ftp.robelle3000.ai 2014

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ ftp.robelle3000.ai 2014 / 2014.06.ftp.robelle3000.ai.tar / ftp.robelle3000.ai / newsletter / 1990 / w1990-02.txt < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1999-04-28 | 22KB | 456 lines

What's Up DOCumentation Robelle Consulting Ltd. 8648 Armstrong Rd., R.R.#6 Langley, B.C. Canada V3A 4P9 Telephone: (604) 888-3666 Fax: (604) 888-7731 Date: March 23, 1990 From: Robert M. Green, President David J. Greer, Research & Development Michael Shumko, Customer Support To: Users of Robelle Software Re: News of the HP 3000, 1990 #2 What You Will Find in This News Memo: Questions, News, and Tips Qedit Gains Redo Stack and Magic Marker! Doing It Right--Electronic Mail in the 1990's (Part III) Simple Analogies Used to Explain Computer Concepts to Laypeople Robelle Products: Problems, Solutions, and Suggestions Swimsuit Edition Questions, News, and Tips The Year 2000? Does anyone out there know of an HP routine to get the date in eight-digit format (other than Dateline!)? It's time to start thinking about this. Qedit and Suprtool Tutorials in Europe. On May 3rd and 4th, Bob Green will give Robelle training classes in Bern, Switzerland, and on May 7th and 8th in Frankfurt, Germany. Contact SWS Software to sign up. COBOL Subprograms; Lib = G. A programmer was pulling his hair out! Why didn't his program work? He ran it with Lib=G and was sure the subprogram he needed resided in the SL in the same group as the program. But it would always fail to find it. Answer? His program used the COBOL "CALL variable-name" syntax, which does a Loadproc of the subprogram. Loadproc looks for the subprogram in an SL in the logon group, not the program's group, so it failed. [Bob Houle] How Not to Build Files. One of our customers did not realize that you can use the :Build Command to create a temporary file (with the ;TEMP parameter). Instead, he came up with: :file filename,new;rec=-80,16,f,ascii;temp :purge *filename This technique can also be used to build permanent files (change the TEMP file-close disposition to SAVE). Ingenious. Stuff like this is guaranteed to provide hours of entertainment for computer operators, maintenance programmers, and anyone else who wants to figure out what's going on. Qedit Gains Redo Stack and Magic Marker! Robelle continues to enhance Qedit, the full-screen editor for all HP 3000 computers. Qedit is a complete environment for programmers, interfacing with most software tools on the HP 3000. You can remain inside Qedit all day, since it supports direct compile of the workfile (without saving!), PREP, LINK, RUN, UDCs, and Command Files, and allows you to hold tools like MPEX and Quiz suspended for instant access. Qedit also has a compatible line-mode, essential for batch editing jobs, so you need only one text editor for all tasks. Some of the new features in Qedit version 3.8.1: * Listredo Command (f7) enables you to edit and repeat your last 40 commands. The Redo and Before Commands work on the redo stack. Redo uses HP-style modify; Before uses Qedit-style (control keys). The Do Command repeats without editing. * Browsing: function keys (f2, f5, f6) now enable browsing in addition to the LJ Command. Browsing includes $Include files. * The List Command searches extremely big files (up to 99,999,999 lines). * New ZZ, "the magic marker", marks any group of lines for use in any command, including full-screen editing. * Column editing is now easier with Replace $Hold to replace lines from the Hold file. You can Hold lines from external files as well as the current Open file. * Set Filename allows an exact pointer to Help and Hint files. These files, and Compilers and NICEPMAP, follow the location of the Qedit program file. You can override the default account name for compilers with Set Account. * Calculator has ASCII input and output, and saves the last result. * Comments in {braces} are allowed at the end of command lines. * The number of processes that Qedit can suspend for instant activation has increased from 5 to 10. The INFO= command string is expanded from 80 to 256 bytes. * OPTION NOBREAK is supported in Qedit UDCs and Command Files. * For PowerHouse versions 5.01 and 5.06, and Native-Mode PowerHouse, new UDCs that work well within Qedit. * COBOL compile and link commands added to udcxl.catalog.robelle. These and other new features are explained in the documentation on the update tape. Print your own copies, or use the complete on-line help file. The user manual comes in two volumes. The first is an applications manual introducing Qedit and full-screen editing, with examples of applying Qedit. The second is a command reference manual. We include a new, improved version of PROSE, our text formatter, which is required to print the new manuals. All users of Qedit covered by service will receive an update tape automatically. Qedit is fully supported on MPE XL, with no upgrade charge. Hint! If you have let your Qedit service lapse, you can get this new version just by paying the next year's service fee. Doing It Right--Electronic Mail in the 1990's (Part III) by Marie Froese, Robelle Electronic Mail as a Memory Expander When was the last time you heard a