hooovahh

This is very different for multiple reasons. But honestly these types of subscriptions don't bother me, because they often are for features you didn't pay for. This isn't someone paying for seat heaters, and then having them taken away and now you have to pay a monthly fee. In this case you had the option to pay for the seat heaters up front on a single cost (perpetual), or you now have the option of a monthly fee. Choice is good. I don't think the "Full Self Driving" of a Tesla is worth the $12k they are asking. Especially for a beta feature tied to the car, not the owners account. Which is why I think it is a nice option that they have subscription option that people can buy into for a month if they have a long trip planned. I still won't personally get it but I like that there is choice.

Here's a thread on LAVA years ago with some VIs to get a list of what groups the user is in. In the past I've had a couple of groups for various features of the software. An admin would assign what user can do what features, and then in my software I'd just query the users access and enable things based on that. I also used DSC years ago and it was fine, but I'd prefer Windows security since group policy can dictate things like passwords expiring, and password rules.

Dan I think you might be misunderstanding OP. NI allows you to recertify by attending and participating in NI event. If you get 50 points, you get to renew your CLA, or CLD without having to retake a test. Attending a user group is 5 points, presenting is 10. I still have time, but yeah I'm also going to be struggling to get enough points when needed. I'm either renewing by points, or not renewing at all. If there are any more online user groups taking place it would be nice to know about them so I can attend. I've been slacking for sure.

SystemLink Enterprise discussion moved to here.

Yeah I'm concerned about this too. I have about a year and a half so I'm not screwed yet, but I'm going to have to focus to make sure I get there. I plan on going to NI Week/Connect next year, and doing the beta this year. This on top of attending and presenting at user groups should be enough. Previous years I renewed by points without even trying.

This is a neat feature, but I feel like it would have been more beneficial had it came out 10 years ago or so. We've struggled with multiple versions of LabVIEW and drivers on a single OS, so now many developers will use VMs or Docker to sandbox a project to only have one version of LabVIEW, and the right version of the tools it uses. I feel like we've all gravitated to this due to the issues that come up with trying to manager version interoperability. I do still have a few versions of LabVIEW installed on my main machine. But if I'm ever building a binary I make sure and do it in the right VM for the project, so an older project doesn't now suddenly rely on the newest version of some dependent tool.

Congrats, and I hope you find your new work rewarding, and stimulating. Thanks for all your help to the NI community, and LabVIEW in general.

Spurred by Tim's post elsewhere, I did a Google search and found this page talking about TestScale. Apparently Averna is familiar with it, so that would make me assume it is more than a preliminary PowerPoint.

By standing farther away.

I knew if I posted this image, there would people over analyzing it...because that's what I'd do. The downstairs is actually the kids play area, and a utility room with laundry, water heater, and furnace. There isn't much furniture like the other rooms because it is just a place for large amounts of coloring, painting, and toys. But it isn't done yet. I also have the reverse of this, which is the traditional breaker list, with words describing what it controls. The garage is a separate subpanel but I don't think I'll do the layout on it since it is so simple, and I can turn the whole thing off if I need to work on something. I don't plan on moving for a while, but I hope whoever gets this house after me appreciates this.

I wanted to have a 2D drawing of my house's layout, so I could find have a clear picture of what outlets and lights were on what breakers. I ended up using PowerPoint because it had tons of shapes and was easy to use. I tried a couple of other 2D drawing things first but for a one off I figured it was easy enough. I showed it to a friend who was impressed that it was PowerPoint. Here it is, not quite finished. But this reminded me of a presentation I saw a couple years ago about how PowerPoint has lots of unused powerful features. It is an hour long, so maybe skip out on some in the middle. But experimenting with the morph features, 3D models, fractals, context aware designs, and using it for full screen programs are some of the topics. I especially love the library of 3D models.

As a user I'm not entirely sure I need to know what control values I changed. Some other software does have a visual indicator of a control value changing from the default. But most of the time, like in the LabVIEW config dialog, I just change all the things I want to, and then click OK or Apply or whatever. But if you do really want to have some kind of visual indicator of a change, maybe you could have a higher level indicator. In my software I mentioned I have several Pages, each of which is a VI, with a listbox on the left displaying them all, and a subpanel on the right for whichever is selected. In my software if the user clicks Apply or Ok, it will figure out what pages have been changed, and then publish to a public event that a config change has taken place, and what pages were changed. This way the software can be told if something changed that the code module needed. If the power supply page was changed, odds are the power supply actor is going to need to reload the config, and the logging actor doesn't. If the debug page is changed, more actors are going to need to know about it and reread the new config. So along those lines I bet you could have a visual glyph in the listbox, that shows that there are unapplied changes in that page. It won't go down to the control level but might be handy as a reminder of the pages the user changed settings on. Oh and I haven't needed this but I wonder if you could have a "Load Default" either for each page, or a right click option on the listbox.

Good advice. I just wanted to add that I was using the OpenG INI stuff for years because of how easy it was to save and load a panel to a section of an INI file. I'd have a set of pages as separate VIs that get loaded into a subpanel, and it was easy to just save and load the whole panel to a file. This started to have lots more functionality and these panels could run and have tables or trees that would eventually get saved as arrays of clusters in the INI file. I eventually found that the performance from these OpenG functions was quite poor when there are arrays of clusters of arrays of clusters since each I think line in the file was a separate call to the NI INI VIs. At the time I hacked in a way to write the data in a flattened, non-human readable format for these large data types. The MGI Read/Write Anything is much better performance-wise due to a rewrite of how it works. If I were to start over today I would consider JSON instead.

