Recent News and Tips
You have probably heard that increasing the capacity of a TurboIMAGE master dataset will improve the performance. So wouldn't increasing the capacity a lot be really good for performance?
Click the link above to solve the mystery!
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10/31/2002
Qedit for Windows 5.3 has one of the most requested features: syntax coloring. The version is available as a general release. If you wish to start using it now, you can download it
Syntax coloring let's you distinguish syntax elements at a glance,
makes it easy to find syntax errors,
and it
works on MPE files, HP-UX files, and local files.
10/29/2002
A user called to ask whether there's a way to do this in host-based Qedit:
List lines that contain a string, within a rangelist of lines that contain another string. e.g. He wants to list lines that contain the string "var" as well as the string "boolean" He knows that he can use patternmatching, but then it'll list only lines with the strings in one sequence ("@var@boolean@").
Click the link to discover three solutions.
10/25/2002
George Stachnik has announced a new migration webcast for Oct 30 (click the
link above to register):
At hpworld,
we received feedback from a number of customers that they needed
more information about print management and reporting. Specifically:
* What are the differences between the MPE/iX spooler and the
spoolers that come with hp-ux, linux and windows?
* How do you handle forms management on the target platforms?
* What about reports that the hp e3000 printed on the desktop?
How should they be handled on the target platforms?
Based on your suggestions, we have scheduled a webcast to take place
on Wednesday, October 30th, beginning at 8:30 am Pacific time.
The complete series of e3000 transition webcasts are available
online.
10/24/2002
Let's say you have your customer data in a file called customers, and customer addresses in a separate file called addresses. You may need to check which customers have no address record.
There is a fast way to do this that uses Suprtool Tables. This method involves two passes, but because of Suprtool's efficient reads, it is generally much faster than regular programs. Click the link above to read about this method, which can also
easily be applied to databases.
10/23/2002
Robelle President Bob Green announces creation of a new firm,
Eloquence 3000 Inc., to sell and support the Eloquence database
on HP-UX as a migration target for TurboIMAGE applications.
Bob says,
"Having converted our Suprtool/UX product to Eloquence, we learned a
lot about Eloquence and we were impressed."
Eloquence is a product of Marxmeier Software AG and the new firm is
an authorized Eloquence reseller, focusing on the HP 3000 migration market.
HP 3000 users can obtain Eloquences trials, quotes, updates, advice
and technical support from the Eloquence 3000 web site:
www.eloquence3000.com
Click the link above for the text of the full press release.
10/22/2002
A new policy from Microsoft seems to have taken Win2k off death row, according to this
article at The Register:
The intent now is that the major Microsoft products will now have a "mainstream" supported life of five years, while for business versions it'll then be possible to buy two years "extended" support. Specifically this means Windows 2000 Pro gets a full five year lifespan, whereas until the beginning of this week it was due to go into the red zone on 31st March 2003. WinXP Pro will now get mainstream support until the end of 2006.
Many sites are still working out the implications of Microsoft's new Upgrade Licensing fees, where you
pay for upgrades in advance by subscription. One
side-effect of this licensing is that if
the new Windows version is late, you get nothing, according to this
story on Vnunet.
10/21/2002
Larry Mahoney writes:
Just read your excellent brief History of the HP 3000. We got the first HP
3000 in Washington State.
A lot of the error searching was done in the R. W. Beck Computer Center in
Seattle on Friday night by guys who came up from Cupertino.
I saved all the programs that made the 3000 crash and the guys would come
and put the patches on from the previous weeks discovery. Then I would run
my crash programs, all in Fortran and the system would crash. Hours later
the guys would leave with some dump tapes.
We never knew about the "24 hour bug" as our computer was always being pushed
to the limit and crashed several times a day. Then we got a night operator
and did a backup and reload every night.
Because HP never improved the Fortran capability, as often promised, I was
finally forced to order a Honeywell DPS 8.
I left that firm in 89 and went fishing.
10/18/2002
As long as our customers are using the HP 3000.
Although we ported our products to HP-UX ten years ago, we
are primarily known as HP 3000 experts. We continue to update
our MPE products and add new features. For example, just recently we added
a new "Clean data" function to Suprtool.
Although HP has announced the end of 2006 as the end of life for
the HP 3000, we see no reason why customers cannot continue to run
valuable MPE applications past that date, and we will continue to
support them past that date.
When our customers do decide to migrate an application to HP-UX,
we are ready: our products are running, tested, and supported
on HP-UX too.
10/17/2002
At HPWorld, Michael Marxmeier and Tien-You Chen gave a two-hour session on
migrating TurboIMAGE programs to Eloquence on HP-UX. Click the link above
on the Eloquence 3000 web site to
read the complete set of slides and notes, in PDF format.
10/16/2002
Suprlink is a Suprtool companion program that allows linking a master file to 1 or more files (up to 7) based on a common key. Although Suprlink is extremely fast, it has some constraints. One of the most common questions we get about Suprlink is:
We have 2 files that we want to link together. Each unique key value in both files can have multiple records. Suprlink only finds the first record in the Link file. How can we get Suprlink to link all the other records?
Unfortunately, Suprlink is not designed to do this. However, with a little bit of ingenuity and knowledge, this can be done with a command file on MPE or a shell script on HP-UX.
Click the link above for all the details.
10/15/2002
As you probably know, VESoft was founded by Vladimir Volokh
(link to interview)
and his son Eugene, who is also a Law Professor
at UCLA (link to publications).
The link above is to an interesting sketch of Eugene on the UPI
web site. You can also follow Eugene's interests on his
daily weblog.
10/14/2002
If you are going to keep your TurboIMAGE database running at maximum efficiency,
you need to know about hashing and migrating secondaries. Here is a classic
paper by Alfredo Rego.
10/11/2002
Allegro has an excellent web page spelling
out what to do when your HP 3000 has hung, in order to help debug the problem later.
They also have a "system abort" tip page.
10/10/2002
In this day and age of migrations we were looking at issues that
customers have run into when importing data into new databases.
What came from this investigation where ways to Clean up your data
in any given byte type field.
We have added two methods to clean your data, you can use Suprtool
to clean an individual byte type field, or STExport to clean all
of the byte-type fields for a given file that you are exporting.
Click the link above for full details.
10/09/2002
Technical article on the new Eloquence3000.com web site by
Bob Green. Shows how simple it is to move TurboIMAGE data from the HP 3000 to the Eloquence database
on the HP 9000.
10/08/2002
"Modes" are UNIX-speak for file security. Read this introduction from
our HP Encyclopedia.
10/03/2002
The HP web site has the last part of the 3000 transitions webcasts: Putting It All Together.
10/02/2002
HP has six new white papers on their web site, including
business planning guide,
compilers and user interfaces,
KSAM and MPE file system,
MPE commands and networks,
technical planning guide, and
TurboIMAGE and databases.
10/01/2002
Archived News and Tips...
HP 3000 Book
HP 3000 Evolution:
Edited by
Bob Green of Robelle, from articles written by Robelle,
by The 3000 Newswire, and by other
experts in the HP 3000 field.
This 300-page book contains the latest information on three important
topics:
Homesteading
HP 3000 Tune Up
Migrating a 3000 application.
An essential reference for every desk!
Order your copy on-line for US$25.
