Leonardo of Pisa, or as we know him Fibonacci, spotted a magical pattern in the early 1200.
Fn = F(n-1) + F(n-2) where F0 = 0 and F1 = 1 or F1 = 1 and F2 = 1 as a seed.
To celebrate Fibonacci Day 2017 and this most import sequence, found in nature, mathematics and the basis for the Golden Ratio, we’ve recreated a sequence in Cradle.
Using an integer Category value FibVal and FibRes and a calculation FibCalc. The calculation is set to look at its cross referenced children (a downwards navigation) and compute a sum based on the aggregate total of their FibRes category and its own seed, held in FibVal. The result is assigned to FibRes.
Fibonacci Calculation setup
The first item were created and and seeded with 0. Then another item created and linked to it and seeded with 1. Thereafter new parent items were created and linked to their two previous children (Seed value of 0 just to keep calculation valid) .
Fibonacci Sequence
The screenshot shows the linked items (in the tree on the left). The query view (on the right) shows the values of the saved items and how they add up.
For more information on Calculations in Cradle, visit the online help. Have a go at creating your own sequence to celebrate Fibonacci Day 2017.
Described by www.worldhelloday.org/ as a demonstration of the importance in communication for the preservation of peace, we can all do our little bit to get along.
Hello from 3SL
Say ‘Hello’
Hello, 你好, Hallo, Bonjour, 여보세요, Здравствуйте, Helo to our distributors and customers.
Whichever language you use, ‘Hello’ is a greeting, a sign of friendship, tolerance, and respect. Thought to derive from a ‘holla or hollo’ used to attract attention back as far as the 14th century, it has always been used as a positive greeting, or introduction. Use it as often as you can, form good relationships with your country folk, your neighbour, your customers, suppliers and even your competitors. As Thomas Edison is said to have done, pick up the phone and say “Hello” possibly to a friend or to a customer, or just an acquaintance you’ve not been in touch with for a while. (You could call 3SL on +44(0)1229 838867)
If you would like Cradle in a language not currently translated, don’t hesitate to contact us. SalesDetails@threesl.com
Find ten contacts and just say, “Hello”, “hey there!”, “wassup” or “howdy” you know it makes sense.
X-Rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation or “ray” for short.
When first discovered, these mysterious rays were nothing like anything that had been described before, hence the ‘X’ name has stuck.
X-rays have a wavelength less than 10 nanometres, that is, they are shorter than those of UV, and longer than those of gamma rays. It was aGerman scientist Wilhelm Röntgen often credited with their discovery.
Looking Inside Cradle
Thankfully there is no need to use X-Rays to look inside your Cradle project.
Information once stored can be recalled by Queries and presented in Views or Forms. Output can be directed to HTML or RTF tables, shown graphically as a Hierarchy diagram, explored by clicking links. Formal publishing to Microsoft® Word documents can be achieved through Document Publisher.
In short there is no mystery to your data once inside Cradle unlike our bones, welded joints or airport suitcases you can easily see your data.
Celebrate on X-Ray Day 2017
Celebrate the genius of a very useful tool in the x-ray machine. Whilst we don’t advise you have an x-ray for fun, you could download another useful tool here!
We all use e-mail as a reliable method for our personal and business communications. However, as we all know, vast numbers of spam, junk and malicious e-mails are also sent every day. Everyone needs protection from the damage that clicking a link or attachment in just one e-mail can do. 3SL has recently changed our 3SL email filters to further reduce our exposure to such threat vectors. We expect that you and your organisation also update your filters regularly.
Block Spam and Malicious E-Mails
This blog post is a summary of what the 3SL email filters will do.
We are publishing this so that you can reliably send your emails to us. We do not expect that the 3SL email filters will block any of your emails. But if one of your emails is blocked, this blog post may help to explain why.
Principles of 3SL Email Filters
We will obviously not disclose full details of the 3SL email filters. You would not expect us to do something that silly. There are some general principles which we will publish, which are:
The more malicious an email is, the less likely our mail server is to provide an informative response to the sender, or their mail server
The more malicious an email is, the more likely we are to provide false responses, or no response, to the sending mail server
We use all available blacklists to ignore all known malicious senders and mail relays. Either we access them online, or we keep local copies and then update them regularly.
3SL always reports malicious financial emails to the organisation that they are supposed to come from
We report all malicious e-mails to blacklist sites wherever possible
We automatically block emails based on their from, to, subject, content, formatting and attachments
Any e-mails sent to undisclosed recipients or with multiple from tags will be rejected
We operate our own blacklists, for people we dislike
Emails from people we especially dislike are automatically sent to spam reporting sites
We operate our own whitelists, for people we like!
All e-mails and all of their attachments are scanned for viruses and other nasty tricks(!)
Email Attachments
The types of attachment to an email is an important part of the 3SL email filters. Therefore, the 3SL email filters are very sensitive to the types of files that are attached to e-mails.
We currently block everything that is remotely executable. This includes the obvious ones, such as:
exe files
scr files
msi files
.bat files
.cmd files
.lnk files
.com files
and many others.
We also block file types that are common vehicles for malicious code, including the obvious ones:
.jar files
.ace files
and others that we will keep to ourselves!
In total, we block over 20 file types.
Accepted Attached File Types
We want to receive your e-mails! Therefore, if you need to send any attachments with your e-mail, only send:
Microsoft Office files
Open Office files
PDF files
Plain or rich text files
Cradle import/export files
Simple images
We will detect macros in e-mail attachments. So, please don’t send us any file with a macro inside it!
