

Again, I fail to see the problem with offering you the upgrade. We do not auto install the upgrade.

I'm not generalizing. I stated what is, to the best of my knowledge, a fact: Everyone upgrades most apps. That is the default setting in home environments, as you ShaunR noted, but most corporate IT departments that I know of have similar policies on the corporate machines. Windows, Oracle and other key parts of my software stack get patched every week (Friday nights) automatically by my IT department. Around here, if Visual Studio pushes out a patch, every developer hits upgrade as soon as they can afford a reboot. If it is a brand new version, we don't auto-upgrade, but we definitely accept all patches (though we try to push LV onto the latest version of Visual Studio within a year). Yes. That is the world of modern software development. By and large, so far as I can tell, those patches do a lot more good than harm. NI would be remiss if it did not participate in that ability to update on an ongoing basis. You don't have to accept the upgrade, but customers expect NI to make it available as an option.

I do not work on RT or times loop, so this isn't any official NI answer, but I've been told several times from various sources that the Timed Loop is pretty much meaningless outside of a real-time operating system and that the only reason it compiles on Windows is to facilitate debugging in simulations. I can easily believe that NI devs have tweaked that simulation to be as faithful as possible, but I suspect it is still straightforward to find a Windows configuration where it just can't keep time.

I honestly have no idea what this comment means. Explain?

I figure most people like being able to apply patches easily. Everyone auto upgrades most apps and even the OS these days. Why would patches for LabVIEW be any different?

I have thought about KickStarting a mechanical Turk type project to have the community pay the salary of a guy whose job is to be the AI to create Git commands in response to English emails.

I can't say why, but I know there were lots of requests for us to build this, so some users definitely use it. Regarding a competitor for NI... I would welcome it. The problem is the sheer expense. I've contemplated building different graphical languages just as prototypes for people to play with. I can leverage all sorts of rendering tools, formats, etc, but an edit environment is expensive compared to a text editor. Every graphical language needs a largely unique environment. I'm lucky ... I can hack the existing LabVIEW environment to simulate syntax, but doing this from scratch would be way more than I could undertake alone, at least with the tools I've seen. I think it would take corporate level investment to do one with graphics at the quality users expect today. I doubt LabVIEW could even get off the ground if attempted for the first time today.

For what it is worth, I can't use Git. Even for simple submits, I do it infrequently enough that I pretty much always screw it up. I've thrown away changes I wanted to keep. I've merged branches the wrong way. At this point, I use Git by writing what I want in English and emailing a friend for the commands to do it. I recognize its power. I recognize that it is the only SCC system with certain key features. I would still rather use anything else.

In 8 years, that's the first time I've heard the cluster/array request. It comes in sometimes for DVRs and for VI Server class refnum types, but infrequently enough that NI has never acted on it. To be clear: it is doable, there just hasn't been pressure to do it.

Ok... scripting has a nice method "Clean Up Diagram" that works pretty well -- more than well enough for my purposes. You put a set of objects into the selection list, call the Clean Up Diagram method and the nodes do a pretty dance. BUT. It isn't always nice. I'm scripting code into the interior of a structure node. At the end, I want to clean it up. When I try to select the objects in the interior of a structure node and clean it, the results are pretty bad. I've talked with the scripting team and they can probably get me a fix for LV 2016. I'd like something sooner. Does anyone have a scripting function that does polishing of positions on such interiors?

I come into work every day to a small number, around 10, of e-mails from the parts of NI that are awake while I sleep. I have realized that the entire tone of my day changes based on the nature of those e-mails. If they are things I can delete without answering, no effect. If they are things that require me to do lots of research or commit me to do work or require long winded answers, I feel like I've gotten a slow start to the day and my whole energy level drops. But if they are things that just require a sentence or two and my reply somehow unlocks the person at the other end to do their work, it's this amazing confidence boost. "I've got something done already, and someone else thought my input was important enough to ask." It's ridiculous that this should matter so significantly, but I started really looking at this trend last week, and it really does change my day. Even now that I'm aware of it, the effect occurs, but the negative effect is tamped down while the positive effect is increased. I think that's because I now have a bit more apprehension about the first e-mail check of the morning, so the relief of finding "easy reply" e-mails seems to have increased, but finding "hard reply" e-mails I can now shrug off. Human psychology is weird (or at least mine, which is one data point for the rest of you). What does this mean to you folks? Well, first, it might make you more aware of this effect in your own lives, maybe increasing the positive and decreasing the negative. But, second, please only ask me hard questions between noon and 4pm, so I can deal with them before I leave in the evening. :-)

Excellent thinking, crossrulz! I had restricted myself only to the immediately relevant case of late fixes! Now, consider that the release manager's sole job is to worry about the release. If, as we have demonstrated, we should exclude such worrying from our concerns, it now becomes apparent that we don't need a release manager! Everyone is free to submit code! Freedom! Woohoo! --- Please note that using logic such as this with your own release manager may be a so-called "career limiting move." Use with caution! :-)

I disturbed my release manager today with the following bit of reasoning... There's a bug. We have a fix. Should we make the change? Release manager is worried about a fix going in this late. But changes do go in late. Given that it is the release manager's job to always worry about changes going in this late, then there must be some other principle that we use to evaluate whether or not changes actually go in this late. If the release manager's worry is a constant, then we can just factor it out. In other words, we should always just ignore the release manager's concerns when submitting changes this late. QED, right? :-)

Update: I may not be changing this in 2015. This change turns out to have ramifications on various other aspects of classes, and there's a significant discussion about which way is the right way to fix it. When aggregated inside of a collection, handling NaN as NaN makes sense. But when aggregated as part of an object, it seems to make much more sense to treat NaN as data -- i.e. NaN == NaN -> TRUE. Having it return FALSE betrays the abstraction of the private data -- just because I use a double as my internal data and happen to use NaN as a sentinel should not change the external view of the object as a single coherent whole. Personally, I'm strongly persuaded by this argument and I'm doing further investigation into how other languages resolve this.