co-worker say "Now I remember your mentioning that to me"? When people get busy, it is easy to forget things or misinterpret what people say. Using electronic mail, you can store memos, information regarding meetings, holiday schedules, business trips, and other important information easily and efficiently. You can also communicate last-minute changes to schedules and projects without having to leave your desk. In our company, we do a lot of travelling, and it is sometimes difficult to figure out when a person will be in town. To help keep this straight, we each post a message on the electronic Bulletin Board, giving our travel plans for the next few months. Barbara Janicki, our technical writer, is a good example, since she was commuting between eastern and western Canada for a year. Barbara wasn't able to stay logged on all day because of the large telephone bill she would incur, so this is how we solved the problem: Barbara dialed into the computer a few times each day using our mail program to dump and pick up her messages. Each transaction took only two to three minutes. We found it to be a very cost-effective way of keeping up-to-date across the country! Message from the Bulletin Board of BOB.GREEN BARBARA JANICKI 01 Apr89 10:56 Barbara's Travel Sched. Travel schedule April - September 1989. Apr. 08 - Apr. 16 London (1 week) Apr. 17 - Apr. 21 Toronto (Turbo IMAGE course) Apr. 22 - May 05 Vancouver May 06 - May 21 London May 06 - May 21 London May 22 - Jun. 02 Vancouver Jun. 03 - Jun. 09 London Jun. 10 - Jun. 18 Vacation (Driving to Vancouver) Jun. 19 - Jun. 23 Vancouver Jun. 24 - Jul. 03 Vacation (Hike West Coast Trail) Sep. 09 - Sep. 15 San Francisco (Interex 1989) Linking Dispersed City Offices Clint Pires from the City of St. Louis Park uses electronic mail to communicate with many departments throughout the five city-government office buildings. All five buildings are connected to one HP 3000, and in departments where not everyone has a terminal, one person is in charge of distributing and sending mail for that department. They found that once the city managers and division heads started using electronic mail to communicate, everyone else caught on quickly. The city of St. Louis Park Fire Department works shifts of one day on and two days off. They use electronic mail to keep track of inspections and other department activities. Think of how difficult it would be to coordinate on-going tasks in your office if people worked one day on and two days off. Electronic mail makes it easy for a person to pass on a task to the next person at the end of his shift. When the new person reports to work, his IN Basket has a list of the outstanding work. Ben Zajac of ABC Rail says that they use electronic mail extensively to keep in touch with their remote offices. Ben also mentioned that an unexpected spin-off of electronic mail is romance! Two people at ABC rail were communicating using electronic mail. As they got to know each other through their messages they decided that they might like to date each other! Electronic Mail in a Sales Environment Jan Winslow of Kelly Computers used electronic mail when she worked as a sales representative at D.I.S.C., and has implemented it in her new job at Kelly. She likes to log her sales phone calls so her boss can have a copy of all sales situations. He can thus be kept informed without face-to-face meetings. The sales force is able to keep in contact with the boss, without the need for a secretary or a file clerk. Getting Started Now that you have decided that your company will benefit from electronic mail, how do you get everyone to start using it? The first step is to train your users. Explore possible vendor training, in-house training, and establish in-house mail standards. Encourage users to use mail first, and call later if necessary. Teach them how and when to file messages electronically and when to keep a hard copy. Set the example by communicating with your people by mail. Require documentation for project direction by mail instead of relying on conversations. You might want to start in the MIS Department, and as you get more familiar with and confident about using electronic mail, you can demonstrate how it can be used in other areas of your organization. Start the cycle by sending a message a day to each person in your group, and expect a reply by mail. Refuse to be interrupted, and ask to receive a mail message. You will soon find that electronic mail works! At our shop, the electronic mail manager sends a daily joke to everyone on the system. He calls it his Fortune Cookie. In fact, he has the process automated as a batch job that spins off a new joke from a computer file at 12:34 every day! This ensures that there is always something interesting to read in your electronic In Basket. Message from the In Basket of MARIE FROESE COOKIE MONSTER 7 Jun89 13:25 A new cookie for approval ____________________________________________________________ Confidence.... That feeling you have before you understand the situation ____________________________________________________________ If people don't receive mail, they won't start sending it. But once they start sending mail, the whole process soon snowballs. Electronic