Cat

Wow. I'm finding myself in the ironic position of feeling like I have to defend a new technology to a bunch of engineers and scientists.

I didn't spend a lot of time with them, but I looked at the Sony and nook readers just before Christmas. The nook seemed like the nicer unit to me, but I didn't get to hold it; there was a big crowd gathered around a sales person demonstrating the features.

I held off on my purchase until I could get a Nook in my hands. It was okay, but more of a concept thing. The little color interface box didn't seem quite ready for prime time, yet, and the software for the whole thing was definitely in Rev 0 mode.

To me, these devices are a solution looking for a problem. The only 'problem' they seem to solve is that of the distribution of wealth.

The problem they solve for me is not having to lug multiple books around when I'm travelling. Or pay exorbitant prices at the airport book store. Also, there is a lot to be said for the instant gratification of finishing one book of a trilogy, and being able to purchase the next one without even having to move one's butt off the couch. Saves on gas $$ and puts less wear and tear on my death-trap of a Toyota.

According to reports, the publishers give up 30% of the price, but have no printing, inventory or distribution overhead; just marketing and editing prior to release. The publishers will make more because they certainly paid more than 30% in production costs. Lets say for the sake of argument that it is 50% (probably low).

Probably high. You need to take 30-50% off the top of the retail price for what the bookstore gets to sell the book.

The 50% that used to be distributed amongst loggers, paper mills, printers, trucking companies and book stores provided income that was in turn used to pay mortgages; to buy cars, groceries and books . A free economy is like a well architected LabVIEW application; it depends upon flow.

Do you object to industries using robots instead of assembly line workers??

The 30% redirected to the new business model seemingly goes to support the infrastructure to distribute the books. This is false because as a user you must pay subscription fees for access (cellular, broadband, etc...).

Nope, you only pay for the eReader. No subscription fees.

On to the next apologia...

From a technology standpoint I agree they are very cool and it's nice to finally get a viable form of electronic ink that doesn't cause eye strain.

I had a days worth of nirvana a couple weeks ago. My daughter and SO were both gone and I did nothing but read all day long. Went thru 4 books over the course of about 15 hours. Only got up off the couch to attend to personal needs and (of course) feed the cats. Someone asked me later how my eyes could stand that. I realized that there had been no eye strain at all for the whole time. Something that is a definite problem for me after 4 or 5 hours of Real Book reading.

I'm not inclined to buy ebooks that require a $200+ electronic device in order to use. (I don't buy online music that I can't burn to cd either.)

I hear ya. I'm not saying that it's not a luxury item. However, reading is one of my greatest pleasures, and the Kindle makes it easier.

Cat, do you use it primarily for leisure reading or work-related documents?

All leisure. I've got the regular Kindle, not the big one that is better for text books.

I haven't seen a lot of ebooks, but I was amazed by both the Kindle and the Panasonic readers - the screens are amazing.

As an avid reader, I wasn't very keen on the concept of an eReader. After much resistance (and borrowing eReaders from friends), I finally drank the kool-aid... My Kindle is now an essential part of my electronic gear. Especially when I'm travelling a lot.

The worst part about the Kindle?? It's having to continually reminding myself that, yes, I am actually paying for all those books, even if I don't have to go to a store or whip out my credit card to buy them.

Couldn't post these in a PM so ignore me as I post them here for Cat.

Thanks for the input, Shaun! I guess you don't fully appreciate my "modern art" avatar.

Back to PM before we are severely reprimanded for being off-topic...

100s turn out at global warming protest rally:

And they look so ANGRY, too!

I have noticed a major increase in the time it takes to save a VI with the new versions of Labview. If I make no changes to the pannel and just select save, times can be in the order of 20 seconds. I am using 2009 with the latest patches. Load times are also very long now.

Just for the heck of it... if you're running on a network, try disconnecting it (pull the cable). In the past I've had some issues with LV searching for non-existent links out on the network and slowing down load times.

Trying to interact with Excel is not necessarily the easiest thing to do in LabVIEW. You might want to just use the "Write to Text File" in LV to save your data in a CSV (comma separated value) file, so it would look like:

time1, data1

time2, data2

time3, data3

etc...

This type of file can still be read by Excel, and you don't have all the problems of trying to format in Excel.

