Recent News and Tips

New files in HP-UX!

Sometimes customers kick themselves for asking simple questions, but really there are no silly questions. I had to remind myself what I do when a customer asked about creating a new file on HP-UX.

11/25/2005

Phone in Support November 24-25

Reminder, that today is Thanksgiving and there will be no phone in Technical Support on November 24 - 25, 2005 due to Thanksgiving holidays in the US. E-mail technical support will be available during this time.

11/24/2005

Migration page updated!

Recently I have been getting more e-mails about migrating Suprtool code from MPE to HP-UX. I went back and looked at our migration article and quickly realized that due to improvements made in Suprtool 4.9.01 a couple of the more recent features of Output=Input, and Totals to a $file and $list, had been completed, so migrations are just a little bit easier.

Click on the link above to read some of the details.

11/23/2005

Adventures in Technical Support!

This feature was called the technical support call of the week, however, we have already had feedback saying that this is answering questions for our customers, and since I have a fairly large collection of support calls, this feature is now called Adventures in Technical Support.

Feel free to say Adventures in Technical Support like a over zealous small market radio announcer, driving in a convertable thru a tunnel.

On that note, take a look at our latest installment for creating Unique Filenames

11/17/2005

Qedit and Columns

A customer e-mailed us to as they knew what they wanted to do, but they did not know what syntax to use for manipulating columns.

Read the article on how to move columns and change data in certain columns based on data in other columns.

11/16/2005

Phone in Support November 24-25

There will be no phone in Technical Support on November 24 - 25, 2005 due to Thanksgiving holidays in the US. E-mail technical support will be available during this time.

11/14/2005

The Robelle Sales and Administration offices will be closed Friday, November 11, 2005, in honour of Rememberence Day.

11/09/2005

MPE Training Continues!

Paul Edwards and Frank Smith have licensed the MPE training courses from HP and are offering training into the future. As HP certified MPE professionals, Frank Alden Smith of Alden Research, Inc., and Paul Edwards of Paul Edwards & Associates were HP contract instructors for nearly a decade and are long time solution and training partners of HP. They will provide ongoing course material updates, creation of new courses, and delivery of high quality MPE training at specific training facilities or customer sites. Cick link above for their web site.

11/08/2005

Getting SD files off of tape?

We recently had an inquiry from a customer that no longer had an HP 3000 that needed to get their Self-Describing files off of tape and onto the HP 9000 as the two separate files, both data and "label" information.

Unfortunately, SDUNIX cannot read files off of tape, Allegro on the other hand, does have a solution.

Take a look at Gavin Scott's reply on options for getting SD files from an HP 3000 store tape (and other formats), to your HP 9000, in our recurring COW column. We are featuring, the Technical Support Call of the Week, not COWs.

11/08/2005

How do I move my SD files to HP-UX?

SD files, or Self describing files are used widely on MPE. Self-describing files have mini-dictionaries that tell Suprtool what fields and data types are in any given file. On MPE this information is stored in the file labels, however, their is no concept of a file label (user) that we could store this information in, back when we ported Suprtool to HP-UX we stored this information in a separate file, which has the same name as the data portion, with a ".sd" appended to the file.

Lately we have been asked how to move Self-Describing files from MPE over to HP-UX. If you click on the link above, you will learn all about SDUNIX our conversion utility that takes SD files from MPE and turns them into the two files which can be read by Suprtool for HP-UX when copied over. You can read all about SDUNIX if you click on the link above.

11/07/2005

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.