hooovahh

I know Edison didn't invent the light bulb, I choose that analogy in particular figuring someone would pick up on it. And it was my better half who did..."better half" I have to come up with a better articulation for that. I am a big fan of Tesla, especially the documentary I saw on him and his most controversal invention...his cloner. (the movie is not a documentary, it is a joke he never made a cloner...or did he...no, no he did, but maybe...)

Not to discredit her (or anyone elses work) but that's like saying without men there would never have been light bulbs. Implying of course that Thomas Edison is the only person who could have created the light bulb. Given enough time I would like to believe that a women would have invented the light bulb, and possibly a man to come up with the idea of a compiler...of course without men I guess the human race would die off and no one would have invented the light bulb.

I'm not sure where you got your sources for this information but I'll believe it. <Wife Bragging> My wife is a nerd, and every time she rattles off some random piece of information that I said and figured she wasn't listen to, I realize why I married her. There was one day we were just watching TV and she asked if we could watch Star Wars. Neither of us are big Star Wars fans, I think she's seen them a few times. Another day she asked questions regarding video game modding, and another we had a technical discussion about web page design using PHP. </Wife Bragging>

When it's a primitive...is it password protected? Is it a polymorphic? Is it a express VI? Never used the feature my self just throwing ideas out there.

Anyone with some free time should check out Primer. Nerdy kind of time travel movie that has to be watched more than once. I found a site that has the movie time line laid out, but it's a spoiler so I won't post it. It's also streaming on Netflix.

First of all I highly doubt you're famous simply because you linked in my signature (I'm implying that I'm a nobody). Secondly it does have too many letter and people mis-spell it all the time. And to be clear I am not Crelf's alter ego. But it is a little flattering for you to say that. I am my own person, and it wouldn't take much research into it to find that out. I think every result on google for hooovahh is me, and if I were Crelf's alter ego it would have to be a pretty elaborate setup since there are postings of hooovahh around the net since 2002 or so. Sorry Paul for saying your postings were resembling Alfa's (I forgot it was spelled oddly before), it didn't add any thing to the topic and it served no purpose posting it.

Yup got my self a new signature.

Yes I've used Autoit in LabVIEW, with ActiveX there's an example on NI's website some where...here it is. Be aware that the ActiveX doesn't have nearly as many features as the AutoIt, it seems the ActiveX call is only for the most used functions (which probably is you're use case). Another thing to keep in mind (probably not for this project) is that AutoIt can be compiled into a EXE with command line switches. What I've done in the past is build AutoIt code, then compiled it into a EXE (which should run in Windows without any installer) and then have LabVIEW interface with it by using the command line. I've also tried talking to AutoIt EXE using DDE and had some limited success. I could get LabVIEW to send out to the application, but I couldn't get the application to talk back to LabVIEW.

I'm sorry Paul lately I've found your posts offensive and frustrating but I won't tell you to stop posting, and I'm not going to report you, you can post what ever you want. I've never been one to argue because I'm not good at it. In many arguments the "winner" is the one who complains the loudest and hurts the feelings of others the most. I don't see very many reasons to yell, and I definitely don't see a reason to hurt other peoples' feelings. If you want to make this argument about my seniority I suggest making a new post since it would be off topic. My seniority is low, and it is not the first time you have taken a personal jab at me with this argument. But what I don't understand is why you would find it more productive to attack your fellow engineers on a personal level, rather than defend the argument this topic was created for. I also don't understand what my seniority as a software/electrical engineer has to do arguments on climate change, or even a observation of similar stying posting between two individuals. I can post just as many articles online claiming that global warming is real, as you can that it isn't but I'm not going to post them because I can't defend their integrity or their data and neither can you. I see you're posts just as useful as googling "global warming hoax", while my argument is to google "global warming facts" and have the individual decide.

We had a quick discussion here about how Alpha hasn't been back since Lava 2.0, and we made the connection that Paul's posts are starting to resemble his (no offense Paul) So someone here has come up with a new name, and I think from now on we can all refer to Paul as "Paul Gamma" On a side note isn't it rude to double post? What about triple, or quadrupole post? I realize this rule is usually in place to prevent people from asking for a bunch of stuff without allowing other users to give back first, just wondering if the rule still applies here.

Is that kinda like the Simpsons episode. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s61-pkrWiTE The end of that clip cut out early, Lisa then handed him the rock and took the money. Also is anyone else surprised that a random clip from a random Simpsons episode 13 years old is on youtube?

Why not, they already handle my email, photos, online documents, IMing/Video conferencing, atlas, web browsing, RSS reader, calendar organization, web hosting, Video Hosting, directory assistance, blogging, online book reader, financing, medical records, not to mention their amazing web searching, product searching, image searching, news searching...do I really need to go on? I could there's google voice, and wave coming soon. Now to be honest I don't actually use all of these services but I use many of them. I may give Google DNS a try but I probably won't stick with it.

This is not limited to politicians or project managers. I had a professor for a networks class (mostly CAN) and in the first day of class he had a power point presentation telling us about how he made a drive by wiring for a fork lift, and he made some robots and stuff. Turns out he didn't do any thing, it was a senior design class and a thesis that he advised for that in his mind he helped enough to claim he made it. Our final project was to simulator a drive by wire system for a motor cycle (lets not get into why this is a bad idea just yet) We had a node to simulate the signals, and we had a node displaying the signals with a dash display, and images of the front and back of the bike to show turn signals and lights. His next term he added out stuff to his power point presentation and ended up telling the class he made it again. Coincidentally enough, there were some students who were in both classes and they called him out on it.

