Check your test equipment

I heard about a perfect example of #1 on my test engineering fears list on the radio the other day.  Some doctors announced earlier this summer that they had "identified a group of 150 genetic variants that they said appeared to allow people to live past 100."  Very cool, but now it appears that there was a flaw with their test equipment.

Of course, I've never had that problem before....

The Power of Complaining, redux

Over two years ago I wrote about complaining to National Instruments and the eventual response from NI.  Well, back in March I wrote about what happened when I took the CLD.

I use Google Analytics periodically, so I know that my blog gets regular hits in the greater Austin area (National Instrument's home).  So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that eventually someone from NI read about my test experience.  A few weeks ago I got an email from the Manager of Customer Education at NI to apologize for what happened.  She also said that the problems had been addressed and shouldn't happen again.

I'm not a NI or LabVIEW fanboy by any stretch, but I'll always acknowledge when they do something right.  Thank you, Carol.

How To Complain

Posting from Oregon

I haven’t posted in over a week since I took some vacation time, and then I was hit with a flurry of work that lasted until Saturday afternoon, took a quick break, and is going strong today.  A couple of days ago I was somewhere over west Texas watching electricity light up a thunderhead like a deranged Christmas tree.  So I decided to catch up on my reading.

What follows is a list of four articles from magazines, digests, etc that I subscribe to.  I managed to at least scan each of these and found them at least mildly interesting and at least somewhat related to test engineering.  Some of them are recent, some are over a year or so old.  I sometimes get delayed in my reading, but at least I get around to it.


Why We Need A Theory for Software Engineering
Dr Dobbs, Oct 2009
This is somewhat related to what I wrote a couple years back about software certification.  Plus it gets points for having Ivar Jacobson as an author.


Data Management Speeds Up Simulation of Crash Test Dummy Models
Nasa Tech Briefs June 2010
Crash test dummies are cool, and the idea of simulating those crashes and analyzing that simulated data is perversely cool as well.


The Online Shadow Economy
ZD Net/Messagelabs
This is a white paper, which means it is a piece of marketing with some small amount of redeeming tech value – the actual amount is negotiable.  I don’t know how real the picture painted by the author may be.  But it’s a fascinating one to examine, even if it is touched up with a bit of invisible ink.


Software Tool Integrating Data Flow Diagrams and Petri Nets
Nasa Tech Briefs March 2010
This little article intrigued me on several levels.  First, the tool itself looks like it would be useful for software testing (early in the process).  Second, I had never even heard of Petri Nets before - cool stuff.  And finally, the guy who invented them (at age thirteen no less) died just a couple weeks ago.

Blog anniversary follow-up

I was trolling around the NI website looking for blogs I may have overlooked when I wrote this post.  Then I found this little nugget: a recent presentation for NI employees about running blogs.  I had a good chuckle reading it, especially considering none of the NI blogs I saw were updated at the suggested once/week rate.  Also, several of the statements in that presentation paralleled a Wired article and NYT piece I covered a year ago.


When I worked at HP they had a policy of awarding money ($1000 back then) to anyone who was published in a magazine or journal.  So when I published an article in a visual basic magazine I scored twice: about a grand from the magazine as well as HP (sweet).  I wonder if NI employees that run their own blogs get extra compensation?  Or are they allowed to advertise on their blogs?  Food for thought.

Three year anniversary

I've now completed a third year of writing to this blog.  That's 133 posts, 35 of them over the past 12 months.  That's just a bit above my 32-post pace for year two, and way off my 66 posts the first year.  It's rough to keep up just a ~2.5 post/month pace, much less a post a week.

That's what I want to write about yet again today.  I took a look at the 8 blogs I had recommended after my first year.  Seven of them haven't been updated in a year or more, or only had a single post in the past several months.  I'm not even sure if the eighth blog counts, since it's maintained by Test and Measurement World.

I also tried looking at LabVIEW-specific blogs.  My main source was this list of blogs on the LabVIEW wiki.  Of that really long list, I only found 3 blogs that I would consider current: at least one post per month.  And ALL of those blogs are written by National Instruments employees, so again I'm not sure that counts.

So, aside from patting myself on the back, what am I saying?  I guess my point is that I've kept writing steadily for 3 years and intend to do it for years to come.  As I said a few days ago, I enjoy it.

Almost 3 years

As I mentioned back in April, I had several ideas for new posts but didn't have the time to finish them off.  Now it's close to the end of June and I've posted three items in the past week.  I'm catching up.

I am also approaching the 3rd year anniversary of this blog.  That date, along with my recent stops and starts, prompted me to ask, "Where am I going with this blog, and what do I want to accomplish?"

I occasionally use blog tracking software, so I know I get between 200 and 400 visits per month, averaging about 1.5 pages per visit.  That's a minuscule amount by popular blog scales, but test engineering is hardly a hot button topic.  People comment rarely, although I have had a few acquaintances tell me they read my blog and enjoyed it.

I don't get paid for this, it's not a supplement for my job, and I'm not trying to score points with people online.  Why do I do it?  Because a part of me always wanted to write - in college I briefly debated trying to become a novelist.  What do I want to accomplish?  To entertain and educate, in relatively equal proportions.

Okay, that's enough touchy-feely soul-searching for one day.  I hope everyone had a good weekend.

LabVIEW patent digging

I started down this path when I read an article about DASYLab in the April issue of Evaluation Engineering.  That triggered something in my memory about Measurement Computing, the company that published DASYLab.  After doing a little digging, I thought I confirmed what I remembered: National Instruments bought them out many years ago (1998).  But then I found a different article from 2003 stating that SoftWIRE, a subsidiary of MC, had patents it had acquired from Fluke that predate the NI patents for LV.  Hmm.  Finally, I found an article on Bloomberg that states, "as of April 29, 2005, Measurement Computing Corporation operates as a subsidiary of National Instruments Corporation."

But doing all that digging started me thinking about NI's patents.  Dataflow programming was first proposed way back in 1966 by Bert Sutherland, so NI couldn't patent that.  Although, if you do a patent search on, say, NI and programming you'll find hundreds of patents (or look here).  To my knowledge, patents can expire in as soon as twenty years.  LabVIEW was first introduced back in 1986.  Doing more digging, I found yet more nuggets:

• According to this news release, one of NI's key LabVIEW patents expires in April of next year.
• NI spent significant time and money defending a patent against The Mathworks (the MatLAB) people in 2002.
• There was a very interesting conversation on LAVA back in 2004 regarding the SoftWIRE v. NI lawsuit.
• Right around the turn of the century NI was in a LOT of activity: licensing patents and buying companies to resolve patent disputes (ex: here, here, over there, and out thatta way).

So where does this trip down the rabbit hole lead?  Here's what I saw:

1. Many of the original LabVIEW patents are getting long in the tooth and will start to expire as soon as next year, if they haven't already.
2. NI has no problems litigating patent infringement.
3. NI will buy companies to protect patents.

Based on that, here's my prediction: history will repeat itself.  In the next few years there will be at least one software company that develops a software package that competes on the cheap with LabVIEW (which currently runs several thousand dollars per license).  They'll be able to do this because of those expiring patents.  Heck, they may even write their compiler so that it can use subVIs written for LabVIEW.  After this happens, NI will sue them, force them out of business, or buy them.  I imagine they'll buy them out - I doubt they'd want the price point on LabVIEW to drop at all.

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.