Recent News and Tips

Mark Bixby's Personal Home Page

Professional interests (porting Apache, Bind, OpenSSL, Perl, etc. to MPE and much more) and his personal interests of a major contributor to the 3000 infrastructure.

5/30/2003

Is a "Zero Secondaries" Report Good News?

TurboIMAGE master datasets have primary entries and secondary entries. Primaries are "good" because they can be located in a single disk read. Secondaries are "bad" because you must search down a chain of indeterminate length from the primary to find them. You would run a Howmessy or Dbgeneral report to find out what percentage secondaries you have in each master dataset. So, would a "zero secondaries" be ideal? Click the link to read our answer.

5/27/2003

Is Your Homestead Secure?

Solutions Symposum paper by Mark Bixby. Everything you need to know to help make your MPE system secure from hackers. Also available in PowerPoint format.

5/26/2003

ScreenJet Whitepaper: VPLUS Enhancement and Migration

Alan Yeo of ScreenJet providesa detailed explanation of the issues involved in migrating VPLUS applications. He also has a package solution using ScreenJet and AcuCOBOL. (You must give your email address to download the paper.)

5/22/2003

Robelle at HPWorld

Representing Robelle at HPWorld in Atlanta, August 11-15, will be Tammy Roscoe, François Desrochers, and Bob Green (who will be presenting a paper on database migration). Look for us in booth 114. As you enter the show floor, turn left and walk to the left wall. We look forward to seeing old friends again, and making new ones.

5/21/2003

HP White Paper: MPE Commands and Networks

This paper describes the issues for MPE Commands and MPE networking when migrating off MPE/iX. PDF format.

5/19/2003

MPE/iX 75 PowerPatch 1 Release

5/16/2003

Unbelievable Enhancements in Suprtool 4.7

Suprtool version 4.7 has been released for HP-UX and MPE/iX with more new features than in any previous year: the $Number function reads a freeform ascii number with signs, decimal places and currency, $Total function keeps a running total for a numeric field, the $SubTotal function totals numeric fields on level-breaks, the $Split function breaks strings into multiple fields, the Join command in Suprlink does many-to-many links, The Clean option prepares data for export, the Escape command exports problem characters with an "escape character", and the $Counter function increments a field for every record selected. (Application notes on these new features.)

Also Suprtool, STExport and Suprlink now support environment variables. And Suprtool/UX supports Eloquence 7.0 features and expanded limits.

5/15/2003

Acucorp COBOL

Here is the Acucorp web page for migrating HP COBOL to their compiler. You can request a White Paper, download their "Compatibility with HP COBOL" PDF file, read their HP FAQ, and more.

5/14/2003

9th HP Webcast

HP 3000 customers are asking HP:

* What's the quickest and least expensive way to make the transition?
* Which tools will save me the most money?
* Can I save money by just staying on the e3000?

On Thursday, May 22nd, HP will present the ninth webcast in the HP e3000 Transition series. The subject will be "HP e3000 Transitions: Controlling Your Costs". In addition to answering these questions, HP will briefly recap some of the highlights of the recent Solution Symposium that was presented by Interex. The 90 minute webcast will begin at 8:30 am (Pacific time) and will include opportunities for you to ask questions of our presenters. This program is available free of charge to HP e3000 customers.

5/13/2003

3rd Party Support: Blueline

This HP reseller in Dallas is 'is proud to announce a continuance of support for the 9X7, 9X8, 9X9, 99X and A & N-Class systems and software well beyond the December 31, 2006 "death" date.'

5/09/2003

New QWIN Script

We have posted a new QSL script on our web site that allows Qedit for Windows to upshift or downshift text.

5/08/2003

Qedit for Windows 5.4 Released

The official annual update to Qedit for Windows (client and server) has been released. Click the link above to read about new features in the PC client, including a useful option to break HP-UX data files (without line breaks!) into lines for display and edit.

5/07/2003

MPE Track Papers at HPWorld

HPWorld is in Atlanta this year, August 11-15, 2003. Here is the tentative schedule of MPE track papers:

Bob Green (Robelle): Transforming TurboIMAGE Data for Eloquence, Oracle and more

D. Scott Pierson: Transition Methodology and Planning: 5 Steps Toward e3000 Transition Success

Birket Foster: Enterprise Migration

Christopher Koppe: Migration Success Stories: Lessons Learned

Frank Calvillo: Homesteading - Establishing a Long-Term Strategy

Alvina Nishimoto: HP e3000 Transition and Migration Panel

Michael Marxmeier: e3000 Migration Implementation

5/06/2003

HP White Paper: KSAM and MPE Files

This PDF white paper describes in detail the MPE file system and KSAM indexed sequential file system, identifying those features that are proprietary and make involve some work to migrate to another system. 33 pages of good, detailed information.

5/05/2003

Robelle Newsletter for May

Our customer newsletter has been posted, with technical tips and news items from the last month.

* How to connect modern, non-HP peripherals to your 3000

* Qedit 5.4 released with LIST "string1" / "string2"

* How to fill columns with text in Qedit

* New $Number function in Suprtool for free-form input

* An Introduction to Eloquence

* Updated "Step by Step" paper

Click the link above to browse the web version, or download the PDF version.

5/02/2003

Why Am I Getting All This Email?

Mike Shumko writes:

Here's an interesting study which shows how email addresses are harvested by spammers, and how to avoid it.

http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml

5/01/2003

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.