Cat

Cyber Monday is every day! (just doing my part for the economy) The very LAST place I will be on Black Friday is any bricks-and-mortar retail establishment, anywhere. Shopping is painful enough without all that madness and mayhem. Well, maybe if REI has a really good sale....

I spent my first few years with LV doing a lot of card-level programming but other than some instrument I/O, have done very little of that sort of thing in the past 10 years. Is this something I would need to go back and review for the CLD exam? Someone's been peeking at my code again!

I love Yosemite! I wracked one of my knees up coming down off of Half Dome with a 35lb pack (this was back in the days when you could still camp up on top) and then had to climb down all those "stairs" of Yosemite Falls. Luckily it was the last day of a 5 day backpacking trip, so I only had to be miserable for a few hours.

Everything I've read about that peak says that violent thunderstorms are a daily occurence in the summer. Mount Elbert is definitely an option. My SO is a Highpointer and he hasn't climbed that one, yet. 4000 feet up over 4.5 miles would definitely be a challenge for me. And I'd be sure to get off the mountain by early afternoon in order to avoid any hair-raising experiences.

I don't have LV9, so I'm assuming your tiff is of the actual block diagram. If so... Your current code takes temperature data every 200 milliseconds, stores it to an array, and after 5000 samples (~ 17 minutes) writes that data to a file. If what you want to do is every minute take a sample and then write it to file, you need to wire a 60000 (ms) to the metronome ("Wait until next ms multiple") where the 200 is wired. Then you need to move the file writing code inside of the for/next loop. If you want the data displayed as you go along, you need to move "Temperature Graph" inside the loop, also. Check your delta-x value -- it's not going to be ".25". If you want to wait till the end to write/display, leave those parts outside of the loop, but you still need to use 60000. Also, check out the file I/O functions. There are a lot newer ones available than you're using. Cat

I was in England last year during Armistice Day and was overwhelmed at how big of a celebration it is there. After going almost a couple hundred years without having our mainland attacked by a foreign country, I think that sometimes some of us USAmericans can be a bit too complacent about our (supposed) invincibility and therefore less appreciative than we should be of the men and women who willingly put themselves into harm's way for us. It was very refreshing to see that isn't true everywhere. Anyway, (belated) thanks to all of you who have served, in whatever capacity. Cat

http://www.birdandhi..._Turtlehead.htm Ok, it's not Mount McKinley, but it was certainly at the far end of my fitness spectrum. A short hike (2+ miles), but the last half mile was a killer. Any steeper and we would have needed ropes once or twice Coming down was in some ways even worse than going up. Some parts of it were a semi-controlled slide. I was really glad I finally got around to buying a walking pole. Two hours up and a little over an hour to get down. We had great weather, so I was an idiot and just wore a tank top and shorts. My legs were all scratched up, but at least I got a late season suntan out of it. Now on to figuring out what the next challenge is going to be! Cat

I go away for a few days and you all turn my innocent little joke into a series of hideous GUIs. Nice work!

All I can say is, skinning or not, from now on I'm using "Clouds" on all of my GUIs!

It's looks more like "You're an idiot."

Our SDD was written 5 years ago and never updated to reflect reality. We are rarely required to do any sort of formalized design documentation -- in fact often no one wants to pay for it. I do rigorously document anywhere I interface with someone else's code, but must admit, should do a better job with my own. That's why I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about it that I will actually impliment and continue to use over the long run. 95% of what I write I write alone, so I've got to be internally motivated to deal with this.

I had to do something that sounds similar with a very graph-intensive piece of code. I was tasked with making 1 "uniform" interface for 3 groups that had their own completely different products. So even tho the basic layout was the same, some wanted a black background, some wanted white, some were very picky about what order the colors were for different plots, etc. This problem was compunded by the fact that User X could be running the code and User Y, with very different aesthetic requirements could be using it 5 minutes later. I ended up building a GUI where each user could go in, mess around with all possible settings, and save their preferences to their own ini file. The users were all a-gaga about it for quite some time and had fun playing around with it. I've noticed lately, tho, that after a year, most of them have migrated to just using the default settings. Cat

Learn something new very day. I wonder if it was always like this. I'll have to dig up that old code and see what was really happening...

