Recent News and Tips
The Suprtool If command supports 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 records which are breaking the rule of "Invoice amount = price times quantity".
>base sales.db,5,passwd
>get d-invoices
>if price * quantity <> amount
>list standard device LP &
> title "Price * Qty not = Amount"
>xeq
Use this tip for month-end jobs that prints exception reports.
Tip taken from the Robelle tutorial Ensuring
Data Integrity With Suprtool (PDF Format).
5/31/2001
Chris Gauthier reports several calls as of late concerning configuration of the “free” 100Base-T card in the A and N-Class. Most confusion he has seen has been in remembering that the 100Base-T interface is NOT the default one for MPE 7.0 and it must be set up as an alternate interface to the MPE default “ThinLan”. For full instructions, click the link above.
5/30/2001
The HP web site contains an on-line reference for their PCL codes used by
the LaserJet and other printers. Another non-HP reference is
on this UCSF page. Thanks to www.hp3000links.com
for the link.
5/30/2001
This link is to a Robelle paper on Debug/iX, a powerful tool that also has
some very simple uses. Yesterday, for example, I needed to know why an unexpected warning message was
being printed in Qedit. So I set a breakpoint in the print_warn procedure and when the breakpoint
occured, I did a trace to see where it was called from. A quick look at the source code and I
knew what the problem was. Besides this paper, here are 3 other useful links:
Macros to go with this paper that
show the parameters of hpfopen, etc.
System Debug Reference Manual for 6.5, online
Introduction to Debug/iX by Stan Sieler of Allegro
bob.green@robelle.com
5/29/2001
From an
Email thread on the hp3000-L mailing list:
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2001
To: HP3000-L List
Subject: Re: Esc and other trash in IMAGE
From: Thisted, Kristian"
Kristian.Thisted@skanska.se
Good day to you all!
This has probably been up before but I still have a problem which many of
you have encounterd before. We are about to migrate to another DB and some
fields contains characters like TAB and ESC. They are of course not accepted
by the receiver.
How can I clean my Image fields? Suprtool?
(Of course there are several ways to clean efter the export.)
Hilfe!
Reply from Paul Gobes at Robelle:
Suprtool would be an excellent choice:
To find and clean up TABs in Suprtool:
>base mydb,1,
>get mydataset
>define a,myfield,1,byte
>if a = ^9 {caret 9 = decimal 9 = tab}
>update
>extract a = " "
>xeq
Above I've used the caret "^" to find 'Character constants'.
Usually the corruption occurs in the first byte of the field, so
I defined as a single byte. Then Suprtool can update the subfield 'a'
with a space.
You could also change the selection command to "if a < ^32" to get
all the 'unprintables' below spaces.
paul.gobes@robelle.com
5/28/2001
Paul Edwards is one of Robelle's authorized Suprtool training instructors, but he also does a wide
range of e3000-related consulting.
|
Company Name: |
Paul Edwards & Associates |
|---|
| Speciality: | HP e3000 Consulting, Development, and Management |
|---|
| Description: | Paul Edwards & Associates is a full service
consulting firm specializing in Hewlett-Packard 3000 computer systems.
The company is a recognized leader in providing professional data processing
services and solutions in many industries throughout the U.S. since 1980. |
|---|
| Contact: | Paul Edwards |
|---|
| Email: | pedwards@gte.net |
|---|
| Location: | Carrollton Texas |
|---|
| Phone: | 972.242.6660 |
|---|
| Fax: | 972.446.9022 |
|---|
| Web site: | www.peassoc.com |
|---|
Suprtool
Experience: | Robelle-Authorized Suprtool instructor. |
|---|
Qedit
Experience: | Qedit for Windows is used in application development projects. |
|---|
| References: | Hewlett-Packard, Client Systems, and many others available on request. |
|---|
| Notes: | Customer satisfaction, delivering the
highest quality service and support, completing projects on time,
and being cost competative, is our trademark.
Paul Edwards is a certified HP 3000 Technical Consultant. |
|---|
5/25/2001
Robert Allen Green of Long Reach Inc. has only been using Suprtool for a short time, but
he has certainly been making his IT department look good. Click the link above to read
how Robert cut the time of their Sales Shipment report from four hours to 16 minutes using
Suprtool, and made the report much more flexible as well.
5/24/2001
The second part of our new monthly column in the 3000
Newswire is about rectangular editing in Qedit for Windows.
Click the link above for the full story from Bob Green!
5/23/2001
Robelle has started writing a column for the 3000 NewsWire
magazine, called: Robelle Tech.
Each month it will feature a technical article about an hp e3000
topic and another article about getting the most out of
Robelle's e3000 products, Qedit and Suprtool.
