Needle in the Haystack

Finding the best answer is not always straightforward. Scientists are not programmers. Repeat that after me: scientists are not programmers. It’s not their fault; it’s just a lack of proper training.  If you are implementing

Beware Simplicity

Simpler ≠ faster : you still have to know what happens “under the hood”. If you read the post about en masse operations, you might remember that I pointed out that you should know what

Terminator 2: the Sequel

Make sure that quitting time is followed by happy hour. As mentioned earlier, a compiled LabVIEW application behaves similarly to the development system when terminating.  Namely, it leaves the main window on the screen, waiting

Writing Non-Fragile Code

Oooops…. who broke it? “Fragile” code is code that breaks in one place because of changes you make in some other place. It’s most aggravating when you’re due to ship a new version tomorrow and

Watch your step

But who’s watching the watchers? Some development environments have a concept called “watching”, where you choose a variable to watch and you see a continuous display of that variable in some window.  This is very

The Next Step in TCP-IP

Several conversations at once A question came up on the LabVIEW forum the other day about multiple connections, and how hard it was to have two connections transmitting at two different rates.  This surprised me

Speed of En Masse Operations

Zip-zap-zowee and swoosh! Just in case you thought I was kidding in the article on en masse operations, I decided to offer some proof of the speed advantages they can give you. I used the

Operations en Masse

The things that I used to do… En masse is a French term meaning “as a whole” or “all together”; treating a group of something as a single unit.   LabVIEW has the ability to

About Type Definitions

The types, they are a-changin’ LabVIEW beginners often either don’t know about type definitions, or don’t appreciate their value. This article will attempt to explain their use and how they can save you boatloads of

The Terminator

Make sure that quitting time is followed by happy hour. Generally, you don’t do anything special in a LabVIEW program to quit; when it runs out of things to do, it terminates. (Quite clever, that).