Many moons ago I wrote some code where (I thought) this sort of construct did not reliably work. I had to separate one property node into multiple nodes and access them sequentially to get them to always execute in the right order. Was I imagining things? Does LV automatically execute property nodes in the same top-to-bottom order all the time? If so, it would definitely save me some screen space. Cat

That's a definite "Kids, I'm a professional, don't try this at home!" demonstration!

I've been thinking about doing this. Where do you paste the images? Off to the side somewhere? I'm thinking about wrapping a stacked sequence structure (gasp!) around the SM and putting the SD in frame0. Mostly because I really really don't like a BD being more than one (1024x768) screen.

Things that involve the kids, like the hair/balloon example, will go over well. If any of your daughter's toys are of the dynamic type, see if there's not some physics principle that can be taught from them. I had the same dilemma with my daughter's girl scout troop -- and unfortunately at the last minute, so I had no time to prepare any props. Software engineering is not very exciting to talk about. So I just talked about engineering and what they needed to focus on in school (they're in middle school), and then told submarine horror stories. The latter, at least, kept them enthralled.

OMG. Paul, did you really have to post that?!?

Not unexpectedly... Well, I've already admitted to the heresy of being willing to put multiple loop/event structures on one BD (back to the original thread). That's how I deal with the exact example you give. I've used a lot of state machines but never had the need to use one that was queue-driven. Or maybe just didn't know that's what I should have been using. Thanks for your input.

Yes, but... (apologies if I'm hijacking this thread) I've been looking at some code I wrote quite some time ago that has an event structure that passes messages to a queue with lots of code underneath it. I think the only reason I did it this way was there were a few bits of code I could reuse by just sending different inputs triggered from different events. I would have had to copy the same code to those events, otherwise, or put it in an event with a "value signaling" trigger (jcarmody, I believe this is what you were talking about?). But this was a rare case and usually I have code in events that is unique. And even tho I'm doing it this way, I still have to be very careful about what controls are enabled/disabled when. My users like to randomly push buttons when they're bored... But if it wasn't for the code reuse issue, I'm not sure what generally the benefits are to separating the event and the code for the event. I'm not buying the "more elegant" concept (which is subjective, anyway). I look at my event/queue code and see it being less readable since the action and reaction parts are separated. I also see twice as much BD space being used. And I see one loop having to rely on another loop for its stop signal (that's one of my least favorite "rabbit hole"). I don't call that "elegant". So if there are real hard technical reasons why I should go to using the event-to-queue paradigm on a more regular basis (keeping in mind that I have no issue with using multiple event structures when necessary), please tell me! Old cats *can* learn new tricks. (And bonus points if you can convince me it means LV will make fewer copies of my Really Big data sets )

Any time your users can kick off multiple simultaneous, long-term events, you're probably going to have to have multiple structures to deal with that. I use multiple loop/event structures often. I've tried both putting the code inside the event structure and also calling it from a queue. I'd have to say I like the code-inside-the-event frame version better for most applications. It takes up less screen space, and in a particularily complex piece of code, I don't have to go hunting around for the right queue handler.

That works for the engineering department because a lot of engineering students actually *want* to program. I have a friend who is in the last year of getting her PhD in Neurobiology. I told her about this thread and asked her if she ever did any software programming for her projects. She said that no (other than a required class), that's what the Tech labs at the school were for. And then added if she enjoyed programming she would have gone into Computer Science... You get what you pay for. And in this instance, what you are paying is your time. Either spend a couple months teaching someone who likes and wants to program a new language and have them around for 2 years after that, or spend a year (as you say) teaching a non-programmer how to program and have them around for a few more years. Of course using a non-programmer probably increases the odds that they are going to give up along the way because programming is not really what they want to do. And as Shaun points out, the quality of the software may suffer too, requiring more of your time to re-make a usable piece of code. It sounds like you've already made up your mind, but I hope you've added factors like this into your cost/benefit equation. If you're that swamped, I don't suppose there's a chance of hiring another programmer?

Yes, I can. It's got the word "theory" in the name, so I guess it must be okay.

Anyone for a game of global thermonuclear war? "The only winning move is not to play." I think BigBrassOnes must have been already taken by some other branch of the military.

Thanks, crelf. Now NCIS is going to be after me.