Cat

There is no way my company would pay for me to go.

Try bugging Management about it for 10 months. That's what it took for it to happen for me.

I'm still trying to get my managers to appreciate why it's better for me to have a quite place to work.

I feel your pain. We had a tech who played the radio all the time. Then he left. When he asked to come back I said, fine but no radio. Now I only have to deal with the roar of 30+ multi-fan data collection boxes and assorted UPSs, one of my cow-orkers continually ringing phone, and delivery guys knocking on the door all the time.

I really get a LOT more done on those rare days that I work from home.

I had to start talking it up 10 months ago, continually remind my management to set aside $$ in the budget, and swear on a stack of technical manuals that it wouldn't interfere with my test schedule, but, I'm actually going to NIWeek!! I need a HappyDance emoticon.

Why are you still using IE anyway!?

I work for Big Brother. It was a Great Day when we "upgraded" to IE7 about a month ago.

Why do I see the LAVA I content dropping?

LAVA I content is being (slowly but surely) migrated to LAVA II. That may be what you're seeing.

(Jeez! I nearly hit the "Manage Topic Poll" button again! Can't teach an old cat new tricks! )

Staff?

I've been staff for awhile now, and this has just started. It's kinda annoying because I'm used to the big dark button above my post being "Add Reply" and now it's something else. Everyone remember this when you're changing your GUI designs...

Oh well, in the scheme of things this is pretty trivial!

But I feel we are not living an ideal world so we have to adapt.

This sounds like when I can't trust my daughter not to eat a whole bag of M&Ms so I have to just give her a few at a time. In other words, I don't believe she is mature enough, or smart enough to make the right decisions, so I limit her options.

When you're talking about a 14 year old, that's reasonable. When you're talking about all adults over the age of 18 in the USofA, it sounds a bit patronizing.

All of this being said, the majority of voters are for term limits (or have been in the past). "We The People" have voted to limit ourselves. And if/when "We" decide "We" are mature enough to handle it, "We" can vote to remove term limits. That's what democracy is all about.

Of course this isn't going to happen any time soon, since most of us as individuals think "We The People" are just an unruly mob who can't be trusted to vote the "Right Way" (as I can't trust my daughter in the M&M example).

I personally think that term limits should be abolished whenever MY party of choice is in power and reinstated otherwise.

A couple things:

1) Why, when I create/reply to a post, is there now a line above it saying "Topic Poll" and a button saying "Manage Topic Poll"? And the "Post New Topic"/"Add Reply" and "Preview" buttons are missing from where they have been conveniently placed above the post.

2) My "View Unread Content" is often not updating after I read a post. This may be my browser (IE7), but it's worked fine in the past.

I'm not a religious man, but I'll pray for you. May the gods of Labview have mercy on your soul.

Gee. Thanks... I'm sure I'll need it.

(I hope you at least created a backup before attempting this?)

Up one side and down the other. I'm very anal-retentive about backing up; it's the only way I've survived so far.

You just listed #1

I know! #4 has been my real excuse.

I guess I should wander around this subforum and see what might work well for a single developer...

Another option occurred to me last night. Some scc repositories allow you to set up symbolic links to files in other repository files. If your scc system allows it that would definitely be a less risky option.

My apps are more interwined than I remembered, so just moving directories is taking longer than I expected. I haven't started moving common code to the Shared directory yet.

I do not have a "scc system". That's part of the problem, eh? It's just me writing code, so it really hasn't been an issue in the past.

You're not stuck still using 8.2 or 8.5 are you? (I know the military is slow to adopt new technology.) If so, I'll just say keep your troubles manageable and leave the code where it is. I've had much better success moving code with 8.6 and 2009.

I've got 8.6.1 (I'll probably get permission to upgrade to those 2009 disks sometime in 2011). I started the process of reorganizing yesterday, and so far it's been going okay. Of course I copied EVERYTHING off to an external drive first. Which was good, since I did end up having to pull a few files off of it when old versions snuck into the new directories. Today I'll take a deep breath and start moving stuff to the Shared directory.

And then I get to figure out what to do with my executables tree. But that will be for another thread. I've hijacked this one long enough.

Assuming you've done that correctly and you expect there to be more apps to follow, I would probably create a single parent directory containing directories for each of the individual applications that make up the system. I'd also add a Shared directory for code used by multiple apps. When you find something in one app you want to use in another app, extract it from that project directory and put it in your Shared directory. (Be careful not to break the links in your original app!) Then, once you've moved the code to the shared directory, remove it from your original app's project to indicate that app no longer "owns" that code.

This is pretty much the road I've started down. I've got a Shared directory, but haven't had the nerve to move much in there due to the linking issue. So that takes care of Big Project and all it's various tools applications. But it's still internal to the Big Project tree. I guess I have to be really gutsy and put it external to any project. While maintaining the links to about 3000 vis in 20 different apps...

Thanks! This has been really helpful.

Where you don't have anyone else left to blame?

Oh. Crud. Why didn't you mention that before?!?

