Month: November 2017

I have never been to New Orleans before, so for those who read my BLOG more often: I have added State #35 to the state-chart! And I really have to say: New Orleans is pretty cool, It has a flair that you hardly find anywhere else in the USA. I didn’t really know that in most of the US it is not allowed to drink alcohol in the streets openly. Hence the brown paper bags you see everywhere. As a European you don’t notice that, for us its normal that you just drink wherever you like. Bot so in the USA but in Bourbon Street you can openly drink whatever you want. You can also walk around as you please, i saw people there that were “dressed” (or actually showed a lack of dressing) that I normally only see in the capital of my country. (For those that don’t know: I live in the real land of the free, the Netherlands)

That is cool but the coolest thing is the music. Literally every bar has a couple of musicians that play. Mostly Jazzy bout also other kinds of music.Raz and I landed in a pub where the band was building up the stage. they told us the band would start in 45 minutes or an hour and that suited us, we wanted to speak anyway. But after some discussion (Raz and I do, luckily, not always share the same opinion) we looked around us and noticed that we were, by far the youngest people in the bar… I’m 56 so that tells you something. And yes, when the band started we soon figured out that this was definitely not our Jazz…

So we moved to another one where the band was already playing. That was much more OK.

Shortcuts

Rhapsody has a lot of keyboard shortcuts. They are described in the manual but unfortunately this is pretty hidden. there are a few websites where you can find more info on that, I will add some here.

Search (and find)

In Rhapsody 8.1.5, when you were in the Rhapsody editor (or in active code view) the CTRL-F command would give you a search dialog. This would search for the string that you typed in. After that F3 would give you the next search-hit.
This no longer works. the reason for that is that the Rhapsody developers have unified the search dialogs in Rhapsody. There were (historically grown…) four different searches in Rhapsody. None of them worked for 100% so Raz and his crew decided to clean that and make a search app that would not only search but also find…. This comes with a (temporary) price, the search lacks some “hidden” features that were previously there.
The find-dialog in the editor has a field “Mark All”, that will put a red ball with a white cross before each line where the searched string occurs. Not a prefect solution but definitely workable.

2 Very useful ones…

The shortcuts that are hard to find in the documentation are the Shift and the Alt key. When you are in a Diagram, State-chart or Object Model Diagram or so, as soon as you draw an element inside another element (when this makes sense according to the UML of course) then Rhapsody notices the hierarchy and will treat the outer element as the container of the inner element. That also means that if you want to resize an element that has other elements inside it, resizing seems impossible without also resizing the content. Resizing is done by selecting the element and take one of the dots that surround the element and drag it.
Now try to press the “Alt”-key when dragging, you will see that the content of the element will stay intact. Now that is cool eh?

In a sequence diagram something similar happens. When you notice that you don’t have enough space in the middle of a sequence, shifting all elements down is pretty tiresome. This can also be done by clicking on the place where you want to make space and press the “Shift”-key while dragging down (or up if you want to close gaps!) This will take the entire content and moves it with your mouse.

I hope this will help you in your Rhapsody life! Have fun modeling with Rhapsody

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Just another day in Paradise

Just before flying back to Europe I spend a weekend at my Friend Arno’s place in Florida. The USA contains both paradise and hell. Florida is paradise, Las Vegas is hell. I hate Las Vegas. But I love Florida, especially South-West Florida. Weather is really nice there, nature is beautiful. You can see all kinds of plants and animals that we don’t have at home. Hence the title picture. Normally I buy photo’s, this one was taken by me.

The USA has it’s nice things, Unsweetened Ice-Tea, free Re-Fills, brilliant weather. It has its flaw-backs as well…. But not too much in Florida…

This morning I woke up early to have some time to take a cup of coffee with Arno, who has to work today, before leaving for the airport. When I got out to the terrace next to the pool I noticed that it was not too warm. My friend Arno and his wife were both freezing… they already live in Florida for a long time and think that 14º C is very very cold. My European body reacted totally different, i thought it was nice and almost warm… That was 7am, on 9am it was already way over 20º…. things were back to normal… Also paradise has its requirements…. no temperature under 70ºF….;-)

Requirements

Speaking about requirements…. How do you get requirements in Rhapsody? There are a number of ways to do so. It also depends on what Requirements management tool you are using.

