jcarmody

From an online poetry contest held here.  My favorite line: "A suicide bomber changed her mind, and nobody ever knew."

On the Day I Became a Terrorist
by benjamin haas

On the day I became a terrorist there wasn’t a nuclear meltdown or pipe bomb
explosion.

There was a radioactive and over-fished ocean, but that had nothing to do with
me.

I am not sure what I was wearing, probably something denim.

I didn’t buy white powder, fertilizer, meat, birds, or bacteria.

I didn’t sneeze, scream, get sick, slink down an alley, or see the dentist.

There were cops, but there are always cops, and no shots fired.

On the day I became a terrorist the sun came up on Bagdad, Jerusalem, New
York, Coney Island, L.A., the Mississippi River, El Paso, San Diego, Bogotá,
Tokyo, Baton Rouge, Tripoli, Kingstown, and almost everywhere else too.

I probably checked my email, drank a cup of coffee, and read the news.

Someone made a paper airplane, and pretended it was a crop duster.

There wasn’t a hurricane, tornado, swarm of locust, lightning storm,earthquake,
blizzard, typhoon, wildfire, brown out, mudslide, or flood covered by the media.

I drove my car and regretted not being on my bike.

For me the clouds were still in the shapes of animals and cartoon faces.

There was distant smoke, but if you ignored it, you could convince yourself it
wasn’t there.

On the day I became a terrorist I wasn’t subject to denial of service online or at a
restaurant.

Someone drank a car bomb, smoked marijuana, and snorted cocaine in a
bathroom.

I wasn’t stockpiling a weapons cache or plotting with my radical friends.

I didn’t own a single vest.

And I have no idea what was going on in the PLO, Tamil Tigers, CIA, Hezbollah,
IRA, Department of Homeland Security, FARC, Tea Party, Al Qaeda, KKK, or
anybody else.

I talked with small number of people on the phone.

I doubt I said the word “jihad,” unless I was talking about music.

I ate a salad with home-grown tomatoes, and had a glass of port.

There were children dying from the self-interested decisions of old men, and I did
nothing about it.

I didn’t cover my face, throw a brink at a window, do any looting, or judge anyone
who did.

On the day I became a terrorist bridges spanned, buses and subways ran, and
still some people cried.

Someone lost their grandfather’s pocketknife in airport security.

There was drilling into the crust of the earth, and gas leaks in several apartments.

I thought that power lines must have seemed like the industrial revolution’s cat’s
cradle.

And I counted the tiles on the bathroom floor, while someone else was held
hostage.

A suicide bomber changed her mind, and nobody ever knew.

Something was so much fun, somebody said it was a riot.

There were lots of flags flying.

On the day I became a terrorist there was just the sound of rustling and pens
dragging across paper, signing bills into law

and silence. boom.

This brings up an ethical question I've had about the possibility of building an executable for someone with a student version of the software.  What sayeth y'all?  Is it expressly verboten in the EULA?  Is it shady?  Is it just plain wrong?

[...] i can't by the key from my country

ITAR!

This is what I use when I want to make something for the Tools menu:

Why don't you let the VI itself open it's FP?

And if you have a large case structure, it's wise to add a piece of code after CS that inserts the case selecter info into the error data.

 

TOn

I understand your first comment, and it works as long as I keep the Wait.  Please explain the second comment.

Alright, I dug down into the code and saw you had a 1ms pause in Dynamic Launch CaseSelect.vi between Run VI and FP.Open.  I bumped that up to 10ms and it seems to be working now.  Go figure. ...

Oh, noes!!!  I must have had this, or a simliar, problem years ago that this Wait fixed.  I couldn't remember why I added it, which explains the comment I put in later...

Someone else had this problem, too, but I can't find the discussion we had.  You may have fixed that one, thanks.

Not necessarily an answer to your question, but if I had that many cases I would start to think about my architecture. [...]

That was my concern four years ago yesterday...

Shaun's link doesn't work.  Here's the Quick Drop plugin he referred to that does what you want, sorta...  The navigation feature doesn't completely work as I lost interest in developing the plugin before getting all of the wrinkles out.  It does a WHOLE LOT MORE, though, that you may like.  I wrote it because I had Case structures with too many states.

Those left/right arrow buttons do what you're looking for, albeit imperfectly.  They'll kinda-sorta let you navigate through your history (that you've made using the plugin).  It works well enough that I can/do use it, but it makes unintuitive mistakes.  The rest of the tool lets you see all of the states, activate one, rename/move/delete/create...  It's a life-saver when working with the type of software you described.

It requires the JKI State Machine, but not their Right-Click Framework (that stopped working years ago so I converted it to Quick Drop).

It only works in LabVIEW 2012.  The link to the NI Quick Drop Community page is the latest-and-cough-greatest version.

And then this answer to the article is also an interesting read.

I wish I could "Like" this twice.  Thanks so much.

Here's an article that answers The Oatmeal's comic about Tesla & Edison.  They're both interesting reads, but the comic is funnier.

I just got this article in my inbox titled To Invent Like Edison, Learn to Collaborate.  It made me think of the reading I've done about Nikola Tesla and the suggestions that Edison was a thief less productive than history would have us believe.  This quote, in a book by his great-grandniece, made me smile:

He viewed collaboration as the beating heart of his laboratories, a sustaining resource that fueled the knowledge assets of his sprawling innovation empire

I'll be he did!

Not all of the rss links fail, but this one does.  It seems that Google Reader is able to see past this error and give me my LAVA fix, but Google Reader is going away and I want rss!

Could it be the "Get Strings from Enum__ogtk.vi" that you're looking for?

I installed http://selfoss.aditu.de/  If you have a web server you can have your own reader that'll never turn its back on you and leave you wondering what you've done wrong even though all you've ever tried to do was to love it and...

Welcome to LAVA.

You'll find your answer at the bottom of the page:

It has been saved. 

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_museum_saved

They'll need more money, though...

It works, thanks.  Great job!

I think I'm going to go with Dash, but that's just me.

This surprised me just a little - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shred444/drive-with-dash (between /projects/ and /drive-with-dash).

The joy of scripting.

Does anybody have this file?  I recall seeing it a long time ago and I want it again.

Thanks,

Jim

I found this on the NI forum.  I'd never have figured that out...

Here is the scenario:

 

You have a heavily nested project and you are debugging your sub-VIs.  You have pressed pause or you are stepping through one of them and you accidentally close your sub-VI.

 

[...]

I just read the part about closing the sub VI; I'm not sure I understand the situation or that my snippet will help.

Try this:

I used Shared Variables in a project about seven years ago to communicate between a Windows touch-panel and a RT controller.  I thought I was having a similar issue until I realized that it took as long as 0.03 seconds for a SV to update.  Are you relying on a write in the initialization to be read in the downstream loop?  It could be that your code gets there before the SV actually updates.

Maybe not.

Algorithms I begins, again, next week, just in time to finish before Algorithms II begins in March.  I didn't finish part 1 so I've enrolled in it again.  I decided early on that I wasn't going to bother with the assignments in Java.  I'll try to work them in LabVIEW...

You're safe with me.  This reminds me that I need to make this into a Quick Drop plugin.