Somehow my Schiphol flights are jinxed. Last year my Zürich flight was cancelled twice, once with snow, the other one while the flight control center wasn’t working. But I was not thinking about that in the train to Schiphol. Today I fly to Bristol, that is… when KLM, Schiphol or whoever is letting me…

It is snowing very lightly so the plane arrived late, but that’s OK… Dropping of my suitcase was real quick today (thanks SkyPriority ) I could even pass the really long line for the passport check (What??? Yep… Brexit, remember…) But I always carry my real passport with me so I could use the electronic line. 5 minutes instead of 1,5 hours… Cool. I thought…

But at the gate, where I met Robert who was flying in from Detroit, we were waiting and waiting and waiting… After a while the PA system explained that they had computer problems and that boarding might take a while. Oh great.

But it was faster than feared and we were in the bus pretty fast. Wait the bus??? Yep.. Since Brexit the UK travels via gate D6 in the basement, you have to go by bus to the place where they park the, relatively small, airplanes (Embraer 175/190) After entering the bus and driving a bit we were waiting before an airplane. And waiting… and waiting… until the electronic Bus voice told us that the bus was leaving…

And after a small drive we were being dropped of at the terminal. When all passengers were back they told us that the plane we saw was really there but they couldn’t find the crew….

I’m typing this while waiting for a crew. Hoping we still go, it would be very inconvenient when the flight would be cancelled now.
After almost 3 Hours (The time after which KLM would have to start pay….) they finally managed to get a crew and get us in the air.. Hey! Flying is fun. Always.

C or C++

Always the question. I don’t want to answer it now, I just want to give some tips and tricks. In Rhapsody, a model (a.rpy file) has a language. if you open the file with a text editor you can see that on the first line, it says “C” (or “C++” or “Java”) Now, all units, which are files basically, have this language indicator in them. There is also a “*”, that indicates a “don’t-care” what the language is. That is very useful for profiles that are more or less language independent (e.g. a “Styles” profile that contains stuff to influence the GUI )

So it is possible to switch parts of your model to another language, just right click on the unit, select “Edit Unit” and then you can select the language. Now there are some side-effects. You can change the language of a component but it can only contain packages and classes/objects of the same language in its scope. So that is why not all browser elements show up. Also… there is a way to make elements show up in both, the “*” method. You have to edit the .sbs files by hand but it works.

I already tried that for you and…. it works…;-) You can create a “C” package, include that in the scope of a “C” Component, close the model, edit the package file by hand to be the other language, open the model and…. you can include it in the other component. Then edit the package file to be “*” (after closing the model…) and you will see that you can generate 2 different languages from the same package.

32Bit or 64Bit

I think that Rhapsody 8.3 has a real good 64Bit version. If the issues with the new file format and extensions (and some other issues) are solved, we start to test our RXF and other tools for the use with 64Bit. That will solve some problems! Also 64Bit is a lot faster when handling large AUTOSAR Models!

IFix2

– IBM just released iFix2 for Rhapsody 8.3.

That’s it for today, happy Modeling with Rhapsody

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)