Solid software
for HP Servers
Robelle News   March 2004

Highlights from our recent on-line customer news. The links
and full articles are available at www.robelle.com/news

What’s Up DOCumentation

 "Qedit and Suprtool rock"

Quote from Robelle customer Craig Erwin of Tempe City Government.

 About Our Newsletter

Gordon Gavin of Cygnus Business Media writes:

It's always such a pleasure to read "What's Up Doc!" ... there is always at least one snippet to glean from the contents. Keep up the good work.

Allegro 20th Anniversary

Steve Cooper writes: As I reflect back on Allegro's 20 years and my own 26 years in the HP 3000 business, I cannot help but marvel at how lucky we are to be a part of this community. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work in such an exciting, dynamic, and supportive environment...

Click the link above and read what others have to say.

 

Homesteading and MPE Tips

Frank Smith for MPE Training

The Feb 2004 issue of The 3000 Newswire contains a good interview with Frank Smith of Alden Research, who offers certified MPE/iX training. Frank even developed MPE training classes for HP. Contact him via email at falden@aol.com or tel: 410.750.2101. Many other MPE consultants also offer MPE training, so it should not be a problem to get training for new staff for quite some time.

Paul Edwards on Homesteading

"The concept of homesteading comes from the 19th century United States law and practice of people moving west to settle the open public lands available. These rugged settlers had to endure many hardships to have a 160-acre plot of their own to cultivate and raise a family. Often they were far from their nearest neighbors and had to fend for themselves. My mother's family used the land runs in Oklahoma territory to acquire land for their settlement. We still have several pieces of family furniture in our house that were in their wagons used for the Run."

"This concept applies to the HP 3000 site that will continue to provide self-support for the platform long after the support from HP is gone. Since their announcement, HP has not shown to be proactive in providing the kind of support you have been used to in the past. But you don't have to be left out in the wilderness on your own if you apply the information in this article."

"net.digest" for December

John Burke has posted his December column from The 3000 Newswire, including tips on Samba and a good discussion of spare peripherals (why the A and N class are better than the older systems).

"net.digest" for January

John Burke has posted the January column from The 3000 Newswire. Topics include automating ftp logons, CI functions SIB request update and Nike Arrays.

Hidden Value for December  

John Burke's web site has the Dec issue of this column from The 3000 Newswire,with Q&A on tape drives, home up without CR/LF, file create, modify, etc. times down to the second, FINFO on temp file only, KSAM/XL space reuse, restricting VT-MGR connections, multiple LANICs on the same network, patch "versions", and more. A good read.

Hidden Value for January

John Burke has posted the January 2004 version of his "Hidden Value" column from The 3000 Newswire. Topics included: frozen program, login IP address, networking error messages, limits on the CI buffer, and much more.

Beechglen Technical Articles on the 3000

Here is a very useful archive of technical tips that you should bookmark for future reference. Dozens of topics, including Traceroute from MPE, Speeding Up Backups, using CI variables with FTP, and much more.

 

Qedit Tips

Merging Lines Horizontally

Merge is a Qedit command that matches lines in the current workfile with lines from a "merge" file, based on the line number. Qedit pre-release 5.4.12 contains a new option, MergeJ, which appends the corresponding line from the merged file, rather than replacing.

 

Suprtool Tips

Dbedit for Eloquence, and more...

Suprtool pre-release version 4.7.11 has some excellent improvements:

Suprtool Performance

Suprtool is a high-speed data extraction tool which, at times, depending on your type of system, version of OS, and the amount of memory you have, will consume too many resources. Read Neil Armstrong's suggestions for tuning Suprtool to be more resource friendly. A must read for any customer who has a system with greater than 2Gb's of memory.

 

HP-UX and Migration Planning

Migrating Suprtool to HP-UX

Recently I was asked why Suprtool for HP-UX doesn't work or even exist, when our web site had references to the product all over. I was incredulous, but apparently someone had been saying that Suprtool for HP-UX did not exist!!!!

Well nothing could be further from the truth, and what is even more important is that we have some great new enhancements and options available! However, one of the biggest questions in the last three weeks is what are the differences between MPE and HP-UX. It is evident that many customers recognize the investment that they have in their Suprtool code and want to know the types of changes they need to make to their code in order for it to work on HP-UX if they move from MPE. .. read Neil’s complete article.

Speedware Supports Eloquence

Jean-Marc Jalbert of Speedware writes:

"We officially support Eloquence on Windows and UNIXs. It is supported in the AMXW product, a recent Speedware acquisition. You can do a search on the Speedware Web site to get more info: www.speedware.com - Eloquence is also supported in our 4GL and CASE Tools : Speedware V7. We also support Omnidex for Eloquence on Windows and UNIXs."

Summit Migration Story

City and County Credit Union describes their successful migration from MPE to HP-UX. The Summit application uses the Eloquence database and our Suprtool/Qedit products on HP-UX.

 

Links/ Resources/ Industry News

Trivia Questions About the 3000

We added questions from Eugene Volokh to our trivia quiz.  Here are several to test your knowledge of history:

  1. What are the full names of the editor commands A, E, I, O, U?
  2. What HP screen-handling product preceded V/3000 (aka VIEW, VPLUS)?
  3. What government post did Dave Packard hold?
  4. What is the full name of HP Steak Sauce?
  5. What was the distinguishing feature of the HP 2641 terminal?
  6. What does the HP 150 output when you type "ESC & a ?" ?
  7. What happens when you hit control-DISPLAY FUNCTIONS on an HP 2645A terminal?
  8. What are the only unprintable characters that DISPLAY FUNCTIONS mode does not display [in the original HP terminals]?

Robelle at Summit Meeting

The Summit users meeting will be held May 17-20 at La Costa resort near San Diego, with a golf tournament on May 16. Bob and Mary Ann Green from Robelle plan to attend.

Getting Rid of the Cool Web Search Hijack

You go to Google and type in a search, but you end up at some other web site. You have been infected by a variant of the CoolWebSearch (CWS) hijack, which exploits the ByteVerify vulnerability in the MS Java VM. The infection comes from browsing the web, not from email or downloads, and some of our PCs have been invected despite having Norton and/or McAfee anti-virus installed. It is quite difficult to remove CWS - almost impossible in the latest variants. Click the link above for the CWShreader program to remove CWS and, optionally, protect you from re-infection. More details.

Customer Comments on Our Newsletter

Neda Bahrani of Superior Dental Care, Inc. writes: "If it were not for What's Up Doc, I would never get to learn new things!"

Why Google is Vulnerable

Read Tyler Cowen's post about Google's competitors and then try these two new search engines: Teoma and Mooter.