Breathing new Life into your Models

Enterprise Architect 9.2 is a major upgrade which significantly extends simulation, adds new modeling languages, new debugging capabilities and new tools to manage your models. Here are some of the great things built into this new release:

• Bring your state machines and business processes to life with advanced simulation support for triggers, signals and events. Model messages, button presses, switches and similar events, then watch as your scenarios come to life. Verify your solutions. Explore multiple pathways and outcomes. Build reusable event sets to automate simulations.*
• Business modelers can simulate their BPMN based models, including support for Parallel and Exclusive Gateways, Loops and basic activities. Animate and validate your business processes.**
• Software developers can now attach Enterprise Architect to the GNU debugger (GDB) and inspect, debug and visualize a wide range of supported platforms. Local and remote debugging are both supported. Ada, Java, C, C++ and Objective-C supported.***
• Modelers can now build and share concepts, taxonomies and detailed ontologies using the new MDG Technology for the Ontology Definition Metamodel with support for the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF).
• Systems Engineers can take advantage of the enhanced support for SysML 1.2 including Block Elements drawn with parts, references, values, flow part and standard port compartments. SysML FlowSpecification elements with the flowProperties compartment.
• You can now generate visual diff/comparisons between current diagrams and baselines using the new visual comparison tools built into the model baseline facility. Highlight additions, deletions, moves, and resizes. Selectively roll back changes to a previous baseline state.

Enterprise Architect 9.2 supports UML® Version 2.4.1 – the latest specification from the Object Management Group® (OMG®).

Links and Downloads:

It is a fact of life that we have a limited amount of time available.
Much less than we usually think.
That’s why it is very important to be careful about how we allocate it if we want to reach our top 3 outcomes.
To reach our top 3 outcomes, whatever they are, we would love to have luck on our side. There is indeed a component of luck involved in reaching our top 3 outcomes. A lot of factors can sway our efforts in the wrong direction. Bad things happen.

So, what’s luck in the first place? As far as I concerned I define luck as “preparation meeting opportunity.”

Yep, that’s it, preparation. You need to be prepared to jump right away on the opportunity as it presents itself to you. The unprepared will say “well, you know, I was unlucky and I was unable to seize the opportunity…”

And the more you prepare, the more you’ll be able to spot opportunities as well as you’ll hone your skills.

But beware, do not drown yourself in preparation. Make sure that you prepare on real cases, not just looking at books or discussing without purpose.

That’s the difference between knowledge and skill. Skill is what you are after. Skill is knowledge that has been applied to real world situations. You have been through the issues, you have a real solid learning. That’s not fluff. That’s not hot hair. As a side note, it is much better to have a grain of skill than 100 cubic meters of hot air on a given subject, no matter what the noise the hot air crew makes!

But then the next problem occurs: which skills are going to help us meet the opportunity we want to seize? And what opportunity are we interested in in the first place? In the previous newsletter we looked at a bunch of questions to help you do just that. Identify your outcomes. At least the areas where you want them to be.

There is no way to get away without this. You need to be clear on youroutcomes first. And with a kind of metric so that you know when you are there, or close enough to consider it reached successfully.

Which leads us to the most difficult thing to do when you want to reach your top 3 outcomes: saying no to a lot of other stuff. You see, if you choose to pursue your top 3 outcomes, or even one of them, you’ll need to stop chasing other things. And that means saying “no.” It means that you have made a choice. And making a choice is saying no to what is not that choice.

Say you want your firm to be well known in the marketplace so that it attracts customers for its very specific value proposition. All right. But if you want to get there, and get there fast, you’ll need to focus on making it true. Learn how to do it, maybe staff for getting it done. Channel your resources to make it happen. No matter what, you’ll have to say no to other things because nobody has infinite resource (not even Microsoft, Google or Apple: they all let go products that do not catch up).

So, this month, let’s reflect on what you’ll say no to:

• letting go of old habits that make no sense in the pursuit of youroutcomes (these are just time leeches)
• letting go of people that do not contribute to your outcomes, or people who are sabotaging your effort (what a relief!)
• letting go of projects that have been on the backburner for too long and have nothing to contribute to your outcomes (it will make more space available in your mind)
• stop making commitments just to “look nice” and “because you have to.” (2 minutes to say no, more satisfaction for hours by focusing on what matters instead of pleasing others)

Choosing is saying no. And if you do not choose, others will do it for you.
Wouldn’t it be better to act on your agenda rather than on theirs, by default?

