What's Up DOCumentation Robelle Consulting Ltd. Unit 201, 15399-102A Ave. Surrey, B.C. Canada V3R 7K1 Phone: (604) 582-1700 Fax: (604) 582-1799 Date: October 31, 1992 From: Robert M. Green, CEO David J. Greer, President Michael Shumko, Editor To: Users of Robelle Software Re: News of the HP 3000, 1992 #5 What You Will Find in This News Memo: News Tidbits Technical Tips Robelle Visits Australia and New Zealand Backup Tips by David Merit About Robelle Calendar of Events Running Robelle Programs From PowerHouse Robelle Products: Problems, Solutions, and Suggestions The New XPRESS 2.9 Improves Screen Interface News Tidbits And the Award Goes To ... Congratulations to Bob Green and David Greer of Robelle, who picked up three of the top awards at Interex this year. Bob received one of three Best Paper awards in the All Platforms category for his paper entitled "The Warning Signs, A Pop Quiz on Quality". And talk about presentation skills! David and Bob each won one of three Tutorial Presentation awards: David, for "Suprtool Performance Tips with the Developer", and Bob, for "Qedit Problem-Solving with the Creator". Way to go, team! SIGLASER is Going Again. The special interest group for high-end laser printers (HP 2680 and HP series 5000) is starting up again. For more information contact the INTEREX office, or Steve Hammond at steve_hammond%aamc@mcimail.com LaserJet 4. Once again, Hewlett Packard proves its leadership in LaserJet technology with the recent introduction of the LaserJet 4. This new LaserJet produces documents at 600 dots-per-inch (DPI) resolution, compared to the 300 DPI that all previous HP LaserJets offer. HP has listened to its customers, and has addressed many of the complaints regarding the shortcomings of the LaserJet III. The LaserJet 4 has 45 scaleable fonts, which include ten Windows 3.1 TrueType fonts. The printing speed is still eight pages per minute, even at 600 DPI. It offers some new printing modes, including "reverse landscape" and "reverse portrait", which turn your text page upside down. In continuing with HP's trend to Open systems, new hardware and software options help connect the printer to any type of machine in any environment. For example, the printer has new bi-directional parallel and serial ports which can both be used at the same time. Support for Printer Job Language switching has been included, making the printer ideal for networks. Context switching, as in determining if the file is PostScript or PCL, is performed automatically. The price is only slightly higher than that of the LaserJet III, making this model an excellent purchase. [Ken Robertson] Technical Tips Memory. When you run out of memory on a 9xx, one of the first symptoms is slow response time. We were running our R&D series 922 with 32MB of memory, with up to six users doing compiles, links, test suites, and document formatting. If we didn't touch the terminal for a few minutes, when we eventually pressed Return, it would take 15 seconds to get the prompt! After adding another 32MB of Kelly memory, response time went back to normal. AT Commands. You can put spaces in your modem commands to make them more readable: atb0q0x6&a2&b1&h1&m5&n0 becomes at b0 q0 x6 &a2 &b1 &h1 &m5 &n0 Robelle Visits Australia and New Zealand In September, David Greer went on a road trip with Laurie Facer, Julie Mowinski of Holland House, Mike Butler of D.I.S.C., and David Merit of ORBIT Software. We visited Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, and Wellington, giving product presentations and seminars. We met an interesting group of users and had fun visiting the land down under. Special thanks to Laurie and Sandy Facer for organizing the whole trip. Backup Tips by David Merit While traveling in Australia, we listened to David Merit's talk on backup technologies. The three most important things about a backup are reliability, reliability, and reliability. Tape drives will report the number of errors and retries to the controlling software, but MPE's :Store command does not provide any way of finding out what these values are. By default, MPE's :Store command will abort a backup with a tape error. If you are using a third-party backup product, check to see if any JCWs are set with the number of errors and retries. This should be monitored by your backup job streams. David recommends that you throw out tapes with more than three errors or ten retries. ORBIT has seen cases where the backup completed, but the number of errors or retries was high enough that users could not restore from the backup. It also takes longer to write to a bad tape. According to ORBIT, you can safely use 90M DDS tapes, even in older HP DDS drives. HP does not support 90M DDS tapes in some of their older drives, but if you are using a third-party backup utility it doesn't matter because HP won't be supporting your backup recovery. ORBIT has been using 90M DDS tapes for two years without any problems. [Unfortunately Robelle has not had any luck getting 90M DATs to work in the C1501A DAT drives on the S922. Caveat Emptor. Ed.] You should clean DDS tape heads (there is a commercial tape cleaner that you just plug into the tape drive). Use 3600' tapes instead of 2400'. The only caution is that a single backup should be on all 3600' tapes or all 2400' tapes but not a combination of the two. Backup tapes do not have an infinite life. HP recommends that reel-to-reel tapes are only good for two years, and this assumes that at least once per year you wind and rewind the tape. We recently restored some files from ten year old backup tapes, but they were small 1600 BPI tapes. Reels of tape should only be used 20 to 30 times. DDS tapes have an expected life of ten years or 300 uses. About Robelle Installing Robelle Updates. At a recent user group meeting, Bob Green asked a class of Qedit fans whether they installed Robelle tapes by simply restoring @.@.