• Managing them in Rhapsody. You can do that but you will not like it that much. It is tiresome to handle requirements, there is not much overview and linking is a pain in the….. For a small program like a Stopwatch it is OK but anything bigger this is a no-go.
• Use DOORS to manage your requirements. Wait… Doors is old? Well, that depends. There are a large number of companies out there that use Doors since years and have large databases full of requirements, and mostly a complete workflow around the Tool using scripts and much more. Since Doors is still supported and even developed (to some extend) by IBM it is not a bad choice. You can synchronize your Requirements from Doors to Rhapsody using GateWay (Which is actually a Tool called Reqtify and is being maintained by a french company called Dassault (Yes, the ones that bought NoMagic) It can sync your Requirements between Rhapsody and Doors and it is fully configurable so you can also use it for other tools then Doors and you can select how you sync the Doors information in Rhapsody. It is and add-on tool, you have to pay for it. A cheaper and also very nice way to sync your Requirements between Doors and Rhapsody is the Willert Software Tools ReqXChanger. It uses the ReqIF format to exchange Requirements, it is also configurable so you can determine the exact information that you want to sync. In the latest version it can also exchange diagrams between Doors and Rhapsody!
• Use Doors Next (DNG) to manage your Requirements. This uses the Jazz Database to store Requirements and something called OSLC to sync the Requirements with other Tools. You would have to use Design Manager or the new Model Manager in Rhapsody to sync your Requirements with that. Design Manager and in lesser extend Model Manager need powerful hardware to run on. So if you are looking for a more “light-weight” solution, you can also consider our ReqXChanger, it is a low-price and low-performance using solution to exchange your requirements. You can still use it in a batch way (For instance in a nightly-build) to automatically keep Requirements and tracing information up-to-date.
• Use non-IBM Tools (like Polarion) to manage your requirements. Syncing can still be done with ReqXChanger. This is a big advantage of the ReqXChanger, it is very flexible in where you can use it. If you change your Requirement Management Tool (Or even your modeling tool…. but we will not talk about that….) you can continue using the ReqXChanger. If you use another tool then the named one and you would like to sync with Rhapsody, feel free to contact me!

Kicked out of Paradise

So. It’s time to pack and leave paradise… Modeling is definitively nicer if you do it in the sun with a glass of Ice-Tea. But modeling beats text-based programming always. Even when it’s cold outside.

Happy Modeling (and requirements implementing) with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Getting nostalgic

In the days of Windows XP (Who’d ever thought I would say that I gladly wanted to go back to XP…) installations were easy. Your PC basically belonged to you and the OS would not interfere in anything you do.
How different is that now. Since Vista (may it burn in …..) we are plagued with an OS that tries to force its will upon us. And installing a complex environment like Rhapsody and a few add-ons becomes a nightmare.
We used to let people install everything during a one day training. INstall took about 30 minutes and would work 99% of the time.
Now it takes hours and the success rate is 50% or so. Even with our own installer, install manual and physical presence of somebody that “knows what he is doing” it is just too difficult to get everything running reliably. Have I already mentioned that I hate Windows?

Brave new world…

At Willert we use Macs. Since 10 years, give or take, we have kicked out our Windows laptops and buy expensive Macs, just to prevent us from hiring multiple sysadmins to keep our stuff running.
Unfortunately, IBM, (a large Apple user itself ! ), does not deliver Rhapsody on a Mac. Yes there is an Eclipse plugging but that is just a “facade” plugin. It calls the Rhapsody DLL’s to do the real work. It won’t work on Linux or Mac OS. Duh…
So we use VmWare (we kicked out Parallels because they’ve become too greedy) to run Windows on our Macs. Works OK. So we are used to virtualize.
IBM has now taken this virtualization to a new level. You can have images that you can instantiate and distribute.
So after installing all tools and testing that they work correct, we can now let other people access it using Remote Desktop Connection. This will work from a Windows PC (It is built-in there) and from a Mac (download Microsoft Remote Desktop for free from the App-Store) And apparently even on a Linux Computer, you have to download a 3rd party tool there but it works.
Using RDC requires an internet connection but not an extremely fast one, it only transfers the screen using compression.

