BreakPoint
This is Hooovahh
@Hooovahh wrote:
So he went into photoshop, scaled the image and resubmitted. This time they accepted it, and he was eventually published.
I could have done it directly in LabVIEW by e.g. just turning every pixels into a 8x8 pixel area of the same color. for 64 times more pixels.
(It actually might not really have been "policy", but a limitation of the typesetting system they use).
(I still remember when the professor complained about the size of his PowerPoint files until I noticed that he had slides with dozens of stamp sized pictures, each actually a resized multi-megapixel image. 😄 )
@thoult wrote:
Sorry to say, PDF generation was done without the Carya toolkit - we already had a different system for use with C#, so I wrote a wrapper for LV - but it was a reminder of just how painful of how reporting can be without the right tools!
No worries, it's free now. If I have a few weeks time, I'll open source it. Just remember that iTextSharp is only free for open source projects. Not even when it's used in a free LV toolkit.
@thoult wrote:That long?! 🙂
The first release of the PDF Toolkit was written in LV6, in 2006 IIRC. I'm sure I had rudimentary (insert a jpg on a page) PDF creation way before that. So [22, 25) years.
Drawing a graph isn't hard, it's just lines, dots and text...
Making a universal API is very hard though. It got easier with OO though.
Search LabVIEW like a graph! 
Union Experiences
I was onsite working on a test system and a coworker needed to get up high to get a cable we had installed. He saw a ladder leaned up against the wall so he grabbed it, climbed up two steps, then put it back. Well the union guys that work there were very upset and had a meeting about the inappropriate use of the ladder. Not that he wasn’t safe, but that the ladder was to only be used by union workers. So the next day he bought a ladder from a local Home Depot and used it, then expensed it to the program and when he went home he strapped it to the roof of his car and kept it. He wasn’t allowed to use theirs, and he wasn’t allowed to leave it.
Same customer, same facility. I wrote some software to control their test system. My software had the ability to send an EStop condition that stopped everything from functioning, and this could get tripped for several reasons. The problem was to reset this meant putting the system into a known good state (which I could do) and then pressing a single Green button that I was not allowed to press. It wasn’t that it wasn’t safe to do, the button was next to the computer monitor where I sat most days. The issue was that the green button could only be pressed by a union guy due to some contract. So I abided by the rules. I’d sit there validating the software and occasionally I would invoke a halt function. Then I would have to go get the one union guy whose job it was to press the button. He would get up from playing solitaire (not a joke), press the button and go back. I’d test another halt condition and go get him. After about 4 trips the guys said “well you can just push it”. So now instead of his job being to press a single button, it was to tell me I can push this single green button for him.
This place also had occasional contract disputes. I was told one day to call in the morning to see if they are striking. If they were, I was told not to come to the facility or they would “destroy my rental car”. I was a bit confused since I figured vandalism was a crime, but apparently during a strike it was expected.
@Hooovahh wrote:
Union Experiences
And people look at me funny when I say that unions are not a good thing anymore.
I was doing some work for GE Engines and moved a cable that was wrapping around an engine turbine so it would not break. I was told the next day to never do that again because the union would complain. The lead engineer told me "If they break the cable, it is on them." All I could do is shake my head.
My dad worked for a grinding shop (they where given parts that came from molds and were told to grind them down to exact specifications for size and smoothness). The owner told many unions "If you come in here, I will shut down." The shop never unionized and he took good care of his employees.