As an example, now I am trying to measure some physical quantity and record them day by day into an Excel file and I want to display the recorded data with their corresponding date and time in the Excel file within 3 different cells but my program display the recorded data with their corresponding date and time in 1 cell of the excel file; I was wondering if you please help me in this manner<I have attached my progam>

Which I believe is already in this thread:

http://lavag.org/top...__0entry71375

Flower, have you been through the "Getting Started with LabVIEW" tutorial that comes with LV? Also, if you go to ni.com and type "LabVIEW tutorial" in the search engine, all sorts of good stuff pops up. Working through the tutorials/examples is one good way to learn.

I knew if I was wrong someone much brighter than I would respond.

They key is to right-click on the control and enable Drag and Drop. Assuming it's there in the version you're using.

Because... the short answer is that you can't do a simple drag and drop from one listbox to another.

With most listbox-to-listbox interfaces you select a line in one listbox and then hit a button with code behind it to transfer that line to the other listbox. Same for moving rows up and down.

Agreed, but the devil is off-topic for this thread.

You're right, sorry! Besides, I keep swearing I'm not posting to this thread anymore. I'd say the devil made me do it, but then we'd be right back where we started.

(unless you are the same page a Danny Glover (sp?) who stated the Haiti earthquake was due to no action being taken in Copenhagen).

He is so wrong! It was because Haiti made a pact with the devil. According to Pat Robertson, anyway...

Right, and if you're allowed to download and install VIPM then I can't see why you wouldn't be allowed to download and install OpenG and JKI packages using the same method...

<BR><BR>Oh, definitely. It's just a matter of lugging my laptop home and doing it there. I'm heading off to install and test the Big Project soon. If I get a chance I'll download the freebie version of VIPM tonite. I've got 12 hours on a plane to play with it. <IMG class=bbc_emoticon alt= src="http://lavag.org/public/style_emoticons/default/blink.gif"> <BR><BR>Thanks for all the input everyone!

Actually, none of those will really solve your reuse dilema - sounds like you need VIPM - seriously.

I think I have the very first version on some ancient laptop around here...

Part of the reason why I stopped using it was that a few years back it was declared by the Powers That Be that we could never touch an outside network with our acquisition computers. Not that they are classified, but just because... That made updating/synching problematic so I abandoned it before I ever really started using it. Plus back then there was only the Big Project and reuse wasn't an issue. Mostly I was using it for the very first OpenG versions.

All that being said, I could take my current development laptop home (it's not considered one of our acquisition computers) and download there. After that, are the any issues with running the Professional version off the net? Or should I be asking Jim these questions?

I just received a summons to report for Jury Duty next month.

Let us know how that goes. Assuming prisoners have internet access in NC.

If I see reuse code in dependencies that isn't in user.lib, it usually means I've accidentally linked to the source code and I need to fix it.

I use user.lib just for generic tools. Nothing application dependent.

Most of the code I reuse across applications is reading/writing file formats, performing basic analysis functions (mostly of the FFT variety). Other users want to use the file format we've developed for the Big Project so they can use my analysis tools. So I am deliberately using code from Big Project in those other projects. As I said in my original post, I haven't had any problem managing this until recently. Maybe I need a library called reuse.lib where anything that's cross-application goes. Or maybe I just need remedial source code control tutoring.

Otherwise I can see the project space getting a little unruly.

"Unruly." That's the exact description of my Big Project.

Monitors are the same? I've had to go back and redo spacing/alignment since the latest batch of laptops we got in are widescreen and that messes everything up.

In addition to crelf's comments, you can also store LV projects in a LV project. So you can create your other projects and add them to the Big Project. You can double click on a project in the Big Project tree to open it up.

Yes, thanks for reminding me. That's probably what I'll end up doing.

Reply #26 (you will probaly have to click for page 2) in this thread on the dark-side has images contrasting the folder vs Project views.

Thanks for the links, Ben. It's good to know I'm not the only one wondering how/when/where/why to use projects. There's a lot of good info in those threads.

I keep forgetting there's another LV forum (tho I did read everything I could find on projects on the NI website a couple weeks ago).

Bope - only list the VIs in the project that you need to get access to or call dynamically and need to add manually to the build definitions - all the other ones will be listed under the dependancies section (if they're being used). For example, I have a few projects with 100s of VIs, and I only have 5 or 6 VIs in the top level project.

Okay. I've already started putting that together. I've pulled top/dynamic vis out into a new project. Another Q: is there a way to copy build specifications from one project to another?

Sure, there may be issues (you mentioned that you're stuck with an "improvement" that you don't like) - if it's really in your way the let us know about it - one of us may have found a work-around, or maybe you're not using it in the way it was intended. That said, if it's a real issue, let NI know and maybe they'll fix it...