Street date for the May issue with our first column was May 17
and the stories are now posted on the NewsWire website as
well. Click the link above to read Paul Gobes' article about RAM
memory in your e3000, the RAMUSAGE program, and how to get more RAM at a reasonable price.
5/22/2001
Longtime Robelle customer Art Bahrs (abahrs@denkor.com) has been using Suprtool since 1989 and
qualifies as a Suprtool expert in his own right. Art was initiated to
Suprtool at Oregon Health Services Foundation where he worked for six
years and even presented a paper on Suprtool's data manipulation
capabilities at the annual SRN conference in 1996. Since then he has
used Suprtool at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon, Boyd's Coffee, and
now at Denkor Dental Management Corp. He even helped his wife, Sandra,
a custom report analyst, learn how to use Suprtool.
Robelle's Nicky Gunther (nicky.gunther@robelle.com)
noticed that Art was one of the frequent
posters to the Robelle-L mailing list, responding to a great variety
of Suprtool topics and questions. Art shared some of his Suprtool experiences with Nicky in a
profile that you can read at the permanent bookmark.
5/21/2001
Host-based Qedit may not have the fancy UI of Qedit for Windows,
but it does have two very nice features for word processing:
the Justify command to flow text into even paragraphs, and the
Spell command to check the spelling of words in your text.
For more details, visit the permanent
bookmark for this story.
5/17/2001
Mark Klein of DIS International deserves a round of applause for his work
porting the GNU compilers and tools to the HP e3000 platform.
Visit Mark's GNU page for links to the GNU documentation.
The actual ported GNU tools are available for download from HP's Jazz server.
5/16/2001
You may have noticed that the Robelle home page has been constantly updated with
new stories since last November. One of the things that makes this possible is an
impressive web service called Blogger which manages, edits and publishes
rolling news stories and links, otherwise known as "weblogs" (the most famous weblog is probably
Slashdot.org which publishes items of interest to techies
and allows them to comment on the stories).
The Blogger service that we use keeps all of your
stories in a database on its server. When you decide to publish, Blogger merges the most recent stories with an HTML template
that you provide and FTPs the resulting web page to your web site. Very cool. Based in San Francisco.
The fact that Blogger is free means you can even use it to publish news for your department at work,
your church, your soccer team, whatever you are involved in that has on-line colleagues.
And if the Blogger service is ever down, I update the home page manually
and post a copy to Blogger when it comes back up. [Permanent bookmark]
5/15/2001
In many reports,
data is unnecessarily repeated in a column. Suprtool can remove duplicate data
from a report, which turns a daunting report into a friendlier version.
For example:
ACCT CONTACT-NAME ADDRESS-TYPE
206J Fred Flintstone MAIN
206J Fred Flintstone INVOICE
206J Fred Flintstone TAPE
206K Freakazoid! MAIN
206K Freakazoid! INVOICE
We have three ADDRESS-TYPE records for Fred Flintstone and two for Freakazoid.
It would improve the report readability tremendously if we could
eliminate the redundant printing of Fred Flintstone and Freakazoid.
Robelle's Ken Robertson has a solution to this need.
Read his full explanation at the permanent
bookmark for this item.
5/14/2001
Jeff Kubler of Kubler Consulting
is presenting a session
on Suprtool at this year's HPWorld conference in Chicago,
"Super Suprtool Solutions":
Suprtool is one of the most prevalant database extraction tools in the MPE world.
Virtually every application, from legacy applications to the new e-commerce
applications, will have some use for Suprtool. A clear understanding of its use
and capabilities is a key concept in any developer's technical bag of tricks. In addition,
there are a number of great solutions to some of the trickiest problems with
database or file extraction, and updating that will be covered in the presentation
of the paper should help any developer increase productivity.
Click the link above to read more, including Jeff's bio.
5/11/2001
To select the intersection of two datasets, standard reporting programs rely on linking the two datasets together.
For example, to report sales generated by California customers, your Quiz code would
access the customer dataset only for purposes of
qualifying which sales records should be selected. For each
customer account that it selects, Quiz retrieves the sales detail records via keyed reads
This common reporting need can be done more efficiently by using Suprtool's Table command.
Click the link above to read the full explanation.
5/10/2001
At HPWorld there will be seven HP management roundtables, including IMAGE/SQL and HP e3000 Management. You can submit issues for
the panel at the Interex web site. Just click on "Review Issues" and then "Submit a new issue".
The only issue submitted so far is by Ken Sletten about the
need for a full-speed
A-Class.
5/09/2001
The 3000 Newswire has a good interview with Duane Percox of Quintessential School Systems , HP e3000
application suppliers to the K-12 education market. Lots of insights:
The reason we still like the 3000 is that it has a breadth of performance that’s binary compatible — such that I can put a 3000 in for a small school agency, and I can put a big 3000 in for a humongous school agency, and I don’t have to worry about performance issues related to the small vs. high end. The only issue is price.
