BreakPoint
Thoughts on NI Week.
@taper wrote:
My 1st NI week, kid in a candy store.
Texas in August is hot.
Got to teach 2 presenters something new. NI employee giving the Overview of Data Communication hasn't read the Clear as Mud thread(fairly high level employee, surprised he didn't know the effects of terminals inside structures). ...
Thank you very much for that write-up taper!
Re: Clear as Mud...
If there was one thing I could do to improve LV it would be to convince NI that;
"The true expert regarding a 'thing' is the user of the thing and not the maker of the 'thing'." (paraphrase of Plato's Republic chapter ten).
This was illustrated by the first LV coding challenge where non-NI developers produced code that out performed the code from NI employees.
When I attempt to communicate that message I get a very polite "Well that is an interesting thought Ben thank you." and they walk away mumbling to themselve "What an arrofant a$$hole he is."
The second thing would get them to stop running after the next computer fad that hits the streets.
Stick with the fundamentals.
Ben
@taper wrote:
..., kid in a candy store.
Always!
Texas in August is hot.
I thought it was actually quite nice. No rain and always a breeze.
NI employee giving the Overview of Data Communication hasn't read the Clear as Mud thread(fairly high level employee, surprised he didn't know the effects of terminals inside structures).
The "effect" is relatively subtle and only performance oriented. It does not break anything.
I crashed LV2012 twice in sessions.
Was it random or reproducible? Did you submit the crash report? 😉
Keynotes were awesome, though I wasn't in the mood for a political speech the last day.
The problem with politically biased speeches is that, depending on the demographic composition of the audience about 50% will not like it, independent of the message. :o. It is on youtube, so everybody can see for themselves. He touched many points that should be important for a wide selection of political leanings. The tone was positive: "This is what we do", and not "this is what the other guy would not do" or similar. It was a bit glossy, though. 😉
The invited outside speaker on the third day has always been interesting and somewhet offtopic (tornado chaser, Dean Kamen, Chris Anderson, etc.) We have not yet gotten a glimpse into the politics of science education and manufacturing, etc. I enjoyed it.
.
3400 engineers + 1000 NI employees + expo exhibitors = no wireless.
Clearly, the network was overwhelmed at times, which is a new one. It was always flawless in the past. Most likely a large part of the problem is that now every smartphone is WIFI enabled so the number of connected devices is a large multiple of previous years. Most of the time I did get an IP address and speed was usable. (I've seen worse. About 2 years ago I was at a meeting in San Francisco and it was impossible to get online. Period.) Obviously the conference center needs to upgrade the WIFI facilities. Everybody should mention it in their survey so it gets addressed for next year.
Very well-managed crowd control. Didn't feel any lines were excessive. Heard stories from last year about the lines for food being terrible, not a problem this time.
You must have misheard. The conference center food lines were always highly parallel and optimized for throughput. No complaints ever. A different story last year was the food line at the conference party at the then brand new Moody theatre (same as this year). There was basically a single food table and the line snaked around the entire dance floor. This got improved this year.
I placed 18 out of 70(at the time) on the speed coding display. Pretty happy with that but I won't be challenging for the "world's fastest LabVIEW programmer" title any time soon.
One of these days I will try too. I always way too busy with all the other things.. 😄
With a weekend to catch up on sleep, I'm ready to go again.
Ditto!
@taper wrote:
[...] At least until a direct brain interface is developed.
[...]
They're getting close.
Very well-managed crowd control. Didn't feel any lines were excessive. Heard stories from last year about the lines for food being terrible, not a problem this time.
You must have misheard. The conference center food lines were always highly parallel and optimized for throughput. No complaints ever. A different story last year was the food line at the conference party at the then brand new Moody theatre (same as this year). There was basically a single food table and the line snaked around the entire dance floor. This got improved this year.
Ok now I already thought that I missed out on a lot. But a dance floor? This is something that I would not participate in, my avatar aside, but I would have loved to see this!
@jcarmody wrote:
@taper wrote:
[...] At least until a direct brain interface is developed.
[...]
They're getting close.
You obviously missed out on the mind-controlled shark. 
@Steve Chandler wrote:
Ok now I already thought that I missed out on a lot. But a dance floor? This is something that I would not participate in, my avatar aside, but I would have loved to see this!
This picture was a bit early in the evening, but later there was a large crowd dancing. The band was LC Rocks (turn down your speakers before clicking :D).
@taper wrote:
My 1st NI week, kid in a candy store.
Ditto
Texas in August is hot.
It is in June and July also.
Hands-On sessions were disappointing. Advanced DAQ timing was too simple, OOP didn't work and was poorly setup.
I learned to see who was presenting instead of looking at the content. I also learned to think "ok, what product is behind this". For example, there was a session called "overcoming the limits of Excel" so I went to this because our customer requires large datasets to be in Excel for their internal processing. The session was basically "overcome Excel by not using Excel, use DIAdem". I also learned that as far as most of the "advanced" stuff goes, anyone who programs LabVIEW on a daily basis won't get much out of it. I did enjoy the presentations on systems that were actually built, because although they may not be applicable to me, they feed my engineering curiousity.
I crashed LV2012 twice in sessions.
My coworker crashed it twice on the CLA (ouch). Luckily he was able to reproduce it and report it. It was while editing an enum.
Keynotes were awesome, though I wasn't in the mood for a political speech the last day.
Jeff K's demo on the iPad is interesting from a "can this be done" view, but I don't know if it'll ever be more practical than a keyboard and mouse. At least until a direct brain interface is developed.
I heard past keynotes were a bit better, but they were still interesting. I thought the iPAD was cool, but I heard a few years ago there was a proof of concept for zooming in on a system overview and when you zoomed in far enough on yoru cRIO, PC, etc it showed the code for that. Nothing ever came of it. Still cool nonetheless.
Very well-managed crowd control. Didn't feel any lines were excessive. Heard stories from last year about the lines for food being terrible, not a problem this time. Switching the down escalators to up after the keynote let out was genius.
One time they turned every escalator to go down by mistake. I walked the whole convention center in a circle before realizing this.
They fixed it rather quickly. I guess some people complained
Those are my comments. Some good things that happened to me: LAVA BBQ. At the NI Forum VIP party, I got the bartender's number; the drinks were on NI so it couldn't have just been for a better tip. I met many LAVA and NI forum users and NI employee frequents on the forums (finally). I also learned beer is better when you don't pay for it. Free margaritas are even better than free beer. I still love hair bands even though I only lived 4 years in the 80's and 0 years in the 70's.
Overall, I got more out of the networking than I did out of the actual convention, but I still learned some things and had an awesome time. I think the CLA Summit will be more up my alley for the learning on the technical side of things.