Sometimes, you just can’t write directly to your blog. Maybe you are at a conference and the Wifi is overcrowded and service is patchy. Maybe you have not enough battery to last through the session if you leave Wifi on. Whatever the cause, you’d like to blog off line and put the information on line after the fact.

A text processor would be fine of course. But a dedicated tool is better because it avoids a lot of issues with formats, copy/paste and the like. Especially since it handles images locally as well.

That’s where Windows Live Writer comes into play. As a blog editor, you just have to configure the URL of the blog (self hosted WordPress works!), a login and a password.

Then, just type and save as a local draft. When ready, upload to the site.

A little tool that can come in handy!

I spend a good chunk of my day upgrading my Dell D430 to SSD.

What was the expected outcome that led me to do this?

Basically, I was fed up with the general slowness of the HDD, a 80GB 4800 RPM disk. Also, I suspect that since I have got this laptop for more than 4 years, the HDD would fail sooner or later and I didn’t wanted that to happen to me, even if I do take backups regularly.

The key factor was to be able to get rid of those pauses when looking deep inside my start menu program, speed up my Find and Run Robot (FARR) launcher, and all application launches.

Just swapping the HDD for the SDD and be done with that.

Not so fast!

Indeed, not so fast. It all went okay at the end but it took longer than expected and there were several bumps on the road, namely:

• The SDD wasn’t recognized when I hooked it up to the system with the USB connector: this one was easily fixed, I hadn’t pushed the ZIF cable far enough into the disk. But this was easy to fix.
• I used the Acronis disk clone feature to get the HDD cloned to the SDD. Looks like easy enough to do it but… nothing was cloned at the end of the process. I had to redo the moves and then, bam, magic! And it took a hell of a lot of time to clone everything.
• The HDD inside the machine was enclosed into a rubberized enclosure to protect it from shocks. I had to remove the enclosure of the HDD to disconnect it from the ZIF connector. Then the SDD wasn’t fitting the space. So, SDD back into the rubberized enclosure and quite a while to get the whole thing to fit tightly into the space available. So, time to boot.

Getting to boot

Booting the system was easy. Everything turned out working fine. But some things took longer than I tought. So, the SSD is no magic. The whole system feels a lot fasters. And is. But web browsing give me some hiccups. Pauses. I found a great utility to help, named Flashfire. This solved some issues.

I am running XP SP3. This wasn’t too great for SSD disks. So, I had to disable prefetching, boot time optimization and other funny registry settings. Well, this is done now and brought several good things with it. I got to know the fsutil command for disabling features of NTFS.

Now, pauses are gone. I saw that Windows 7 would be better to SSDs. But not much more than what I do have now. HDTune gives me the speced speed. Which is around 90MB/sec. Which isn’t what SSD should give on SATA machines, but this is a PATA UDMA Mode 5 chipset here and there is no way it is going any faster.

I have rebooted quite a number of times to get everything in good shape and the battery wasn’t drained as it was usual with the HDD. So, a good point here.

How does it feels now?

Well, pretty good actually. This SSD isn’t delivering its full performance, being somewhat limited by the chipset of the Dell D430 but there are really great benefits that were worth the upgrade.

Here is my list:

• no more HDD noise: a great feeling, no more grinning of platters
• more space since this is a 128GB SSD and I was moving off a 80GB HDD
• much much snappier menus

I declare this to be a success. It is extending the life span of this little solid machine (even if it is not a superspeedy and superpowerful box, I can in fact achieve a lot with it. And that because the keyboard is very well built and has a decent size without a numeric pad shifting my typing to the left. And a 12” form factor is just what I need when moving around. It is just a bit larger than my iPad2.

Any special things to mention?

Yep, sure. First of all, my Nusphere’s PHPEd editor is starting amazingly fast now.

As a contrast, Sparx System’s Enterprise Architect is only marginally faster. Go figure.

So, an SSD isn’t going to cut all times in 10 on this box. But the advantages are good enough to justify my investment in the RunCore SSD 128GB 1.8” ZIF PATA. Which was about $219. You can almost get a new laptop for that price but not as sturdy as this little Dell Latitude D430.