The Cutting Room Floor: Interesting finds in LabVIEW resource files

[Sparkette]

Let's take a look inside labview.rsc first...

Four of the connector pane patterns actually have names:

• 4833: "monnie pleaser"
• 4834: "super monnie pleaser"
• 4835: "monnie would be pleased-er"
• 4836: "add supports 2 ddt"

I guess this book wasn't lying. (edit: This is on page 122, and actually, it did get it slightly wrong: the two conpanes shown in the text are actually 4834 and 4835, respectively.)

Two cursors with rather...interesting names:

• 64: "order sucker"
• 65: "order squirter"

Someone at NI has a dirty sense of humor 😛

There's some resources that correspond to the style values for VI scripting. Some of them aren't in the style list; unfortunately attempting to use these just gives an error:

• 2051: "Comment Node" - says "Case" in the data, and gives "Unable to create new object" instead of the usual "object not found" error
• 2358: "Line of Script"
• 3902: "Growable Node with Header"
• 3905: "ExtFuncTerminalTipStrings" - data says "External Function Node", and has names for "path in", "path out", and the standard error in/out terminals
• 9008: "Select Menu Item" - with all the menu nodes. Looks like at one point they were working on a primitive for programmatically activating menu items.

Someone found some hidden structure types a while back. All but one of them didn't work, and that other one is now an official part of LabVIEW. I found the image for the "Race Structure", which I've posted to that thread:

There's also this super-minimalist "Alternate Splash Screen":

And some monochrome sprite sheets—looks like the old Boolean constant graphics are still there. From what I know about internal VI data structures, I wouldn't be surprised if those were still used if you load a VI created in an old version of LabVIEW.

Just thought I'd share. Curious if anyone has seen these before!

Edited September 21, 2020 by flarn2006

[Sparkette]

Found the icon for Select Menu Item. Also I tried applying that "add supports 2 ddt" conpane to a VI, and it turns out it's a hidden one that's not normally selectable.

Actually, here's all the icons in lvicon.rsc. I also put up a Web page where you can hover the cursor over one and see its description.

Edited February 25, 2019 by flarn2006

[Sparkette]

Few interesting things in lvdialog.rsc:

This file contains a good number of dialogs used by LabVIEW as VI files. None of them have block diagrams, probably because they're programmed directly in C. These three stood out as interesting, though they might not be at all. The dialog on the right, specifically, was listed under a name that suggests it's used for adding built-in functions to the palette. Perhaps some NI-internal feature just waiting for the right INI key or license?

By the way, that weird "User Item" object placeable via scripting (or my Place By Style plugin, which I guess still counts as scripting) shows up here a lot, usually where images would show up. I guess it's a placeholder control that just does whatever the connected C code is programmed for.

Edited February 25, 2019 by flarn2006

[hooovahh]

Seriously Monnie?  Get your act together.  Let that be a lesson to us all not to be a Monnie.

(I don't actually know a Monnie, and have never heard of this term before but I love it)

[jacobson]

Monnie would be the pleased-est to know how many terminals a VI could have in NXG.

[Sparkette]

30 minutes ago, jacobson said:

Monnie would be the pleased-est to know how many terminals a VI could have in NXG.

😄

I'm curious about that screenshot. What's that VI from?

Edited February 25, 2019 by flarn2006

[jacobson]

It's from "Connector Pane Pattern Reference.vi". There's no code it's just an indicator showing the pattern numbers and the terminal index mapping. Just a handy reference for scripting.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

This is a reference to Monnie Anderson who worked at NI long long ago. Not sure where he is now.

[viSci]

along time ago I ran across an interesting paper by Monnie.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=664322

I used some of his ideas as the basis for this...

http://viscience.com/blog/portfolio-3/

Edited February 26, 2019 by viSci

[Sparkette]

1 hour ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

This is a reference to Monnie Anderson who worked at NI long long ago. Not sure where he is now.

Yeah I figured; I saw a lot of references to him on Google and no one else named Monnie in relation to NI. Also naturally I assumed it was a woman, because Monnie is generally a woman's name--so much so that I accidentally typed "her" at first when replying to you 😆

54 minutes ago, viSci said:

along time ago I ran across an interesting paper by Monnie.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=664322

I used some of his ideas as the basis for this...

http://viscience.com/blog/portfolio-3/

I've actually seen that before, at the Maryland Science Center. You may remember my thread about it from a while back

[austinman]

This was posted at NI and relevant to this thread:

Monnie Anderson, a very early National Instruments employee who retired not long after NI went public in 1995, passed away this morning.

He was one of early LabVIEW's most important internal users, the inventor of the Error IO cluster convention, provider of extraordinary customer support, and all around LabVIEW enthusiast and evangelist.

He is memorialized in LabVIEW with three densely packed connector panes, named: the 16-terminal "monnie pleaser"; the 20-terminal "monnie super pleaser"; and the 28-terminal "monnie would be pleased-er".