I'm very willing to admit (and was trying to in my original post) that some of these issues may be my fault. My main problem has been that between the Big Project and other projects I'm working on, there is a lot of code reuse. I've managed this all quite fine for years. Ever since I had to start using projects, there have been several occasions where I have altered or even deleted code because I was editing it in one project and didn't realize what impact this was having on code in another project. I don't think this is something that can be "fixed" by anything other than me knowing what the features/limitations of projects really are as they apply to a large installation with many parts.

The next version of the Big Project is ready to be shipped (so to speak ). I've got a couple days before I head out to sea for the installation and I thought I'd spend it doing a little code organization.

This is a set of code that I've been developing over the past few years. Somewhere along the way, NI in its infinite wisdom, decided I needed to be using projects to organize my code. I won't go into the headaches this has caused me, since it's one of those "improvement" I'm stuck with. But I do think part of the problem that I have with the Project Paradigm is that I really don't know how to use it to its full advantage. I realize there are multiple answers to this question, but I'm hoping you all can give me a few pointers.

Here's the situation: I have a project with 2000+ vis in it (well, really only 1800+. The other 200 are two OpenG polymorphic vis I use ). This project consists of a main program that calls a whole bunch of code dynamically, nine or ten "tools" programs, and 4 or 5 ancilliary programs that aren't really part of the Big Project, but are needed for other parts of the test setup.

All 15 of these programs have their own executable and those executables go into one installation package (that resides in the Big Project). I've started attempting to move the ancilliary programs off to their own projects and just pointing to their executables in the installation package. I'm not really sure if I should move all the tools programs off too, mostly because keeping track of 15 projects will be a headache.

Also, what vis should be listed in the project directory when I'm done? Right now, there's a whole bunch of vis that I don't need -- whatever I created while the project was open. Should the listing just consist of whatever top level vis and files I need to actually use to build the executables? Or should all 1800 vis be listed (hopefully not!).

As you all can probably see, I need a lot of remedial help!

Cat

It seems my bug is not a bug, but, "a result of the change of the Cursor Legend from LabVIEW 7.1 to 8.x". I dunno. If going to a newer version changes how my GUI acts, in a way that I can't directly access to fix, that's not a good thing. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Anywho, the very nice NI App Engineer says he will file an internal product suggestion to change this change.

In the meantime, I've coded around the bug, uhh, change.

Cat

It could cover 360 degrees if you wore it like a hat .

I keep thinking about those tin foil hats to stop aliens from invading your brain.

http://www.stopabductions.com

My favorite quote:

"The thought screen helmet has effectively stopped several types of aliens from abducting or controlling humans. Only four failures have been reported since 1998."

If you need to change it, you will have to code it up,

It's easy enough (although definitely annoying) to click on the cursors in the tree and contract them after the centering function. However, there's another function where I have a cursor automatically scrolling across the screen between the 2 other cursors and need to have its XY values displayed at all times. Manually contracting that is impossible. So yes, I'll need to code it up, I guess. I've done something similar before in another application when I had a single cursor and wanted to display the XY values as the graph caption.

It's just annoying that this used to work and now it doesn't. Makes me leery of upgrading to new versions of LabVIEW. I've got over 1800 vis in the Big Project, and testing them all after an upgrade is a huge job (not to mention all the Little Projects). I noticed another bit of GUI code the other day that's not working quite right any more, even tho I haven't touched it since before I went from 7.1 to 8.x. I'll be checking that out today. Odds are it's something I unknowingly did, but now at least I know to consider it might be another version change issue and I just have to code around it.

Follow up:

I dug up the original 7.1 code, and shore enuf, it works just fine -- no expansion of the cursor legend tree. I've reported it as a bug to NI.

Based on some of the past posts, I'm not convinced that the modification to the cursors between version 7.1 and 8.x was necessarily a good thing.

That's a really good point. The code this is in has been around for a few years, and I was idly wondering the other day why no one had noticed this behaviour before. It might have not been a problem in the original 7.1 code.

I'm having a minor issue with the cursor legend of a waveform graph and was hoping someone would have a solution.

My cursor legend starts out looking like this:

After I programatically set the cursor postions (using the Cursor.PosX property), the cursor legend looks like this:

This is a Bad Thing, since the real code has several cursors and after it opens they go beyond the legend window. Here's the bit of code I pulled out to illustrate this:

cursor legend test.vi

I guess I need a property to contract that tree after it's been expanded. I've looked for something that might do this with no luck. Any ideas?

Cat