Archive for July, 2010

ArchiMate

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

I have been modeling application landscapes in the ArchiMate language and think it is a vehicle you should consider to use when you are an IT architect. It offers a good toolbox of enterprise architecture concepts and a set of rules on how to stick them together. You can try it out with the open source Archi tool, which offers all basic functionality to work with ArchiMate. There are other more extensive and expensive ArchiMate tools, to be found on the ArchiMate site. Archi works fine for me up to this point however.

I use Archi mainly for “IT geography”, laying down my “IT archaeology” findings in an applications map. Extending the applications map with a processes map and thus linking the process and application levels of your enterprise architecture is also possible. Further down the architecture stack you can also model and relate to the technological situation.

The maps are very useful in communication. A picture really says more than a thousand words and I can get to the point quickly in discussions about which architecture pattern or mechanism to use to solve a particular architecture issue. ArchiMate also helps to get the ambiguities out of the discussion. Because the maps can be understood by both business and IT (if not then maybe they should not join the discussion at all…) and because it is a formal language, it leaves little room for interpreting the situation differently. I can be reasonably certain that everybody understands each other and that the risk of surprises in working out the described solution is small.

I still have to investigate how products made in the ArchiMate language relate to process and architecture modeling in Aris. IDS Scheer does offer a tool, ArchiMate Modeler, that combines Aris and ArchiMate, but unfortunately it is not open source.

En als we op de Paardenmarkt zijn zingen we…

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

Ik dacht dat ik de enige was met dit lied. Door mijn zus al bestempeld als het Paardenmarktlijflied 🙂

Printing photo’s in Ubuntu with an HP printer

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

To print photo’s in Ubuntu you need a how-to. Here it is.

My set up:

-Operating system: Ubuntu 10.04

-Printer: HP Photosmart Premium C309g, connected to the local network via cable

-HP printer drivers for linux, hplip-3.10.5. Get yours here. Though normally Ubuntu will have these already installed. You can check this with your package manager. Ubuntu has Synaptic to manage its packages.

Forget all the print options in your photo management programs like F-Spot and DigiKam. They don’t work very well. DigiKam does have a Kipi plugin that is a print wizard, but I have had limited success with that.

Easiest thing to do is to open the image you want to print with Gimp. Also installed per default in Ubuntu. Otherwise install it with your package manager of choice.

The biggest advantage of Gimp is that it has a preview function that actually shows the image as it will appear on paper.

  • When working in DigiKam, right click the image to open the context menu and choose “Open With”-“GIMP Image Editor”. The image is opened in GIMP.
  • From the GIMP image window choose “File”-“Page Settings”. In the popup window choose your printer, paper size and orientation. Paper size is important because photo paper is usually smaller than normal paper. Measure the dimensions of your photo paper with a ruler if you don’t know the size.
  • From the GIMP image window choose “File”-“Print”. Go to the tab “Page Settings” and verify the page size.  Also set your paper settings to use the paper from the photo tray of your printer.
  • On the tab “Image Settings” you can play around with the image size. For example, reduce it so you get white borders around the image.
  • Set image quality to “Best” in the tab “Image Quality”.
  • On the tab “Color” set “Output Mode” to “Color”
  • Click the “Preview” button. If everything looks ok, hit the print icon on top!

Menu item names are translated from Dutch, so they may differ from what it actually reads on your screen. Happy printing!

Moving to Ubuntu II

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

I’ve got it! Everything works just fine. Moved over all my data. Set up my tools for my web sites. Installed mail and imported old Windows mail and address book. There’s really not much more to say 🙂 Oh, yeah. It reboots in 1 minute!