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Text File | 1995-09-10 | 23KB | 516 lines

What's Up, DOCumentation? Robelle Consulting Ltd. Unit 201, 15399-102A Ave. Surrey, B.C. Canada V3R 7K1 Toll-free: 1-800-561-8311 Phone: (604) 582-1700 Fax: (604) 582-1799 Email: support@robelle.com Date: July 24, 1995 From: Robert M. Green, CEO David J. Greer, President Paul Gobes, Editor To: Users of Robelle Software Re: News of the HP 3000 and HP-UX, 1995 #4 What You Will Find in This News Memo: News Tidbits Technical Tips Book Review: "BUGS in writing" SLIP Connections from home About Robelle Robelle at Toronto Interex Robelle Products: Problems, Solutions, and Suggestions News Tidbits PKZIP Virus Alert. PKWARE Inc., the makers of the popular PKZIP data compression and archival software for PCs, inform us that someone has created a trojan horse program which masquerades as PKZIP. The filename is PKZ300B.EXE or PKZ300B.ZIP, which makes it look like a new PKZIP. The trojan horse program will wipe your hard disk if you execute it. PKWARE says that the current version of their product is 2.04G. SYMTOOL: Windows Front End to Suprtool Symple System has announced the release of Symtool version 1.0. Designed to provide an intuitive Windows-based front end to Robelle's Suprtool. Symtool will provide a set of GUI s which when responded to by the user will produce a usefile containing syntactically correct Suprtool commands. The usefile can then be transferred to a HP3000 host for subsequent execution (all without leaving Symtool). If you are an experienced Suprtool user, the interface should be fairly evident and after a few test sessions should become second nature. If you are not an experienced Suprtool user, Symtool can be an effective way to become proficient with Suprtool. Symtool uses WRQ's Reflection for Windows to download Image schemas into its data dictionary and to upload the usefile for easy testing. Priced at $995 per installation this product shows a lot of potential. For more information on Symtool contact Dan Lawson of Symple Systems at (608) 276-7937. Iworks merges with Interex. Interworks, the HP-UX Workstation users group has decided to merge with Interex and provide a single focus for HP-UX users. Iworks, as it is also known, is noted for its vast library of contributed software and for its annual conferences. These conferences were well attended by HP Lab personnel and provided a great atmosphere for learning. It is retaining it's unique identity by becoming the InterWorks Technical User Forum. The focus of the Forum will include workstations, technical servers and X terminals as well as significant technical markets, including CAD/CAM, software engineering and electronic design automation. Also, the Forum is responsible for preserving and expanding current services provided to InterWorks members. On Aug. 1, InterWorks members will become affiliate members of Interex. InterWorks members who attended the annual InterWorks conference in May in Phoenix, Ariz., will receive a complimentary one-year contributing membership in Interex, with all accompanying privileges. MPE CI Enhancements It looks like Jeff Vance and his MPE Labs team at HP have been pretty busy lately. He recently posted on the internet HP3000-L discussion list some enhancements that are scheduled for the Express 3 release of MPE/iX 5.0. This should be available for request around mid-September. What's really encouraging is how Jeff is involving users in shaping the final outcome of the features being added to MPE. There was much discussion back and forth on the HP3000-L about these and other requests. The REDO command will soon be able to upshift and downshift characters and words, you will be able to delete words and even delete characters up to some defined delimiter. This processing is also possible for both 'at end-of-line' and 'to end-of-line' by using the '>' character. For command file processing there will be these new evaluator functions: REPL for string replacements DEBLANK for removing blanks in a string DELIMPOS for determining the position of a delimiter in a string WORD for extracting 'words' from a string PMATCH for testing if a string matches a specified pattern Also look for changes to the RHT and STR functions that will allow negative ' chars' to indicate index numbers rather than number of bytes. In another of Jeff's posts, he mentioned some new CI variables, we have installed Express 2 release and here are the new HPvariables since MPE/iX 4.0. HPFILE = {identifies current command file name} HPLASTJOB = #J4796 HPOSVERSION = B.79.06 HPPIN = 151 HPRELVERSION = C.50.00 HPSTREAMEDBY = PAUL,MGR.ROBELLE (#S768) HPSYSTIMEOUT = 0 Technical Tips Store/Restore Bug. Last issue we told you about a bug in MPE/iX store/restore. The simplest workaround discovered so far to avoid the problem completely is to Store the files on the 5.0 system using the ;TRANSPORT option. When the files are restored onto the 4.0 system using Restore;Account=, the GUIDs will not become corrupted, because the files on the tape do not contain any GUIDs at all. Paul Taffel of VESOFT reports that MPEX can correct the faulty file labels if you run into the problem. WINDOWS 95, ready for prime-time? We have been using Beta versions of Windows 95 for several months. If you are considering upgrading to Windows 95, here is some common sense advice. Be absolutely, positively certain that every piece of your hardware and software is compatible with Win95, or will be upgraded to