hooovahh

People will decorate their office with retro software boxes, and game boxes. So yes various LabVIEW manuals, books, and old software gets you a bit of nerd cred. I have a box of Windows 3.1 on my shelf next to my copy of LabVIEW for everyone, LabVIEW 7.0, and my bound thesis.

Writing strings to TDMS that are a byte stream can be tricky. I have a Read/Write Cluster to TDMS and it flattens it to a string. But as you noticed there needs to be special consideration for null. Well it also turns out that on different platforms there are other characters that need special attention too. You can absolutely do extra work on your images. But I fear that you won't get the performance you want. TDMS is crazy fast and all, but it sounds like a bonkers amount of data real fast, and I don't know if it will be able to keep up, especially if there is special code needed to convert a string ready to be written to TDMS so the null (and any other characters you want) get written correctly. Writing an array of bytes also sounds crazy for this application. The number of samples on the channels might approach NI's limitations for the data type, and then keeping track of where the offsets are for files would need to be a separate channel. I've done stuff like this for logging raw CAN frames to TDMS files but that seems like way less data. Honestly you might be better served writing to binary files, then having the TDMS file just keep an index of the file names or locations for replay. Not sure how I'd go about solving this.

Thank you for your continued reports. If it continues to be a problem Michael will twist various knobs behind the scenes.

Because of a thread over on the darkside, I got the motivation to improve this code, and include the Google Material icons in it. I posted the package over on VIPM.IO. This uses the native 2D picture control for displaying icons like I wanted. It still requires Windows due to how icons are resized, but maybe that could be worked around if there is interest. https://www.vipm.io/package/hooovahh_boolean_vector_controls/ Install the package and its dependencies and you'll have a Tools >> Hooovahh >> Boolean Control Creation... Once ran it will start trying to display all the icons the toolkit installed. In the background it will be converting the vector images to 56x56 PNGs to be able to display them in the window. I tried being smart and having it prioritize icons that you scrolled to, but I honestly don't know how well it works. It basically takes about a minute after first launching it to have all of its icons displayed properly. You can use the tool during that minute but not all the icons will be available yet. From that point on you can scroll around and resize the window and it should work as expected, just a little bit slow at times. There is a single constant on the block diagram where you can change the icon side. At one point I had icon size be a control on the front panel but since it took about a minute to process all the images for every change I just left it. Some of the icons have multiple versions. If you left click on an icon and a window pops up you can pick from what version of that icon you'd like to use. Then create a control using that icon. You can theoretically put your own EMF files in the folder with the rest but at the moment it doesn't scan for new files since it is relatively slow to find all icons on every launch. What I'm saying is compromises had to be made. Maybe I could have a separate program that gets ran in the Post Install VI that starts processing the icons right away in parallel. That way the tool might be done processing icons by the time the user launches it for the first time. I did use the Post Install and Post Uninstall to do extra work since there are so many individual files. Normally you'd have VIPM handle the files but it took a long time. So the package just installs a Zip, and the Post Install will unzip them. This also means Post Uninstall needs to delete the extracted files. Not ideal but the install time was much longer otherwise.

One other odd side effect is I've seen several reports that are clearly bots, that think it is a reply system. The report will be a normal spam message but reporting some content. So at least those ones only I need to deal with and you won't see. Sorry again about all this. I have talked to the site admin again emphasizing the severity, and frequency.

Oh sorry I didn't read your post closely enough. I don't know how to do that.

I think what you want is MoveBlock. This is basically a function that takes a pointer and returns the actual data at the pointer. I don't deal with DLL calling often, and I have a hard time figuring out things so I might be wrong. You may want to do some research into it. Here are a few links.

We are at the whim of the city planners to approve of the use of the fire extinguisher...okay the analogy falls apart a bit there.

I do occasionally have correspondence with him. He is aware of the spam issue and we've talked about turning on content approval. He seems to want to update the forums and just has limited bandwidth to do so. Until that happens I'll just keep cleaning up the spam that gets through.

I did try to implement inflate/deflate in pure G. There was a website that explained in pretty easy to understand english how the compression works, and gave example code on how to implement it. I went through it step by step but it still wasn't producing the correct data. After trying in my free time for a bit I gave up. I thought it would be helpful on Linux RT for web server stuff where it could make PNG compressed images. There are alternatives.

Oh yeah it sucks. I do what I can, I contact the admin when there are issues I can't resolve. I appreciate your patients.

It does put more spam in my inbox. Honestly with how frequent things are I'd say make a single report of any kind, then I'll review all the posts by the newest users. Banning a user deletes all of their stuff, so just one report to get my attention is enough.

It's just every morning sorry. I was getting emails when reports came in. This made it easy to review them from my phone as they came in but that broke some time last year. So now I need to check the site for spam, or reported content.

I don't have that feature available to me. I'll mention it to the admin.

Moderator tools are way more restrictive than Administrator. I appreciate the support but it is all I can do to get rid of the stuff manually that makes it through until better tools are installed or upgraded.