jzoller

The student version's been around for quite a while. And it's been crippled the whole time. I was thinking more like the original thread from the idea exchange.

ShaunR: Thanks! Your work on systems has been awesome to watch from afar. Thanks for taking part in making the JSON stuff into a real library. Unfortunately for me, most shops seem to be an either/or proposition on the languages they use. gleichman: Ah, I see. So: there are many more jobs. The pay is better. I can program nearly full time without needing to do sales/project management/QA/manufacturing/PCB design/what have you... that is, the job IS largely programming. LabVIEW can't seem to get away from the "programming as a second job" mentality, where the heavy lifting belongs to the consultants. And since I'm not really happy consulting... <shrugs>. As far as LabVIEW, I've always suffered from wanting it to be a general purpose programming language. Alas, it never happened. Even the hobbyist version got nixed.

<rereads post>... Hrm. I guess you could read it that way, if you wanted. Actually, I was working with C++ in parallel with LV on a multi-platform thing. It was fun. And, as tempting as it is to be that guy, I'll pass on the gripe list. Feel free to fill in your own.

After 15 years of making LV do oddball things, I'm moving on to text coding for my day job. I may still do a bit of LV here and there, but not much anymore. I hope LV can catch up in features and ecosystem to some of the languages that have surpassed it. It's an amazing language... I just wish it were used in more places, for more things. Thanks, everyone, for the insight, advice, and fun over the years. You all have my deepest respect for the amazing things you've done for the language and the community. Joe Zoller joe at underflow_software dot_com (no spaces or underscores)

Hi Sebastian, You can translate the xml to labview using the scripting functions. It's not trivial, though. You'll need to understand VI server and references reasonably well. You can turn on the scripting functions in more recent versions of LV under Options>>VI Server>>VI Scripting. It's a little dated, but check the GenINI code at http://lavag.org/topic/11920-genini-generate-readwrite-code-for-ini-files/. In particular, how typedefs are generated. Joe Z.

A Boulder, CO company that I'm familiar with is looking for a Test Engineer. Likely technologies are LabVIEW and Python, with a good amount of hands-on manufacturing work. Send inquiries to lboehnke at symmetricom dot com. Principals only. This is a cross-functional position, requiring collaboration with stakeholders spread across multiple organizations and disciplines. The candidate will work to achieve the following goals: · Create, enhance, and maintain automated and semi-automated production test systems that support a wide variety of new and existing products · Develop an automated regression framework and tests to support functional verification of new products and product modifications (hardware, firmware, and software changes) · Recommend, design, and develop interfaces and processes that improve manufacturability of new and existing products · Validation of product functionality, features, and performance The Test Engineering position includes the following roles: · Interface closely with software, firmware, hardware, and mechanical design engineering, and manufacturing in the fulfillment of position responsibilities · Design, develop, and review flexible product test strategies, processes, and methods · Design, implement, and maintain test automation software and hardware · Design, setup, and upgrade test fixtures · Actively support problem resolution activities, including recreation, debugging, and collaborating with development engineers and manufacturing · Seek out and implement enhancements to existing test and measurement systems · Run automated and manual tests as part of functional verification and manufacturing process verification · Document results and work closely with others to analyze and debug issues · Provide guidance to development on decisions that affect product quality and manufacturability, including common failure modes, easing failure debug, correct confusing diagnostic logging, etc. · Support test technicians on the operations floor · Involvement in creation and improvement of all engineering changes relating to test documentation · Participate in the capital equipment process · Contribute to cost estimates and reductions for all present and future products · Lead the creation/maintenance of test plans and schedules, coordinating multiple projects, reporting status / progress to management · Initiate and drive the development and review of test processes, plans and procedures following the test platform

Request deallocation can also be a huge time hit. I've tried it several times on 2D arrays of strings in different situations, and it's... well, not ideal. I ended up writing my string array to a file, and storing an array of mapped integer file offsets. The deallocation problem first showed up with some changes in LV6.1... apparently, it's either not soluble or not a priority.

Always love your insights, Tomi. Thanks for blogging again!

Not sure here, it won't install on my work machine. It appears to be interacting poorly with something from my IT group. I'll try again when I really need it.

If you can handle some Python programming... The simplest way I've found to do this is to build a socket listener in Python. It opens a TCP port, and waits for commands to come in. You can see the basic idea at http://docs.python.org/3.3/howto/sockets.html. On the LV side, you send commands to the Python socket using the TCP functions (http://www.ni.com/white-paper/2710/en/). When the Python side receives a command, it breaks it down, and routes it to the right dll call. When the dll call finishes, Python might send a message back to LV with results, if needed. There are always a lot of little details to handle, but if you get the basics of this down, it works very well.

I just wanted to chime in and say I think this is a fantastic idea. It's something I've been looking at and tinkering with for a while (using kineticjs), particularly a re-visualization of the profiler and trace execution data to a format that's more connected to how the diagram and hierarchy look. No time until the new year, though... making money interferes with all the fun stuff.

Congrats!

Given NI's tendency to litigate and their patent portfolio in the US, I don't predict smooth sailing for this company.

While it doesn't answer your question... I recommend not using the profiler. It's measuring something like processor time, rather than wall-clock time. The profiler doesn't account for long disk accesses, slow serial connections, memory teardown time, etc, etc. This ends up very misleading. Depending on what you're trying to measure, instrumenting your code is usually a more accurate, if somewhat tedious, way of doing things.

I've been down this road, too. Windows has a number of third party SSH tools (cygwin, TeraTerm, etc), but all of them are encapsulated in their own little universe and don't interact with other code well. Tunnelling sounds like a good solution. Because I'm not that smart , I ended up bridging LV with Python, and using the paramiko package to handle the ssh connection.