work with Win95. Win95 is a significant upgrade to Windows 3.1. Although Microsoft has done a good job of providing compatibility with existing hardware and applications, not everything is compatible. For example, Windows software for inputting and display Chinese characters fail, as well as some third-party installation Be prepared to add memory to your PC. Microsoft has said that Win95 will work with only 4Mb of RAM. In practice, consider 8Mb as the minimum. Having 12-16Mb is even better, because Win95's performance is much better with more memory. [Dave Lo] "Programming the CI" bitten by PROSE With the last issue of WUD we included two papers printed back to back, one of which was Programming the CI. Thanks to feedback from a few people, a couple of typos were spotted and reported. There are three occurences of missing @ signs in some examples. You see, our text formatter, Prose, loves to eat @'s if there is no preceding &. A @ indicates a hard space. Example Current Should be checkjobshowjob job=j;exec >sojfileshowjob job=@j;exec >sojfile sja showjob job=j;exec >sojfile showjob job=@j;exec >sojfile jobhist showvar jobhist > jobhist showvar jobhist@ > jobhist Creating Compound Variables in the CI If you've ever had the need to use a compound variable in the CI, but gave up trying to find out how to do it, then read on. The use of a compound variable is slightly different, depending on whether you are assigning or referencing them. Assignment (the left hand side of the setvar or input command) can be done simply by concatenating the names of the variables. i.e. setvar myvar!cnt 5 Reference - using the compound variable on the right hand side - is a bit more difficult. You must do some clever variable de-referencing to get it to work. The format would look like !'prefix_name!suffix_name' i.e. setvar some_var !'myvar!cnt' In other words, the format is made up of an exclam (!), a single quote, the prefix variable name without an exclam, followed by any variables that may make up the variable name, and terminated with a single quote. Jeff Vance from HP, after reading my CI programming paper, sent me these details with the remarks, "...we do this kind of thing all of the time...". [Ken Robertson] Modem Inactivity Timeout. Last month we got our phone bill and were shocked by a $750 phone call lasting over 25 hours. This was on one of our modem lines that we use for dialing out to customers' computers. The only explanation we can think of is that the remote HP 3000 did not drop the Data Terminal Ready (DTR) modem signal when we logged off, so the modem did not know to hang up the phone. Alternatively the remote modem might have been set to ignore DTR, which is a common factory default setting. Luckily we were able to convince the phone company to drop the charge (Thanks, BC Tel!), but they warned us that it was the last time they would do that. Since then we have discovered that our USRobotics modems have an inactivity timeout feature that will disconnect the call after a specified period of inactivity. For the USRobotics Courier modems we set register 19 to the desired number of minutes. E.g., ATS19=10 for hangup after 10 minutes of inactivity. Other brands of modems may also have this feature, activated via a different command sequence. [Mike Shumko] Book Review: BUGS in Writing by Mike Shumko BUGS in Writing: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose by Lyn Dupre, Addison Wesley, 1995. ISBN 0-201-60019-6 I'll start by admitting that I am fond of books about words: I have half a shelf of dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, and style handbooks, which I read for fun. The newest book is BUGS in Writing, which is actually fun to read, and has a style that makes it more useful than other books I have seen. There are over a hundred little sections of a few pages long, each one discussion a specific idea or principle. Each section has plenty of examples of that principle: Good, Bad, Ugly, and occasionally Splendid. By looking at the examples, you get an Ear for what is right and what is wrong. Each of these articles can be read like a bedtime story that is just a few pages long. Or as a reference, where you open up the book to the short section that deals with a specific problem you are grappling with. There is no need to read the book from cover to cover. In fact BUGS in Writing is designed with no flow from one section to the next. These are all discrete separate little articles that could very well have been a daily installment in a newspaper column on technical writing. Proofreaders and copy editors will find this book indispensable. What makes this book particularly valuable to WUD readers is that much of the material is geared towards writers of technical communications such as computer documentation, manuals, procedures, and online helpfiles. Lyn Dupre's experience and expertise is in the area of editing technical manuscripts - things written by computer nerds, scientists, etc. These people know their stuff but may not be the best writers. Lyn highlights the mistakes she commonly encounters. Everybody can benefit from these tips, from the novice writer to the long established author. Each will have his particular foibles and blind spots. Get this book; learn it; apply it. Your readers will thank you. SLIP Connections from Home by Paul Gobes For the last few years we have been enjoying the benefits of our office LAN: increased speed, multiple sessions, connections to different hosts, integration