Tid Bit TechieVarta

Icon

Another TechieVarta

Archive for the ‘visio’ Category


Challenging all Choregraphers out there

Friday, October 9th, 2009

The latest idea I am working on is a choreography tool. The idea is that you got a character with set of animation clips.   As a user you will be able to combine these small sequences to create a full dance sequences. You will than be able to combine these sequences to create a full dance sequence of your liking. You will let your creativity loose. The dance sequences I am working on are various hip-hop sequences, moonwalk sequences, disco sequences, etc.

Once the full dance sequence is complete you will be able to e-mail the sequence to other users. Here are some very preliminary sequences. They need lot more work. But let me know what you guys think. Here is some of the sequences I am working on. Sorry for the slow link friends.

http://techievarta.com/dal.html

Posted in iphone, mobile applications, visio | 3 Comments »

Generating UML2 Sequence Diagram: SDEDIT

Friday, June 13th, 2008

As software designers we always need to create Sequence Diagrams for documents. Some documents can use have lots of variations of sequence diagrams. My documents are normally written in MS-Word and use Visio for diagrams. Instead of using Visio’s built-in UML stencils (which are awfully difficult to use) I have always used stencils from this site. These stencils are significantly easier to use. Still generating many sequence diagram can take a lot of time.

After some research I  found SDEDIT at Sourceforge. This tool is just fantastic. It is fast, powerful and customizable.The tool has its own scripting language. The tool has a split window GUI. You type the script in the bottom half the the diagram immediately appears in the top window. It is possible to export the sequence diagram in variety of graphics formats.

Also, it is possible to run the tool from command line. So just create the sequence diagrams on in various text files and run sdedit to generate various png or whichever format you like and embed in your document.

Visio diagrams are nice since they provide a way to embed the actual Visio object inside the document using OLE. This implies that everything used to create the document is in a single file. This has advantage with with respect to management of the document. I am not an OLE expert but it should be possible to provide an OLE wrapper around the sdedit. In the meanwhile I will settle with including contents of the script file as an icon inside the document.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Software Design, UML2, visio | 2 Comments »

Date with Kubuntu/KDE 4.1

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Yesterday I upgraded my Kubuntu (Hardy) distribution to KDE 4.1. I use Dell lattitude as my primary machine which can dualboot to Hardy. I decided to use that exclusively for a day @ work. This post has my impressions. I am typically software engineer and use all the tools which a software engineer would. These include Outlook, Word, Excel, Visio, VPN software , Internet radio, etc. Although for development tools I typically logon to a Linux machine.

First Impression

I am very impressed with the KDE 4.1 finish. Excellent eye candy. It made Mac fan club at my work place run for cover. Ctrl F2 as well as the startup program launcher has become a lot more polished. I like new plasmoids specifically the cartoon strip. The capability to change the size of plasmoid without compromising clarity (SVG) is great. I changed the desktop switcher to box style and enabled the wobble desktop effect. I think these should be enabled by default.

Once the KDE 4.1 becomes a little more stable I will retry making it my defaultOS.

Network Configuration

For some strange reason KNetworkManager refused to correctly configure my  WiFi interface. This was also problem in KDE 4.0. I had to fall back to a shell script I have always used. I know I should file a bug. I plan to investigate my issue a little more before I file the bug.

Online Music

I listen to http://www.radionri.com/ for music. I could not play the MP3 stream with any of the KDE tools so I fell back to VLC. It works. I personally don’t care about playing my music with a KDE only player and VLC can play more formats then anything you can throw at it. So I am happy.

Exchange AccessI started of with exchange wemail access but quickly fell back to Evolution. The Evolution is easy to setup and use. However, there are few things I don’t understand. Why save as the only option for attachment? Why can’t I just open attachment from the e-mails? Also, eventually the evolution froze and I had to kill it. I tried Kmail however it still does not seem to have exchange interoperability option. I am back to webmail. I will retry evolution at a later time when I have more time to analyze issues.

Documentation

I  tried using KWord. While opening MSWord documents text looked reasonably ok. However, embedded Visio drawing did not even show up. I tried OpenOffice.org next. That worked a lot better. However, since there is no way of editing Visio on the Linux, I had to switch back to Windows to complete editing the docuement.

Stability

The plasma crashed several times. This was specially bad when trying to get wallpaper from the Internet. Konquror crashed trying to browse my SMB shares. But then KDE 4.1 is still beta.