5/08/2001
Robelle will be at HPWorld August 20-24, 2001 in Chicago. Representing Qedit and Suprtool will be
Nicky Gunther, Bob Green, Tammy Roscoe and Hans Hendriks.
Some deadlines are fast approaching: June 8 for submitting final papers and
July 28 for early bird registration discounts.
The list of MPE presentations is
interesting this year (see the HP World web site
for papers by Alfredo Rego "23 Years of Gypsy Programming", Stan Sieler "Test and Tune Your Disk Drives",
Mark Bixby "Perl Programming on MPE/iX", Rich Trap "Cool UNIX Utilities on MPE", ...). Robelle's
Bob Green is presenting two of them:
Building Better Software:
User-Centric Techniques That Endure and
Image Internals and Performance: a
two-hour tutorial.
5/04/2001
Qedit for Windows: Testimonial
"We've been using Qedit for Windows to edit MPE COBOL source code on our
HP-3000, as well as accessing UNIX files on our HP-9000. It's been a huge
time-saver on the 9000, because we no longer have to telnet into the box and
vi the file - we just edit it right here on our PC's. We have an employee
directory on our web site, which is driven from a flat CSV file. There are
constant updates to the directory, and the time savings will pay for Qedit
in the very short term."
Dave Phillips
Programmer/Web Developer
Gavilan College
5/04/2001
Automated Computer Environment LLC provides management and technical services necessary for the automation of system and data center operations. They specialize in the integration of a variety of tools into management frameworks such as OpenView and TME for medium to large size companies. Scott Hirsh is well-known as former chairman of SIGSYSMAN and
Keith Olson moderates the Maestro discussion list.
5/03/2001
We have enhanced our web site with an archive of technical support calls that
can be searched and displayed. This allows you to check whether an issue has already been reported
to Robelle and what the status of it is. The new Robelle Knowledge Base search page is at
www.robelle.com/AT-kbs.html; it contains both bug reports and enhancements, open and closed,
searchable by keyword.
Use the number of the KB entry if you know it.
Each entry in the Knowledge Base is assigned a unique number, such as 16488
for KB16488. If you know the number, you can go directly to the entry.
Not all KB entries are visible on the web site.
Any entry that contains customer sensitive information is not posted to the
web site. The internal Robelle Knowledge Base is used for many mundane
transactions such as sending updates to customers who need a fix or
enhancement; these are not posted to the web site.
How to Find My Submissions?
You can't search by your name or your company name, since those are removed
from the web KB entries for privacy. You will need to search by any words
or phrases that appeared within your submission, or by the KB ref # if you
know it.
How Frequently Is This Updated?
The web version of the Knowledge Base is currently updated once per day at
night. If you append a comment to an entry, it will first go to technical
support, who will add it to the database. New entries are not automatically made public; it
takes an explicit action by the technical staff.
Many thanks
to Ken Robertson who wrote the 3000 software to convert the data from
our IMAGE database into HTML, to Dave Lo who created the web Perl scripts,
and to Paul Gobes and the rest of the staff for editing our archives to
bring you these support calls.
Bob Green
bgreen@robelle.com
5/02/2001
This page was put together so that Ecometry users can get in touch with other Ecometry users
via instant messaging. To chat with a user, just click on their AIM name on the page.
If you want to get added to the list, email Ryan Wheeler (rwheeler@desantiscollection.com) with your name, email address, company name and URL, what your company does, and your AIM nickname.
Hosted on Ecometry.org by Anthony Ballo (anthony@ecometry.org).
5/02/2001
Examples of the Robelle Channel
The news stories on the Robelle home page can now easily appear on other web sites, as headlines with links to the full stories.
For examples of how this looks on people's web pages, visit
Ecometry Users Group web site
Kubler Consulting
Bob Green's home page
To add the Robelle daily e3000 tips to your site, read the instructions
and learn the single line of Javascript that makes it happen.
5/02/2001
With the introduction of the Euro and the withdrawal of national banknotes
in February 2002, it's important that you know how to manage the Euro symbol on the
HP e3000.
To find out how to configure your input devices, such as the Reflection terminal emulator,
and your printers, read the article linked above.
This article was sent to us, courtesy Marius Schild (marius@samco.nl) of
Samco Automation, one of our excellent distributors,
who got it from Ingrid Lamandassa of HP-Netherlands.
5/01/2001
With Suprtool, it is easy to include a grand total of a field in a simple report. List Standard Device XXX prints a simple report on device XXX, and Total $File $List prints the total of a field on the same List device.
What if you also want to include a count of the number of records totalled?
To find out how, read Dave Lo's article linked above.
5/01/2001
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.