with PC programs and lately Internet access. But all of our programming staff work from home and have been forced to dial in via modem to a DTC and 'dsline' or 'vt3k' to whichever host machine they need to work on. This all changed last month when we bought a Livingston PortMaster communications server. This device looks like a DTC in that you connect your incoming modems to the back of it but what it does is it initiates a SLIP connection that extends your office LAN all the way to your home PC. SLIP stands for Serial Line Internet Protocol and it 'packetizes' your serial modem dataflow to resemble LAN traffic. On the home PC side we installed WRQ's 3000/Connect (RNS), selecting the SLIP option (not the ODI or NDIS protocols). Your home PC does not need a network card nor does WRQ require that you purchase a separate copy of RNS as long as your office PC is licensed for RNS. Configuring the PortMaster took a some trial & error but with a little help from our friends at WRQ, Allegro and Telamon we soon had it up. The device also supports PPP which we've heard is better but we'll wait until that's included in RNS before we try that. We are now upgrading our modems to 28,800 Kbps V.34 to take advantage of the greater speed capabilities. When we get our new T1 Internet feed in August I'm sure we'll see a lot of late-night Netscaping. What's to come? We're looking into Norton's "PC Anywhere" which is supposed to allow us to run any program that can be run from our Office PC, but testing will show if this includes Windows for Workgroup applications like Schedule+. We've already had Mike from home connect to Neil's home PC and pickup a program via ftp. This stuff is amazing, the only question now is what to do with those empty DTCs? About Robelle Welcome to Robelle, Trevi. Trevi Caroline Spronk has recently joined our Sales and Marketing department as an Account Representative. Currently she is getting up to speed with our product line. In the near future she will be taking care of customer inquiries and providing input to our product marketing. In the past Trevi has worked in technical support, 4GL programming, as an MIS supervisor and for last few years has been involved in the marketing of application software. In her spare time she enjoys long walks in Vancouver's West-End, hikes in the wilderness and is an amateur watercolorist. Beyond the Call of Duty. It was Friday night, and I was lying on the bathroom floor, subjected to the virus that became known as the Robelle Revenge. I had been worshiping at the porcelain alter for some time now, and I finally felt that I could go back to bed. I glanced at the clock. "Oh no, it's quarter to four," I thought to myself. "Oh well. At least I didn't wake up the kids." I returned to bed, and finally began to drift off. Rringgggg. At this point my admiration for my wife, Aly, became slightly clouded - she picked up the phone and handed it to me without even waking up. "Hello," I said, trying to sit up. "Hi, sorry to call so late, this is the answering service." Suddenly, a wave of nausea swept over me. I wasn't sure if this was from sitting up, or from hearing that this was the answering service. I ran to the bathroom, (luckily we have a cordless phone); the wave of nausea subsided, and I started to ask the answering service who had called. My immediate problem was finding the right tools with which to write down the name and telephone number of the computer operator in distress. My wife's eye liner and toilet paper just were not working, so I had to run to my office for pen and paper, having retrieved that, I felt that I needed to be in the bathroom again, writing down the name and number to call. I sat down on the bathroom floor and tried to collect myself and wake up some more. Ok, now dial the phone number. A voice as tired as mine answered the phone, and quickly outlined the problem. I described the steps needed to make the problem better. The caller thanked me and hung up. Then, on the mats on the bathroom floor, I slipped off to sleep. [Neil Armstrong] Robelle at Toronto Interex This year's North American Interex conference is being held at the Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada August 14th to 18th. Robelle has planned another great selection of talks and tutorials for this year. Featured speakers include Bob Green, David Greer, Paul Gobes, Hans Hendriks, and Ken Robertson. In order to assist your conference planning, we have included Robelle's Handy Toronto Guide and Calendar in your delegate bag. It includes spaces for session planning as well as a quick guide to some of Toronto's restaurants and night spots. Wednesday Speaker Topic 8 a.m. Hans Hendriks Speeding Up Quiz with Suprtool 10 a.m. (2 hrs) David Greer How Messy is My Database? 