hooovahh

Yeah no I understand I wasn't trying to say this is the only option and everyone must use an Xbox for their media center needs. I dabbled a bit with building my own HTPC. I wanted to make one out of a miniITX, or PicoITX board. I think a great site for ideas is http://www.mini-itx.com/ they have all kinds of odd projects people have done putting PCs in just about every thing.

Very cool, I know internally we had a multilingual tool but it was only used once or twice, it isn't often we need to write interfaces. This looks much more refined.

Yeah I use a Xbox 360 for media browsing. I'm not sure if it is classified as a HTPC or not. I like your solution but it's hard to beat a 360 for $200 you get all you need to be connected to a HDMI supported tv, and content sent via a ethernet connection. If you want the wireless route it's like an extra $100 for the official adapter but for me wired is fine. The interface for browsing media isn't the greatest but I have it broken up into a directory structure for videos, and music supports playlists. Also using TVersity you can stream any video/audio source in any resolution and have it converted to what the 360 supports on the fly. TVersity also supports streaming podcasts, youtube and hulu (pro version for hulu). And did I mention the 360 is a 360? and plays original xbox games (that are like $5-10 used). The 360 also supports streaming media through netflix (if you are a gold member). And soon it will have integration for Last.fm, twitter, and facebook. ...no I don't work for Microsoft...

...I doubt the profanity filter works on pictures

Yeah so we were discussing a autotune , and it reminded me of the original slap chop video of Vince Shlami. Figured it'd be good for a few laughs.

Nope didn't see that it works fine thanks. Any idea why NI doesn't make a better native browse for folder dialog?

Wow very nice, I always just use the built in LabVIEW browse for folder, but it's not always intuitive for people new to LabVIEW applications. I played around a bit with your vi and it acted strange when I changed the root to anything other than Desktop. If I made root Fonts for example and ran it, the vi would run and complete but no dialog would come up, then LabVIEW wouldn't allow me to run it again, or change any other controls, I am forced to restart LabVIEW. Running 8.20, or 8.6 in XP SP3.

WTF? Do you mean Work Time Fun?

Yeah, watch it or I'll start dropping F bombs here, FART YOU you farter, go fart your selves.

Very clever poem but I couldn't bring my self to finishing it, just messed with my head too much, and I'm no critically acclaimed wordsmith or anything. I can't imagine what it must be like for an English professor to read that.

Yeah I wish VIPM supported making packages with post install, and post uninstall hooks but it doesn't. If you want to manually make your own package that performs these operations I'd say look at the oglib_lvzip to get an idea on how to do it. Rename the .ogp package to .zip, uncompress it, and take a look at the text file in the root to get an idea on how to perform a post install, or post uninstall. Assuming you've already done that and have a post install VI that works, I don't know how you could get information like the directory that the package exists in. Once you get that VI running if nothing else you could ask the user to browse to the package.

This isn't really the right tread for this but why don't you use the RSS feature? Not that the RSS is 100% right now, but it doesn't miss content, it just some times adds old content. I use outlook for my RSS reader, but a better solution for you might be Google reader. It's an in browser RSS reader that is linked to your gmail account. So if you read some RSS at work then go home it will show that you read those articles. reader.google.com

I was going to say that I've never had dog or cat but I started thinking, maybe I have and I didn't know it. But then I made the connection that maybe I've never had cow or chicken, maybe I've been feed artificial meat my whole life, or maybe every time I was feed chicken it was really pork just modified to taste like chicken. I guess the only thing I'm sure I've had is frog legs, pork, and I'm pretty sure I've had deer. I know I've had frog (watched it get cooked) and my father-in-law had a pig that he had killed so I know I've had that. And my dad shot a deer and had it processed. I didn't watch it get processed so I can't say for certain that what we ate was deer.

Here's some info on the post build hook. http://forums.jkisoft.com/index.php?showtopic=839 I don't know if there is similar hooks for post install. I didn't know that VIPM supported post install hooks, are you sure you mean post install? Remember that the post build VI does not get brought to the front, or focused when it is ran, so if there is some user interaction you'll need to use a Windows DLL to bring it into focus.

I'm really more of a dog person...hey wait a second!

Oh no I was talking about the other CLAs with teaching certificates of course...I know we have at least one other person that fits into that category, assume I was talking about them.

I would also like to humbly disagree with Paul. There are CLAs here who have teaching certificates, or who formerly worked in NI's R&D that I know would not get a 100% on the CLAD. There are many questions dealing with topics like express VIs that no one here would get right unless they guessed. I have two examples I remember from taking it. I'm sure this one has been fixed by now (I would hope so) but it was what file type is best for saving large amounts of data? Binary, ASCII, TDMS, or TAB delimeted? I choose TDMS because I figure NI was trying to push their new abiliites (new at the time). But you can't say one is the "Best" what if the requirement is that it needs to be human readable? or readable within Excel, or the smallest file size? Or do they mean the best for streaming data quickly? Everyone I've talked to that has taken the CLAD has had this question asked. When bundling a cluster for a Waveform Graph what is the order of the following inputs (usually showing pictures of the options) Y Array, X0, Delta X? You could be using LabVIEW from the day it came out, and not know the answer to that, any normal person would say use the bundle by name and just wire it up properly. But here they want you to remember that the order is X0, Delta X, and Y Array. I remember hearing that NI employees can now take the exams, and I was hoping the questions would be improved by people internal to NI seeing some of the flaws in the questions. So please report back once you've taken it, and tell us if the questions are still tricky and missleading, or even wrong.