While I generally agree with you I would like to make an argument for the US post office. I realize they are not the most cost-effective. But I still find it amazing that for $0.42 I can mail a piece of paper across the country in a few days. That being said when was the last time I had to mail a letter where I could just as easily send information electronically instead. Wonder if it's possible to just get rid of the post office for mailing paper. Could the post office be replaced with a more digitized version where people email/fax letters to send, and they can email/fax/deliver the information. Then we wouldn't need mail trucks to deliver documents from a city to another, just have the a document email from city to city, and then delivered that way. I'm sure there's alot of problems with what I said and someone has surly thought of it before me.

"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Viacom." Paul might be on to some thing I mean it looks like Viacom is in on the whole global warming conspiracy too.

\small crowd forms "Fight Fight Fight Fight!" \crowd size increases

Conspiracy James is out of town this week so I'll be glad to fill the void. XKCD: http://xkcd.com/258/ And just because it's Paul: Every thing we ever know could all be lies. We know the earth is round because many different independent groups tell us it is, but I have never done any experimentation to determine if it is. What about atoms, and molecules and the periodic table of elements is that all made up? Could be I don't know for sure it isn't. For all I know computers could run off of fairy dust and moon beams, I've never built one from scratch, how do I know what makes it work? Ultimately I don't know, I take all the information that is given to me and I formulate an opinion based on what I am told is fact from groups and organizations which may have a private agenda. I believe global warming is an issue we should be concerned. I may be completely wrong but I know that I don't have the technical data to backup hardly any claim without referencing someone else's work, which could be total crap.

Nope all should be fine, modern motherboards don't need you to tell them how much ram they have, or change any thing when you add more.

Thanks for mentioning that. While many versions of LabVIEW can co-exist happily, the addons, and extras that come with LabVIEW is a more difficult. When I said "it is a pain to setup" I should have mentioned the extra difficulties involved in making everyone happy. While I had all these versions installed they were mostly used for down converting code. I never actually deployed code saved in 5.0 to a DAQ system.

Actually you can have many versions of LabVIEW installed at once. I at one time had 5.0, 6.0, 6.1, 7.1, 8.0, 8.2, 8.5, 8.6, and 2009. All in Windows XP SP3. It's kind of a pain to setup, and it is better to use virtual machines for this if possible. A discussion was created some time ago but I can't seem to find it.

I think he always knew how to wire it up, he just needed help building a distributable product. I'm sure he used some LVOOP since the child inherited some of the parents attributes. (never really worked with OO does that sentence make sense?)

...well mine has less features... To be honest I didn't know NI had developed a tray icon tool. When I searched ni.com and their forums I searched for "System tray" or "tray icon". All I found was old articles saying it was possible with some shell32 calls, and how to do it with LabWindows. There's also a company out there that developed a product for making system tray icons in LabVIEW. Because of this I assumed there wasn't a free open source way to do it. I can't look at NI's tool right now (on the wife's netbook) so I can't say what all the differences are, but I can say that mine doesn't require .Net 2.0. And my tool is can also be used in any programming language that is supported in Windows and has file I/O tools. That being said it sounds like NI's tool is much more feature complete.

Ok so I got another goodie that I've been working on. I don't know why, but lately I've had a slight obsession with the Windows system tray. I don't know why just do. I wanted an easy semi-universal way of making system tray icons. I wanted some thing native but instead I went with what works, and I may end up changing it down the road. Right now it uses AutoIt3 (another obsession lately). But you don't need to install AutoIt, Windows should already contain all the run time engines needed. Included in this zip is two AutoIt EXEs. CreateTrayIcon.exe is the main work horse. It is a command line program, so applying the /? switch will give you some information about what parameters are needed. It needs a command to exit on, a tip strip text, a path to a config file (which contains all the items to appear when you right click one item per line), a path to the icon to use (it supports using .dlls or .exe files with an icon index or .ico file) and a icon index which can be blank or 0 if not used. The second EXE is RemoveUnusedTrayIcons.exe. If you kill the icon using the LabVIEW VI it will just run taskkill on the application. This normally leaves the icon in the system tray until you mouse over it and then it disappears. This program searches for all icons that don't have a handler and removes them. The source for both EXEs are included. What VIs are included? There is a create icon VI, get click VI (what did the user click on) and kill icon VI with an example VI named Tray Example.vi. There is also a Global used for passing data around, but it's not important. Another feature I included is the minimize to tray VI. This will take a VI and minimize it to the tray, then wait for the user to double click it or restore it to bring it back. I also created an example for this. Here's a screen shot but it's not very exciting. I was thinking of adding support for more complicated tray items, like bolding items, adding checkmarks, I saw a way to implement radio buttons, and even nested items. Are these the kinds of features that would be useful? Also if you didn't notice since the autoit programs are command line programs, any programming language that has File I/O can use this to create tray icons. I just included LabVIEW VIs as a sort of API to make it easier to use. BTW all of these VIs are written in 7.1 for the most compatibility. Create Tray Icon.zip

I expected it to mean something in Japanese...this all has nothing to do with controlling electrons anymore.