Mail Is Cost Effective You can prove this and make it happen in your own shop. Many companies have electronic mail and don't use it to its full advantage. Many others can't convince management that it is cost effective. Talk to companies who use electronic mail to discover how it works for them (vendors can give you some names) and how they cost-justified electronic mail. If you do your homework you can: Increase productivity Reduce frustrations Lower project costs Reduce the number of meetings Avoid re-work (through the loss of information) Reduce memo typing and filing costs Lower telephone costs Capture otherwise lost opportunities Electronic mail does not replace interactive speech, but it does go a long way toward helping communication and productivity. Simple Analogies Used to Explain Computer Concepts to Laypeople by David Merit, Scrug Communicator 1. Disc caching is like Gin Rummy: you keep what you think you might need, except you can pick up as many cards as can fit in your hand. 2. Accounts are like filing cabinets, groups are like their drawers, and files are like file folders -- only you can't slam your hand in a group. 3. A disk drive is like a record turntable, except if the disk is bad it doesn't skip -- it destroys your database. 4. A job stream is like a ToDo list, except if you misspell `Coiffure' you don't get a CIERR 975 and the remainder of your ToDo list is not flushed. 5. A CE is like a refrigerator repairman: the scraping noise in the disk drive disappears as soon as he walks in the door, and comes back as soon as he leaves. 6. A binary search through a KSAM B-tree is like flipping through a phone book to find a number, except KSAM can't dial 411 when short children come for dinner. 7. Binary code processing is like turning all the lights on and off real fast in different sequences, except the computer's arm doesn't feel like it's going to fall off after a while. 8. The MPE operating system is like a person's brain, except older versions require less memory while older brains retain more memories. 9. The Memory Manager is like a traffic cop, except it does not take donut breaks every two hours. 10.A laser printer is like a photocopier, except it can't take a picture of your buns. Robelle Products: Problems, Solutions, and Suggestions All Products Series 6000 Drives. HP is now shipping their new Series 6000 disc drives (aka Blitz, Coyote, HP 2200). On MPE V, some Robelle software will not recognize these devices as discs, and may produce unexpected results. This is because of the new device type used when configuring them into MPE. Robelle software uses this information to decide whether it is writing to a disc, a tape, or a cartridge tape/serial disc. We started supporting these drives in Qedit 3.7.6, Suprtool 3.1.5, and Dbaudit 1.9.2. All versions of Xpress should be okay. Call us before you install the new drives, so that we can ship you fresh versions of the software. Note: MPE XL users should be okay. MPE XL 2.1 This version of MPE XL is still in beta-test. Yes, the stories are true - native-mode KSAM files are now one file instead of two, and spoofles are now regular disc files. The current versions of Suprtool and Qedit have trouble accessing these new KSAM files. We are working with HP to correct these problems before 2.1 is released. Suprtool Version 3.2 Privileged File Violation (FSERR 45). We have started receiving reports about Suprtool jobs failing with Privileged File Violations when they try to access databases on remote computers. It affects only users who do remote database access, and only those who have recently upgraded to a new version of MPE or NS. Here is the story. Various versions of MPE and NS/3000 have produced this error, starting with V-MIT. It is the result of increased security being applied to remote file access. Apparently, some customers complained to HP that a program on system A should not be permitted to access a privileged file on system B unless the job/session had logged on to system B as a user with PM capability. HP agreed that it was a security violation, and plugged up the security hole. This caused some problems for Suprtool users, including some HP internal sites. In V-Delta-1 they relaxed the security and went back to what was in effect before the change. About the time that V-Delta-5 was released, the increased security was again put into place. It appears that it will stay this way. We can offer a few workarounds: 1. Use the Set Privmode Off Command in the Suprtool task, before the Base Command. This will force Suprtool to use slow DBGETs instead of fast MR NOBUF access. Standard intrinsic access doesn't cause the privileged file violation. 2. Log on to the remote system as a user who has PM capability, and who has proper read/write access to the database. Manager.Sys satisfies these criteria, but few people want to code Manager.Sys passwords into their batch jobs. 3. Log on to the remote system as a vanilla user, then run a program such as VESOFT's God utility on the remote system, granting yourself the required capability and file-access privileges. This may be a viable workaround for some users. 