If you send a file containing a macro, then either your e-mail will be rejected or, if you are in our whitelist – and this includes customers – then your e-mail may be logged as spam, or it may be rejected.
Alternatives to Email for File Exchange
If we need to exchange files with you that would be blocked by our email system, or by yours, there is an alternative!
Every login account in our website can have a file transfer area. You can use this area to download any type of file from us. You can use this area to upload any type of file to us. Therefore, this mechanism avoids any need for us, or you, to send files by e-mail that either of our mail systems would block.
We think that this mechanism is very useful. 3SL asks all of our customers to consider using this mechanism. We hope that you will agree. Therefore:
If you have a login to our website, we can enable this facility for you.
If you do not have a login to our website, please register and create one!
Your organisation may also provide a secure file transfer mechanism. If so, tell us about it. We will be pleased to use it.
Help Us to Help You
Obviously, we never send anything malicious to anyone. Equally obviously, we do not ever knowingly send any emails that could be regarded as spam, malicious or suspicious. So we would be concerned if you do not receive any of our emails.
Therefore, please tell us if you believe that we are sending emails that are being blocked by your mail system.
If this happens, then we will work with you and your IT to either:
Add 3SL to your organisation’s whitelist, and therefore none of our e-mails will ever be blocked
Or we will change the format of our emails so they are acceptable to your organisation
Onward, beyond the three hundredth blog entry we’ll be keeping you up to date with all things 3SL and Cradle (and the odd bonkers story too!)
Have you got a great tip for setting up a schema for a particular engineering or management practice? You could submit a guest article and let us, and other users, know all about it.
If you mention Cradle in your own company blog, send us the link and we may mention it.
If you’d like see a ‘How To’ on a particular subject, we’ll endeavour to put one together.
3SL is pleased to announce the release of Cradle-7.3.2. This is available for download from the 3SL website. As you currently have an active Cradle maintenance agreement you can download this Cradle release free of charge.
Please note that even the website states Cradle-7.3 this IS the Cradle-7.3.2 software.
Cradle 7.3.2
To download the latest release please visit our website at www.threesl.com and login. Once you have logged in navigate to the Resources section to download this release.
Details of the fixes in this release are in the Cradle help.
Upgrading
If you upgrade to Cradle-7.3.2 anywhere, you must upgrade everywhere, the server and all clients. Visit the download area.
If you are upgrading from a version prior to Cradle-7.3 you will require a Security Code. Contact our Support Department to get your new Security Code.
How would we work without those ubiquitous columns and rows?
It may have started with Visicalc but these days it is hard to find an aspect of our organisational life that doesn’t have a spreadsheet in it. So during spreadsheet day 2017 try and think what it would be like adding up your budget by hand, working out hours worked per project, or even listing the office Christmas dinner totals.
Cradle supports a Microsoft Excel® capture utility directly bringing data in or CSV import from any spreadsheet’s saved output.
Capture
When the Office Toolsuite has been installed with Cradle you are able to capture information from Microsoft Excel® directly into Cradle. On the sheet of interest select the Cradle Toolbar and Login to Cradle. Then select Capture and in the resultant Data Capture dialog, assign the correct columns to the item attributes in the database. You can change the Options… to overwrite or merge the data and you can Validate the data before Capture. The resultant capture can be viewed in Cradle via Workbench or Web Access. You will of course need the privilege to ITEM_CREATE.
Excel® Capture Facility
Import CSV
To import items into Cradle you will additionally need the IMPORT privilege. This is similar to the Capture utility, but can be run with any CSV source. Selecting CSV as the import type and then assigning each of the columns to the attributes of the item, will allow the data to be imported into Cradle. More details about the CSV format can be found in the Cradle Help.
So why not celebrate everything columnar on spreadsheet day 2017 and capture some information into Cradle.
If you have a really old version of Cradle you may need to remove the old plug-ins
The second Tuesday of October (Ada Lovelace Day 2017) sees the celebration of women’s achievements in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths).
Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace is known for her work on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. By taking maths beyond calculations to create algorithms to run on general machines. To coin a phrase “One of the first computer programmers”
Ada is a structured high-level programming language designed in the late seventies and takes its name from the countess.
ASGs are used to provide a visual representation of the program units (packages, tasks and subprograms) in an Ada software system. You can draw these in Cradle, and of course link them to other Cradle components from requirements to tests.
Whatever you Carbohydrate Requirement – There’s a Noodle for You!
OnInternational Noodle Day 2017, we celebrate this humble food universally eaten worldwide. There, are of course, variants, rice, wheat, eggs in various proportions, wholemeal noodles with a higher fibre content and noodles made from courgettes for people who want the convenience of a noodle without the carbs.
Now trying to put a product slant on Noodle Day may appear tricky. We’ve opted for pointing out that Cradle comes in many variants too! From Single user Requirements Management to Multi User Enterprise Product Lifecycle design and control.
So whether today you choose to have them from a pot with boiling water as a lunch time snack or coated in sesame oil and chilli with chicken and shredded pak-choi for your evening meal. Enjoy a Noodle today! #InternationalNoodleDay
Different Views
Now whether you see a Noodle as a type of Pasta or Pasta as a type of Noodle is a topic for debate. World Pasta Day celebrates the multi variants of this card dish. These opinions can be seen as different viewpoints on the same data (the flour / egg / oil in the recipe). Unlike the traditional classic functional modelling, where the diagram is king, in SysML data is prime. SysML diagrams allow you to show different views on the same data, unlike classic models they don’t need to tell the whole story or balance in the same way. Different user groups may choose to focus on different aspects of the same project and have the same underlying stereotypes, but offer a different top level perspective in their diagram.
