Recent News and Tips

HP 3000 Blog from the Newswire

Ron Seybold, publisher of The 3000 Newswire has started a Newswire blog and already has some great stories posted. A blog is a web site that is frequently updated with new stories/tips/links. The Robelle home page, for example, is a blog. New items are added at the top and old ones fall off the bottom (going into an archive). Here are the headlines today on Ron's 3000 blog:

Deep Enough to Hold a Mansion
A Patchwork Future on the Rise
Give print improvements a try
What's the bail to escape patch jail?
Jumbo improvements over time
Direct payoff, direct layoffs
Commerce off 3000s: Off the page
Keeping your update skills sharp
Less tangled SOX for 3000s
Source code makes tomorrow like so yesterday

Ron has comments enabled, so you can add your own ideas to his stories. The URL is 3000newswire.blogs.com and to syndicate it for a news aggregator such as bloglines, use this link.

6/30/2005

Sales & Admin office will be closed Friday July 1st due to a Canadian holiday. Technical support will be on an emergency-basis only on Monday July 4th, as that is a US holiday.

6/29/2005

Converting a Quad Script to Qedit

If you are moving from MPE to HP-UX, you may find yourself looking for a replacement for the Quad editor on MPE. Qedit is an alternative that runs on both platforms.

Here is a question received by technical support:

I have just one last job that I need to convert from Quad to Qedit, and I'm having a little trouble. I'm going to paste the code for quad and explain what it's doing and hopefully you can send me back some working Qedit code.

:DATA !quad
t dmovltag
d a i :-:(25/25)
c 16/25 t :     -1000: a
c 26/27 t :GL: a
c 36/39 t :PTFE: a
c 40/55 t :OVERLIMIT CHARGE: a
k dmvsaovl
e

We will start with the delete line. The code deletes all instances of '-' in column 25/25. It only deletes the '-'. The next set of changes appears to be adding verbage to the columns specified. The verbage is in between ':' and ':'. Let me know if you can help me with this. Thanks.

Most Quad jobs can be converted to Qedit, and this one is no exception. Here is the same task done in Qedit:

qedit
t dmovltag
c 25/25 "" "-"(25/25)
c 16/25 :     -1000: @
c 26/27 :GL: @
c 36/39 :PTFE: @
c 40/55 :OVERLIMIT CHARGE: @
k dmvsaovl
e

Notice that the text, keep and exit commands are identical. The c (change) command is almost the same (remove the "t:" and change the "a" to "@" --all lines). The only tricky bit is the d (delete with column option), which is converted to a change command in Qedit (c 25/25 "" "-"(25/25) removes column 25 in all lines that have a dash in column 25 -- if you want remove column 25 in all lines, use c 25/25 "" @).

6/26/2005

Last PA-RISC Chip Debuts

From Eric Sand (esand at sandsoft dot net) on 3000-L:

Subject: What a Journey....

To quote a phrase, "Trust me. It worked fine in the wind tunnel.", from a caption in "BEYOND RISC!" by Steven M. Cooper, Jason M. Goertz, Scott E. Levine, Joanna L. Mosher, Stanley R. Sieler Jr., and Jacques Van Damme written seventeen years ago underscores the result of the most incredible talent, effort and faith by HP and her people that I have ever been party to and will probably never see again. The result of the genius of PA-RISC is still with us as the last PA-RISC chip just debuted and marks the end of an era that will be talked about for years to come...

Click link above for a story on the last chip.

6/02/2005

Here Comes Suprtool Version 4.9

Suprtool provides fast access to your data on the HP e3000 and HP-UX. With Suprtool, you can perform many necessary DP functions easily, with just a few simple commands We are getting ready to release a production update to Suprtool, so we thought it would be good to review the changes. Suprtool users will receive version 4.9 on their regular anniversary date, but the changes are also available in a pre-release version 4.8.11 if you would like to try them right now.

For Both the MPE Version 4.9 and the HP-UX Version 4.9:

$Clean Function and Clean Command

The $Clean function in Suprtool and Clean command in STExport now have the ability to replace a character to be cleaned with null or nothing. If you set the cleanchar as being:

Set Cleanchar "<null>"

$Number Function

The $number had a bug whereby it would add on two zeroes and or bad data if the input number did not have a decimal point. We have fixed the bug so that the number function no longer adds the two digits on the end in error.

However, some users worked around this issue by doing the following:

 >extract target = $truncate($number(conv-field) / 100)

By default, Suprtool will just convert the number and not add on the data at the end, however, if you have used the work around then you can add the command:

  >set numbug on

Suprtool 4.9 for HP-UX - the following enhancements only apply to HP-UX:

Oracle Integers

Suprtool by default maps certain numeric fields into packed-decimal data types when they have more than one decimal place:

Precision	Decimal Places	Suprtool Data-Type
None	Any	8-byte IEEE
1-4	Zero	2-byte Integer
5-9	Zero	4-byte Integer
1-9	Non-zero	Packed-decimal
10-27	Any	Packed-decimal
28-38	Any	8-byte IEEE

The new setting, Set Oracle Integer On, changes the Suprtool format from packed-decimal to Integer based on the size of the Number:

Precision	Decimal Places	Suprtool Data-Type
1-4	Any	2-byte Integer
5-9	Any	4-byte Integer
10-27	Any	8-byte Integer

Output=input

Suprtool now supports the Output=input command, whereby Suprtool sorts a file onto itself. This is one of the last features of MPE Suprtool that was missing in HP-UX Suprtool. It allows you to sort a large file without requiring the disk space for both an input and output copy at the same time.

Oracle Dynamic Load

We have further revised the Oracle Dynamic Load to do the following:
1) Attempt to load libclntsh.sl using the dynamic path.
2) Attempt to load libclntsh.so using the dynamic path feature.
3) Manually load $ORACLE_HOME/lib32/libclntsh.sl

Suprtool now dynamically loads all of the Oracle routines that it needs at startup. This insures that Suprtool is using calls only for your version of Oracle and provides a more stable environment.

If Suprtool fails to load the Oracle library, you will see the message:

  Warning: Your oracle library could not be loaded.

Eloquence Dynamic Load

Previously, Suprtool would attempt to load the Eloquence libraries and report an error message if the libraries were not loaded. This is no longer the default behaviour. Suprtool will try to load the libraries function, however Suprtool will not report an error by default. To check if your libraries were loaded you can run Suprtool with the -lw option:

 ./suprtool -lw

Oracle Connections

Due to recent patches and changes in Oracle Security, older versions of Suprtool could not connect to some Oracle databases. We have therefore re-written all of the code to connect to databases to use more up to date OCI functions.

By default, Suprtool will now use this new method of connecting. This version also improves the parsing of the open command, allowing for 30 characters each for the username, password and dbname.

This also allows for connection to databases on other servers.

  >Open Oracle username/password@dbname

Set Oracle OpenOld On Set Oracle OpenOld forces Suprtool to use the orlon call, when connecting to Oracle databases. This should only be used if connection to Oracle 7 databases.

Table Command

The Table command is now capable of reading files greater than 4Gb. The MPE version of Suprtool already does this.

Bugs Corrected in Suprtool 4.9

On HP-UX, Table was not releasing memory-mapped space properly. This may have been the cause behind a number of weird problems over the last couple of years.

Suprlink's Join command would not build the output file large enough if the input file flimit was significantly smaller than the Link file. This was only on MPE, since there is not such thing as a file limit on HP-UX.

For a complete list of problems corrected, go to www.robelle.com/products/whatsnew.html#Suprtool

6/01/2005

Archived News and Tips...

HP 3000 Book

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.