Provisioning an Image

Once an image is provisioned, you will receive data on how to access it:

• IP address, mostly 169.x.y.z
• Login name, mostly administrator
• Password,8 character random generated

On a Windows PC

It is pretty easy on Windows, everything that you need is built-in. In the menu under “Windows accessories” you will find “Remote Desktop Connection”.

This is how that looks. First you click on “Show Options”.

After “Computer” you type in the given IP address, 169.x.y.z:3333 (Important, the 3333 is a port number and needs to be there.)
After “Username” you type “administrator” (Or the username that was given to you.
The password will be asked when you connect. As you see it is possible to store the login credentials on your PC. You might want to do that, it is easier to restart your image.
Click on Connect and RDC will now ask you for your password. Copy it from the data you have received.

Then Windows gets suspicious about the certificate of the WebSite. It will display it. You have to tell Windows that it is OK, otherwise…. no go… so click on “View certificate”

Then click on “Install Certificate”

This is OK, click “Next”

Again click “Next”

And now on “Finished”.

The Certificate is now installed, you only need to do this once.

On a Mac

You first need to download and install the RDC App from the App store.

Click on “install” and then on “open”. Confirm that you trust Microsoft and RDC starts.

Click on “+” (“New”) and fill in the credentials you were given.

• Connection name, You can give your connection a logical name.
• PC name, the IP address that you were given, i.e. 169.x.y.z:3333 (The 3333 is mandatory)
• User name, the name given, mostly “administrator”
• Password, what you were given
• The rest can be changed if you like. Lower resolution and colors mean less data.

Now just close the window and press “Start” with your image selected.

And now?

Your image will be ready and started. Login is automatically, you can start using the tools that are installed in the image.

Images are valid for a certain period of time, I’m still trying out the facility so I can not say how long this is exactly.

So contact me when you want to try Rhapsody and our tools, I will provide you with an image.

Happy evaluating with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

I have spent a lot of my time in airplanes, certainly more than a whole month. That is a lot of time. I used to be afraid of flying due to an “unlucky” experience when flying from Austria back to Rotterdam.
That flight had everything, storm, and I mean a real serious storm, a broken of landing, emergency landing on anther airport, crying flight attendants, not to mention the other passengers.
It took me a while to get over that but since the first US flight I don’t care anymore. Or better, I like flying. In spite of hundreds of flights, I still like it very much.

As said I’ve seen lots of different airplanes, Boeing 737, 747, 767, 777, 787, Airbus 319, 320, 330, 340 and the 380. Also Embraer, Fokker, Dash, Ilyushin, Bombardier and even some smaller ones.

But the A380 is something special. Very very silent and of course: Huge. And I mean, really huge. I’m an engineer, i know hoe planes fly but even I am wondering how something this size can just fly.

My Facebook timeline told me this morning that it was exactly 5 years ago since I went to India. The flight was via Dubai so I’ve flown with the A380 of Emirates from Schiphol to Dubai and back. I was already impressed that time.

This time i flew from Paris (CDG, the worst airport in the world) to Miami with Air France. But… Business Class (Yes!!!) So upper deck and a real lot of space.

So… back in the USA. After just a bit over 3 weeks…. This time I have an AUTOSAR conference in San Jose (November 7-8) and the IBM IoT CE Conference in New Orleans (November 14-17)

I will be speaking on both events and on November 17 we will have a Rhapsody Workshop.

I hope to see you there!

Happy modeling with Rhapsody

Walter van der Heiden ( wvdheiden@willert.de )