4. Log on to the remote system as you have done in the past, but run Suprtool on the remote system instead of the local system. That is, run Suprtool on the system where the database resides. This makes the database access a local access, bypassing the NS security restrictions. For many tasks this can have the added benefit of increased performance. Consider this scenario: the task is to select one month of data from a yearly history file. If Suprtool runs on system A and the database resides on system B, then all the records in the dataset must be transferred over the DS line, just to have most of them rejected by Suprtool's selection criteria. On the other hand, if Suprtool runs on the same system as the database, then only the selected records need be transferred back across the DS line. This is the solution that we recommend. If you do not have Suprtool on all your production systems, you can use one of the other workarounds, or call us for a right-to-copy license. Qedit Version 3.8.1/ 3.8.2 Patch for Ftn 77 Version A.02.04 Here is a patch to FTN.PUB.SYS to keep it from going into an infinite loop when reading a Qedit workfile. ?m,32,151 051404,140050 Free Space. One of our users, Laurent Proulx at the Greater Montreal Real Estate Board, sent us this Qedit Use File which displays the percentage of his discs that are free space. Here is the UDC: freespace run Qedit.pub.robelle;parm=128;info="uq usefree.sysoper.sys" And here is the Use File usefree.sysoper.sys: s totals off s warnings off purge outfree purge freespac build outfree;rec=-132,1,f,ascii;disc=100 run free5.pub.sys;stdlist=outfree t outfree q "^[h^[J" q " " q "System Total Free Space ^G^G^G^G" q " " q " " lq "TOTAL FREE SPACE" q " " q " " dq "SYSTEM TOTAL FREE"(nomatch) cq "SYSTEM TOTAL FREE SPACE"" @ cq "="=(" @ apq "/13704009)*100" uq * The big number in the apq command is the total number of disc sectors on the system. Tip: 4096 sectors is one megabyte. ALT-Y Versus :Reflect. Why do some Reflection command files work fine when I execute them from the ALT-Y command line, but go screwy when I execute them using Qedit's :Reflect Command? Because that's the way it works. Qedit's :Reflect Command sends an escape code to Reflection to invoke the command, then Qedit waits for Reflection to send back a status code to indicate when the command is finished. While Qedit is waiting for the result code from Reflection, it isn't capable of executing other Qedit commands - it's already executing a Qedit command! The only thing that Qedit is capable of doing while it's waiting is to execute any MPE commands that Reflection might send to the HP 3000. The reason MPE commands must be accepted is that Reflection sends a :Run command for PCLINK whenever a file transfer is requested. As long as the command or command file doesn't attempt to TRANSMIT any data to the HP 3000, :Reflect will probably work the same way as ALT-Y. For example, here is a Reflection command file that works from ALT-Y, but not from :Reflect. ; BYE ; This command file gets me out of Qedit, logs me off ; the HP 3000 and exits from Reflection back to DOS. ; transmit "exit^M" wait 0:01:00 for "^Q" transmit "yes^M" wait 0:01:00 for "^Q" transmit "bye^M" wait 0:01:00 for "CONNECT" wait 0:00:05 hardexit Xpress Version 2.6 User Names Versus Group Names. We never anticipated that anybody would want to create an Xpress user with the same name as an Xpress group. But one user did, and discovered a bug in Xpress. A future version of Xpress will prevent you from defining users and groups with identical names. But if you have already done so, call our office. Managing Distribution Lists. Do you often send mail messages to the same lists of people? A Distribution List can make it easier. Instead of constantly typing all those user numbers, you can represent your list of users with a single letter, and you can create up to 26 lists (A-Z). To create a Distribution List, go to the Organizer and use the "Distribution Lists" option. This option gives you three sub-functions: 1 - exit, 2 - maintain distribution lists, and 3 - maintain user lists. Use option 2 to define a new letter and distribution list (for example, T - Techsup Department). Then use option 3 to add users to the list. The new distribution list will then appear on your user menu. Note: your distribution lists are private -- not shared with other users. Select a user to receive this message: 1 HELPMAN 6 Edit Message 7 Waste Basket 9 MPE Files 41 BOB.GREEN 45 MIKE SHUMKO 49 JIM BIRD 51 JOCELYN GREER 53 WARREN ZEVON 55 KEN ROBERTSON A - All Users T - Techsup Department Distribution lists are meant to save you from repetitively typing long lists of user numbers, but lists can be short: you could even make a list with just one person on it. I often send messages to users with similar numbers, and have to search my user menu -- is 45 Mike's number or Ken's? To save time, I created a distribution list under the letter M with Mike's user number, and another list under K with Ken's number. When Xpress prompts for a user number to receive the message, I type `M' to send to Mike, and `K' to Ken. [Barbara Janicki] Swimsuit Edition. We really weren't planning to have a swimsuit issue. Last month's tickler was just a joke. But for you die-hard `sports' fans, here it is.