Conclusion

I love the finish, style, usability speed of KDE 4.1. Stability is not yet there but then it is still in beta phase. Several applications did not work as expected but then in open source world we always have alternatives. Visio was the only reason to force me back to the Windows world. I can possibly try a Windows VM with Visio running in it. But that will defeat the purpose. The other alternative is to use crossover office.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in kde, kde 4.1, visio, windows | No Comments »

IPv4 Exhaustion Analysis

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

Summary of the Analysis

Based on number 17% available number, and 3.7 billion total IP address space number, available IP addresses in Oct ‘07 are 629M.

There are a variety of predictions, using different models, that attempt to estimate when there will be no more IPv4 addresses to allocate. The cut-off date ranges from 2009 to 2013.

It is now the widespread opinion of the technical community that for the continued and uninterrupted expansion of the Internet, it is vital that IPv6 adoption begin in earnest.

Various Papers Analyzing IPv4 Exhaustion Date

Here are some of the selected papers from around the web analyzing IPv4 exhaustion date.

  • Very Detailed Information about IPv4 addresses where they are and how are they consumed.
  • ICANN’s IPv6 Factsheet: Published in Oct ‘07 said that 17% of IPv4 addresses are available
  • Wikipedia page on IPv4 Exhaustion analysis this page quotes various sources to come up with 2010 as date of exhaustion. Among other sources this page uses information from various RIR advisories.
  • Ars Technica article predicsts that at current rate we have 7.5 years before running out of IPv4 addresses. However, givent publication from ICANN the number of left IP addresses here cannot be accurate.

Available IPv4 Addresses as of Oct '07 (From ICANN paper: Blue is Available)

Available IPv4 Addresses as of Oct '07 (From ICANN paper: Blue is Available)

What About NAT?

NAT was discovered in ’90s. NAT has served us well. Nearly all the enterises and most homes using more the one host is using NAT. The NAT in effect allows us to create several private Internets each using the same set of IP addresses. The IETF has reserved IP address space for private Internets. The hosts within the same private Internet can communicate with each other using private IP addresses. A device behind NAT only needs to use a public IP address when the host communicates with the public IP Internet. This allowed sharing of a single public IP addresses for several hosts.

Can NATs be promoted to the operators networks? If we can, we can delay the date of IP address exhausion by several years if not for ever. The NAT works well for outgoing only connections like web access, POP/SMTP based e-mail access. However, they have serious problems for incoming connections like VoIP, P2P, some game plays etc. At home the solution for incoming connection typically involves port forwarding which can be manually configured or auto-configured using UPnP.

In the current Internet, our ISPs provide us pipe and do not control what type of applications we run on our computers and how they use the pipe. Installation of NAT in the operator’s network will change this model since they will only be able to provide outgoing only connections.

It is possible for the operators to provide two types of services. Outgoing only service which is mostly used for browsing and e-mail and the second class providing access to all the services. The operator could deploy NAT for the first set of subscriber and provide public IP addresses to the second class of subscribers and have differential charging.

If this had to happen lots of newer mobile devices could use browse only IP addresses and can be sufficiently served by NAT. The operators can deploy application level proxies to deal with specific protocol needs like IMS. This will limit innovation in the Internet since several applications will not be able to run on these devices.

The impact of this design on overall IP address consumption is not clear but it should delay need to deploy IPv6 significantly.

If this has to happen, this will fundamentaly change the nature of the Internet. At present North American operators are very reluctant to deploy NAT in their networks.

Effect of IPv4 Exhaustion

Blogs have tried to compare IPv4 exhaustion to Y2K. However, the impact of IPv4 exhaustion will be a lot less dramatic. If the Internet is not ready with IPv6, several possible things can happen:

  • Operators can deploy limited NAT for certain class of subscribers, devices extending life of IPv4 addresses they already have
  • There is significant IPv4 address space which is allocated to different organizations. It is possible that this IP addresses can be sold back to the ISPs at a cost or can be reallocated by ICANN extending life of IPv4 address space.
  • Operators can deploy limited IPv6 on devices with limited applications (e.g. Comcast recently announced that they will move management of home modems to IPv6)
  • Operators will move quickly towards IPv6.

It is clear as we move closer to IPv4 address exhaustion, the cost of IPv4 will increase. The ISPs at that time will have a choice whether to move to IPv6 or live with restrictions, cost imposed by IPv4.

Tags: ,
Posted in ipv6, visio | No Comments »

Pages