Software tools

A collection of 43 posts
Character Sets

Character Sets

So here is another article inspired by Joel on Software. In this article, titled The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!), Joel talks about the importance of understanding Unicode and character sets. It is a bit of a rant (Joel
3 min read
Rename AF Message

Rename AF Message

I inherited a project written using Actor Framework recently. I started to do a little refactoring to make it easier to add some of the changes I needed to make, following Kent Beck’s idea of “First make the change easy, then make the easy change.” What is in a
4 min read
TLDR

TLDR

I’ve been doing a bit of Linux work lately, and I’ve stumbled upon this thing called TLDR, so I thought I would share it here. Manpages If you do much Linux work, one of the first things you should have learned about was manpages. This is the Linux
2 min read
LazyGit

LazyGit

In a previous post, I mentioned lazygit in passing. It’s a nice CLI replacement for some of the Git GUI tools like SourceTree. It’s not too well known so I decided to do a little write-up on it. What LazyGit has over something like SourceTree is that is
5 min read
How to create a cRIO Virtual Machine

How to create a cRIO Virtual Machine

Just a week or two ago I stumbled upon a forum post that outlined how to create cRIO Virtual Machine. I’ve written a little bit about Virtual Machines before. Creating a virtual cRIO was pretty straightforward, but it required piecing together several responses in the thread, particularly since I
5 min read
February 2021 Webinar

February 2021 Webinar

LabVIEW Shortcuts – Don’t waste time wiring… February 24th, 10:00am MT We are fortunate to have Stefan Lemmens join us in February. He is going to give a presentation on all the various types of LabVIEW Shortcuts. We are always looking for ways to be more efficient. These tips
1 min read
Zsh

Zsh

Oh My ZSH If you follow this blog, you will know that I am a huge fan of the Maintainable podcast by Robby Russell. It contains lots of great information about working with Legacy Code and how to write code so that you avoid a lot of the issues with
5 min read
Getting Started with 3-D Printing

Getting Started with 3-D Printing

I did a job a few years ago for a mining company. We were building a tester to test soil samples. I was amazed that many of the parts for the tester were 3-d printed. I thought it was pretty cool technology. At the time I thought it could be
4 min read
Don't Waste Time Manually Writing Documentation

Don't Waste Time Manually Writing Documentation

We all know documentation is important. Our software will likely need to be updated and upgraded at some point, oftentimes by another person who is unfamiliar with it. Even if we are the ones doing the updates we may not remember all the important details. That is why documentation is
2 min read
Camtasia

Camtasia

I have been working on putting together some prerecorded online classes. I have been using Camtasia and Snagit a lot lately, so I thought I would do a quick writeup on them. I first discovered these tools when doing some videos for NI. That is what they had recommended for
2 min read
What is Docker?

What is Docker?

I recently posted a book review for a book about learning Docker. I immediately got some feedback that I did not do a great job of explaining exactly what Docker is. This post is going to be a brief explanation of exactly what Docker is and particularly how it compares
4 min read
Enhanced State Diagram Editor

Enhanced State Diagram Editor

I was talking to Fab a while ago and she put me onto the Enhanced State Diagram editor. Apparently it is one of Jeff K’s pet projects. It is a way to create a state machine by drawing the diagram in a special editor that automatically generates the LabVIEW
1 min read
Git Tips For Beginners

Git Tips For Beginners

Git is a great source code control tool, but it is not known for being user friendly. It’s actually a shame. The way in which git stores and references content is incredibly elegant, but it’s UI seems more of an afterthought. The command structure is not at all
7 min read