This is just something that I feel is very important to get under control before I do some damage that it takes some real time and effort to recover from.

So, I ranted yet again to my boss about this topic and (finally!) should have VIPM on order momentarily.

I used to have the problem of unintentionally modifying the code in my reuse library... now I make all my reuse code read-only while building it. Problem solved.

Hmm. Interesting solution. I could apply that to my generic reuse code...

(You do keep your reuse source code separate from the reuse code you use in your applications don't you?)

I keep generic reuse code in my user.lib (which I guess is passe now, too). I have a few hundred functions I've written over the years in there (many of which were eventually supplanted by OpenG functions ).

An example of my problem is this: I have the Big Project (BP) that stores data is certain file formats. A New Project (NP) comes along and wants to be able to use the tools that I've written for BP to analyze its data, so it needs to have its data stored in the BP file format. Not wanting to rewrite code for the NP, I reuse BP-specific functions/typedefs/etc. Or, I come up with a better way to do something in NP and want to use it in BP. Or when I started using queues instead of GVs to get data from my buffer to my analyzer in BP and it broke various NPs.

So how do I organize this? Does code that gets used over and over in BP, and one time in NP, get moved to a "reuse" directory? Am I just being old-fashioned in thinking of things as going in "directories" in the first place? I've spent some time on the NI website reading documents about the Project Paradigm, but I have not found anything that really answers how to best utilize Projects when you've got multiple large overlapping applications. That, BTW, all have to be turned into executables at some point, so I really don't have the option to just ignore Projects and manage it all how I used to.

Ehh. Sorry about the rant. This is just something that I feel is very important to get under control before I do some damage that it takes some real time and effort to recover from.

I'd much prefer to use a tool that helps me with reuse so I can get on with my business.

I need a tool that slaps me severely if I try to alter code I've used in some other application. I used to do just fine keeping track of all that, and then LabVIEW switched me to the Project Paradigm. I've had more than one really big boo-boo since then.

Or maybe it's just that I've just finally hit the critical threshold of brain cell loss from too much .

• Shift-Enter will give you a new blank case.
• Ctrl-Shift-Enter will give you a duplicate of the case you were on.

Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it be just as easy to right-click on the case structure and select "Add Case After" or "Duplicate Case"?? I must be missing something here...

And how do you read "available memory" and "program usage"?

Program usage I get from eyeballing how much memory just running the program takes up in Task Manager. Then I throw in a couple hundred MB because LV has a bad habit of grabbing memory and not letting it go (even if you use the "anxious deallocation" function). This all should be a fairly constant value, depending on your program. For my program that's about 750MB. Like I said, this is Bad Programming and not how I would like to be doing it if there's a better solution out there.

I have a set of Windows API llbs that I've had so long that I don't remember where they came from. Available Physical Memory is in winsys.llb\System Information.vi

Windows API.zip

Welcome to my world...

I love LabVIEW dearly and will defend it as a great all-around programming language, except in one area -- memory management. And that's a killer for those of us who have to manipulate/display large data files.

My (rather vague) understanding of the problem is that LV generally wants to grab *contiguous* memory. So while you may have plenty of free memory, if it's broken up, LV can't necessarily use it. (I'm sure if I'm wrong someone more knowledgable will jump in here...)

My workaround for this is to read the available physical memory, subtract off about 750MB for what I label "LV inefficiencies" and divide the remainder by a "memory loss" value. Trial and error with this has left me with a value of 4 for memory loss.

(Available memory - program usage) / memory loss = #bytes of hopefully contiguous memory out there somewhere

This is a cludge and isn't really determining what I need to know (available contiguous memory) and I hate it. But it works, most of the time. If anyone else has a better way to do this, I would love to hear it.

Everyone: IMHO this member is looking for a contractor to do the work for him and is willing to pay for it (which I'm totally fine with). With that in mind, I suggest we all either work for the $ offline or leave him alone - please stop trying to harass him into doing it himself.

I realize that the other forum members can stand up for themselves, but he *did* post this in the "Help me with this LabVIEW code I want to write" section of the forum, and not the "I've got a small job for a LabVIEW programmer" section. And then proceeded to accept free suggestions. Or rather proceeded to respond negatively to free suggestions. Definitely sending mixed messages.

I agree, he and his chosen contractor should take this offline. Tho, I must admit, I definitely applaud Mark Balla's attempts to supplement the LAVA beer fund.

Note to any generic HR folks out there: that is how to write a "help wanted" ad for a techie

Absolutely. I've printed it out and am going to save it as inspiration for next time we're looking to hire someone.

The content is all in case 42.

That's the answer, then.

Sweet indeed. Fight you for it.

Is there such thing as "virtual arm-wrestling"?

I want this job!!

If only it didn't mean leaving behind my daughter, my cats, and my SO.

Of course, my daughter is in China, my SO is under the deep blue sea, and one of my cats presented me with a fur ball this morning. If I just snuck off, no one would notice for quite some time...

If you don't get any answers here, try over at Info-LabVIEW . There are (or atleast used to be) quite a few LV/Mac experts there.