Yeah and in what other countries does inflammable mean flammable?

I didn't say I compiled LabVIEW into an EXE, I used ThinApp, it's owned by VMWare. Basically you install XP in a virtual machine, then in your host machine scan the virtual machine's hard drive image, then in the virtual machine install any program you want, then in the host machine scan the hard drive again. It will create an EXE that is a virtual environment for the new files to live in, kind of like a sandbox. So then you have a single EXE with LabVIEW that can be taken to any computer and ran, which will be idential on any machine. ThinApp is very expensive, but it does have a 30 day trial, I doubt it is unlimited use in that 30 days, but if it is we get alot done in 30 days. I don't work directly for Crelf, but he probably has enough persuasion around here, that if he wanted my SSD he could get it, but he would never use his powers for evil. And as for the Miley Cyrus, well he borrowed my external drive and started snooping around, I'm just glad that's all he found on there.

Yeah I like nlite, but if you just want to minimize what things are installed on your Windows machine after a full XP is installed on it, I recommend XP Lite, it's a program that you install on a normal XP machine, then it removes services, and extras to make it smaller and faster. There is a free version and a pro, the pro gives you more access to other services, but most of them break Windows, so I don't recommend it. Not to digress too much but they also have 98Lite which can reduce the Windows 98 install size down to about 50MB with full explorer shell, not always very useful, but fun to play with. You could take that 50MB of files, burn it to a CD, then on boot up copy that to a RAM drive, and boot into a full Windows environment...sure a 11 year old operating system but it was fun to do when the OS was only 6 years old. EDIT: It appears they have the record to 8MB for Windows 98 with explorer.

NI has recently changed how you download LabVIEW evaluations. Instead of having a direct link to a zip file, you first need to download a 1MB downloader program, which will download the 700MB or so self extracting zip file. Here's the page to download the LabVIEW 2009 evaluation. https://lumen.ni.com/nicif/us/lveval/content.xhtml 2009 can open 8.6 files, but remember if you save any thing in 2009, it can't be opened in 8.6, you must perform a File >> Save for Previous Version to open it in 8.6.

Well you don't have to be technically. A while ago (just to see if I could) I made a single EXE that was LabVIEW 7.1, and 8.5. 7.1 because it is my favorite and does just about every thing you could want for most applications, and 8.5 because that was the newest version at the time. So imagine carrying around a 600MB EXE (for 8.5 or 300MB for 7.1) on your drive that you run and you have a full LabVIEW development environment available on any Windows computer. I was going to post how I made it, so others could too but it's been a while and I'm not sure I remember the steps needed, but I do still have the EXEs floating around maybe if I get time I'll try to make it again. The main issue with this is most people don't have just LabVIEW installed, they have several toolkits for projects they are working on. Adding toolkits to this EXE after it is built isn't impossible it just would take alot of work. And installing new packages via VIPM wouldn't be impossible it would just be manual. There could be a directory structure next to the EXE, which the EXE then uses as relative files. So lets say LabVIEW85.EXE and in the same folder is $user.lib$ and what you put in there will be used as extra files in the user.lib. So basically this EXE would only be useful for making quick VIs, or opening small ones and seeing what's going on, but if the VI needs any toolkits it will be broken.

THOSE AREN'T PILLOWS!!! (sorry for the caps but he was actually yelling)

Get use to constantly needing to clean up the hard drive. My drive is only 64GB, my National Instruments folder alone is over 10GB. Then there's Windows, other Program Files, several SVN repositories, and several gigs of music. I tend carry around a a 2.5'' external drive that I keep larger files on (like virtual machines)

I did a very un-scientific test and timed how long it took to startup LabVIEW in the different versions. I did not reboot after every start of a version, so I don't know that if opening 8.0 then closing it, would have any effect on how long it may take for 8.2 to startup. But I did restart several times and here's what I got. With my installed versions of 6.0, 6.1, 7.1, 8.0, 8.2, 8.5, 8.6, and 2009, the longest taking 18 seconds was version 8.5. On average it took 10 seconds to start a version of LabVIEW on the first start of that version. The shortest time was 6.1 with 2 seconds If I opened 8.0, closed it, waited then opened 8.0 again the times were significantly less with the longest being 5 seconds with 8.6, the shortest 6.1 with 1 second, and the average being 3 seconds. It should be noted that 8.6 had DSC and FPGA toolkits installed, all other versions don't have any. Also no options on the startup procedure was changed on any of these versions. And my PC is a laptop with 2 GB of ram, a Core2Duo at 2.2 GHz and a SSD. I assume the SSD is what makes the startup time relativly quick. For the heck of it I also decided to run all versions of LabVIEW at once, and it took 12 seconds to load all of them, after starting them once already I'll reboot and try a fresh start of all of them at once later today.