I don't understand the connection. They were running it on a low power laptop. They were a student. They were (and continue to) be concerned with the climate. They were (and continue) to consider themselves poor. Not that it matters.

Oh I have gotten malware from a shady torrent. Just never anything NI related, seems like it is a pretty niche category. I do remember once getting photoshop for a friend, and the cracking team added a splash screen on the software startup that was an advertisement for climate change. You had to sit through a 10 second page telling you about their efforts before the software would start.

Now I don't think it is completely fair to take what someone said during a presentation, and quote them out of context. But I just love this from Darren's presentation: If NI had a replacement for Project Providers that was documented and stable and all that, then I won't suggest anyone make a Project Provider plugin. Until then I say there is a time and place for them, just knowing the edge cases, documentation, and support issues. I think Darren's presentation does a good job of cautioning others.

I understand Rolf's concern, and others should listen. However of all the NI software I've gotten from non-NI sites, nothing has ever came with anything nefarious. They typically package the NI software untouched, along with the things that are shady separately. That shady stuff might be executables that perform activation, DLLs or EXEs that replace functionality after an install, or applications that generate offline activation codes. That being said I'd still not encourage anyone from getting NI software, from anywhere other than NI's site. Policies like this make that pretty difficult.

I won't be there this year, and haven't heard anything about an official BBQ. Fingers crossed for a full normal NI Week next year.

It's fine I moved it to a category I think fits. The Lounge would also work, which is a catch all. In the future feel free to use the Report to Moderator function giving text about what you want to have happen to a thread.

So I've been using, and loving OpenG zip functions on my x86 based embedded cDAQ running RT Linux. But I recently ran into an issue. The newest versions of XNet only supports being installed as OPKG packages. These can only be installed by using the System Image install option, and not the custom option that is needed for OpenG Zip. As a test I SSH'ed into my controller and copied the liblvzlib.so where it belonged, and my previously written code seems to find and use it. Is there any plan to update the inno installer to somehow add feeds or something so that the OpenG Zip tools can be installed through MAX, on controllers that use the System Image option?

That reminds me of a couple insults that I like but rarely use. "Room temperature IQ", and "Shoe size IQ". Digressing a bit but my new favorite is "You aren't the dumbest person on the earth...but you better hope they don't die." Also I think I'm more wise in my age, but I'm less flexible. I've also been told I'm hard to talk to, abrasive, and unapproachable.

I can't tell honestly if that is the same thing or not. I looked up the part number and it said it is a "LabVIEW Real-Time Deployment License for PC", but on the page talking about converting a Desktop PC to an RT target, it states "Note: NI is not currently planning on supporting conversion of desktop PCs to NI Linux Real-Time targets. Conversion of desktop PCs to Phar Lap ETS targets is supported." And this was last updated 5 months ago. But on a page talking about converting a desktop to RT, it lists Option 2 as using the license you mentioned. Edit: Now that I look at these I think the original page you linked to at Farnell is incorrect. I think that is a normal RT non-Linux variant license and the page is wrong based on the product number they listed.

If you have an MNU inside a class (or library really) you can set it as the Default Menu for items in that class or library. Then if you right on members of the class, or the class constant, then the menu you specified will be available as a shortcut. Lets say I install a File IO package with a palette for it. And then I install as Zip package. I might want that zip package to insert items in the File IO palette, or I might want to make a subpalette for the Zip, or make a subpalette under Advanced for the the zip which is also in the File IO. In any of these cases you can then add the MNU to the zip class, and set it to the default. Now I can have the File IO palette come up if I right click a Zip class, or I can have it come up with the subpalette if that's what I did during the install. Here is some information on it. https://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361R-01/lvhowto/setting_default_palette_menus/ https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Here-s-a-scripting-VI-for-LVClass-default-menu/td-p/2429356 In the scenario I described you'd want to edit the Zip class, but you also will need to edit the File IO palettes, either adding Zip items, or adding subpalettes to it, or linking the Zip palettes to it some where. Doing this causes browse dialogs if say a required Zip DLL was missing and needed to be installed as part of the system. In that case I'd just include the DLL, but in my actual dependencies is XNet which can be a 1GB install so including that in the package isn't ideal.

I don't know much about CINs, CLN, or DLL calling in LabVIEW. But don't be discouraged. Our history makes us what we are. There's several projects I started and spent a lot of time on just to do nothing with, but I feel like I learned stuff or grew as a developer and a person just because of the journey. Maybe that time could be better spent elsewhere. But with that mentality I'd never do anything for entertainment.

I'm currently getting the dialogs because trying to edit a class by adding the MNU to it, but having missing dependencies causes the browse to show up. This is currently a Post Install VI. This issue I worked around with the code posted that does this without using VI Server. And secondly I found that editing an MNU that has VIs that are missing dependencies also causes the browse dialog. A Pre Install VI to check if external dependencies are installed can fix this by failing to install. Hopefully the error can be passed back up to VIPM where it can tell the developer something like "Install XNet before installing this package". But as Darren said there are some tools in it that are useful even if XNet isn't there, and ideally I'd like to install the package before XNet, and just have some of those functions not available. Some aren't sub palettes, and are just items on the base palette. For those I could have a Post Install that opens up the MNU and remove the entries to items that require the XNet install, if it is missing. That way the package can be installed, just some items won't be available that use it. I'd still not be able to edit the Class adding the MNU to it, without causing browse dialogs, or using my custom code I posted earlier.