2 p.m. Paul Gobes Ensuring Data Integrity with Suprtool 3 p.m. David Greer Client Server, Internet, & WWW 4 p.m. Bob Green Qedit Cookbook for Novices Thursday Speaker Topic 9 a.m. Ken Robertson Programming the Command Interpreter 10 a.m. Bob Green Suprtool Tables, Keys & 3rd Party Indexing 11 a.m. Hans Hendriks Qedit's Forgotten Commands 3 p.m. Paul Gobes Combining Data Files Without Keys 4 p.m. Bob Green Qedit Master Class Friday Speaker Topic 10 a.m. David Greer Suprtool Master Class Enter to Win Visit the Robelle booth (number 600) for contest details on how you can win one of four fabulous prizes. The draw will take place Thursday afternoon in the Robelle booth. Special Interex Prices! If you have been holding back on ordering Qedit or Suprtool, now is the time to take advantage of a special one-time Interex offer. Bring your purchase orders to our booth during the Interex conference in Toronto and save up to $800 on your order. All orders processed at the show will be eligible for 20% off the first CPU license. This offer will not be available after the close of the conference on August 18, 1995. If you are not attending the conference, contact the Sales Department for more information about how you can take advantage of our Interex promotion. Toronto Tips by Neil Armstrong Since I lived in Toronto for years before moving to Robelle on the left coast, I know a little about the city where this year's Interex conference will be held. Here is this edition's tip for traveling to and around Toronto: Book Stores. Toronto has two of my favourite book stores. The first is Bakka which is found on Queen Street West. (This is a fun street to just walk down and watch some of the interesting people!) This is a used book store that specializes in Science Fiction, I highly recommend it. If Science Fiction isn't your thing, you could always visit the World's Biggest Bookstore which is two HUGE floors of books and magazines. The store is found just off Yonge St. (the main street running North/South in the downtown core) and is one block North of Dundas. When you visit you will see terminals and PCs behind some counters, which are, interestingly enough connected to an HP3000. Robelle Products: Problems, Solutions, and Suggestions Suprtool Version 3.7 Delayed Installation tip. When installing new versions of Suprtool (or Qedit) the steps are: 1.) Restore and stream Robelle.Pub.Sys 2.) Restore @.@.Robelle 3.) Stream Install.Suprjob.Robelle (or Install.Qeditjob.Robelle) 4.) .... various optional steps You can setup the account and restore the files (steps 1 & 2) while users are on the system using Suprtool, and defer the rest of the installation steps (step 3 onward) until the middle of the night when nobody is using the system. e.g. :stream install.suprjob.robelle;at=02:00 Validating field relationships. The IF command can now support arithmetic operations between fields, even fields of different numeric data types. This is useful in checking some of the 'business rules' that most applications have. These rules are usually included in the data entry programs but sometimes 'stuff happens' and the data gets messed up. Here is a simple task that uses this new feature to isolate which records are breaking the rule of "Invoice amount = price times quantity". >base sales.db,5,reader >get d-invoices >if price * quantity <> amount >list standard title "Price * Qty not = Amount" device LP >xeq This idea can be used in a monthend job that prints exception reports. [Taken from the "Ensuring Data Integrity Using Suprtool" tutorial given at Interex in Toronto.] Qedit Version 4.3 Editing PC files John Conway from Stockton Unified School District really wanted Qedit to be able to edit PC files (he staked his whole $100 from the survey on this). Well, we haven't done what he really wants yet, but we did come up with this little command file that does allow editing of PC files. It makes use of the REFLECT command which invoke WRQ's Reflection to do the actual up and downloading of the file. Here is a listing of command file: parm pcfile continue purge mpefile /reflect send !pcfile to mpefile file edttext=mpefile run qedit.pub.robelle,basicentry;parm=4 /reflect receive !pcfile from mpefile delete We kept this command file as PCTEXT, so to use it from within Qedit: /pctext \windows\system.ini Powerhouse 7.29c2 no longer suspends. Cognos have been distributing their latest "rolling bug fix" for HP3000s, version 7.29c2 which introduces a new problem for customers running the PowerHouse components with the ";SUSPEND" option (as is done from within our supplied command files QZ, QD and QP.QEDCMD.ROBELLE). Version 7.29C2 introduces a bug where the program is successfully suspended, but does not notify the parent process, and subsequent invocations create new processes which are in turn also suspended. So, over time, the same module will be held suspended multiple times, wasting system resources. Cognos are aware of the problem, which has been elevated to "hot site" status. Their problem reference number is 111002. They are hoping to have it fixed in 7.29c3. In the meanwhile, we would suggest that if you're running PowerHouse version 7.29c2, you temporarily remove the ";SUSPEND" parameter from the run command in the QD, QP and QZ command file. [thanks to James Wilkinson, Commonwealth of Virginia] Frequently Asked Questions Do I need a new tape when I get a new CPU? Even though your new CPU will have a different HPSUSAN (or SPU) number than what is currently encoded into your Robelle software, it is not necessary to wait for a new tape. Simply call us and let us know the new number. We can generate the authorization codes that you feed into a program that you already have. On a HP3000 it is Extend.Pub.Robelle, on a HP9000 it is /usr/robelle/bin/extend. It usually takes about 5 minutes. How do I get this newsletter via email? If you have electronic mail at your site and you are a Robelle customer on current support then you can get 'What's Up DOC?' sent to you automatically via email. This is great where many people at your site want their own copy. Just email us at 'support@robelle.com' and let us know which address to send it to. We'll still also send you a regular copy via 'snail-mail'.