@. Quite a lot of hands went up. Of course, there is nothing wrong with restoring the files from the tape -- it's a necessary step. But it doesn't stop there. The new versions of the programs on the tape are not stored in their "normal" names. For example, there is no file called Qedit.Pub.Robelle on the tape. Rather, there are two programs, only one of which will be the correct version, depending on whether the install is being done on MPE V or MPE/iX. Both versions are provided to all customers, to facilitate our generous upgrade policy. The installation job stream (e.g., Install.Qeditjob.Robelle) decides which version to put into production, saving the old program in the PubOld group of Robelle, in case you ever need to go back to it. Other installation jobs may be required to install new versions of the bonus and contributed programs, also. We recommend that you read and follow the instructions in the Change Notice that accompanies each tape. Your HPPA System Must Have a Valid Serial Number. When run on MPE/iX (also known as MPE/XL, 9xx, or Spectrum), the next versions of all our products will verify that your machine has a valid HP serial number. For now they will not check for a SPECIFIC serial number, just SOME serial number. A future release of the products will only run on the serial numbers that you are licensed for. When HP first released the Series 9xx machines, some were shipped without a valid serial number. If you do the following and get an error message as shown, you do not have a valid serial number: :showvar hpsusan ^ ACTIVE FUNCTION FAILED (CIERR 8159) If you get the error, you must call the HP Response Center and obtain a valid serial number before you can run the program. You may want to do this now, before you receive the Qedit 4.1 or Suprtool 3.5 release. Bob Green Visits UK and Greece. Bob Green recently returned from visiting users in London and Dublin as well as Athens, Greece. Teaser: the next issue of What's Up DOCumentation will include a full report by Bob, who says, "The trip was a dream come true. I was finally in Greece, and I was a philosopher (well, a computer philosopher)." Robelle Software Rental. If you require one or more of our software products for a short period, or if you can't afford to make a full license purchase for a while, our rental program may be for you. You can rent any of our software products for a minimum period of one quarter. Half of the rental fees paid can be applied to up to half of the purchase price. A rental license agreement will be required. Give us a call for more details. Calendar of Events November 1992* Qedit training in Sacramento on November 3. Qedit training in Santa Clara on November 4. Suprtool two-day training in Santa Clara on November 5-6. * Qedit training in Boston on November 17. * Growth Power User Group Meeting in Boston on November 18. * Two-day Suprtool course in Boston on November 19-20. Running Robelle Programs From PowerHouse Most Robelle programs are capable of suspending instead of terminating when you exit them. This includes Qedit, Suprtool, Suprlink, Xpress, Select, and some other programs. This suspension only happens when the programs detect that they have been run from a program other than the MPE Command Interpreter (CI). The assumption is that any program that is "smart" enough to be able to run other programs should also be "smart" enough to recognize when the programs suspend, and to act accordingly. On MPE V that was a reasonable, but not infallible, assumption. On MPE/iX it may not be a good assumption at all. This is because any program that calls the HPCICOMMAND intrinsic to execute MPE commands can now run programs. However, the HPCICOMMAND intrinsic does not recognize suspended child processes. It simply leaves the child processes suspended, with no way to re-activate them. PowerHouse programs have always had the ability to run other programs. This was achieved by PowerHouse emulating the Run command internally through custom programming by Cognos. As part of that emulation PowerHouse was able to detect suspended child processes, and hold onto them for later reactivation. The typical benefit was the ability to resume execution of the child process much more quickly because all its files and databases were still open from the prior execution. However the native-mode versions of PowerHouse programs no longer emulate the Run command. Instead they simply call the HPCICOMMAND intrinsic to do the Run for them. This has the benefit of having complete compatibility with all the new parameters of the MPE/iX Run command, and all other MPE/iX commands, with no programming effort at all, but gives up the significant extensions that the former emulation of the Run command offered. From a practical standpoint, this means that if you run Qedit or Suprtool from inside Quick, then exit from Qedit or Suprtool back to your Quick program, Qedit or Suprtool will have suspended, and you will have no way to reactivate them. That can leave Suprtool, for example, with a database open, with no way to close it except by exiting the Quick application. Robelle has attempted to get HP to change HPCICOMMAND to kill off suspended processes (KPR 5000-616615), but the response center closed the call for two reasons: the lack of resources, and their judgment that it wasn't a bug in the intrinsic, but a design flaw in the programs calling HPCICOMMAND or the programs being run by HPCICOMMAND. Fortunately Robelle products provide a method of overriding the suspend action. Run Qedit or Suprtool with parm=32, which tells them to shut their files and terminate completely, instead of suspending. In the case of Suprtool you can make this a site-wide option by adding the Set Suspend Off command to the Suprtool configuration file, Suprmgr.Pub.Sys. Suprtool also has an option on the Exit command, Exit Abort, that tells it to terminate. However, this has the additional, unwanted side effect of not executing the current task, so be careful. Qedit does not have an equivalent Set or Exit option, and relies on the parm=32 on the Run command. The explanation behind this change to PowerHouse is described in the July 1990 Cognos Support Technical Newsletter: ... users no longer need the SUSPEND option when running PowerHouse, as HP has indicated there are no savings suspending and reactivating processes in MPE/XL as there were in MPE/V. Many users would not agree with this assessment. One example is an interesting article published in a subsequent Cognos Support Technical Newsletter in 1992 (Vol. 2, No. 4), written by Jonathan Heywood of Xeleton Systems B.V. in The Netherlands. Mr. Heywood describes how he programmed his Quick application to execute QTP with the SUSPEND option, and used the Activate intrinsic to re-awaken QTP instead of restarting it from scratch every time. Mr. Heywood says that this saved him 0.2 CPU seconds (on a S980) per QTP run, which accounted for 17% of the CPU time for that task. His estimated saving, when applied to all his background processing, "is between one and two CPU hours per day, and that is considerable on a system that is running a 80% to 100% CPU load all day." There is no doubt that the process handling features of MPE are still valuable tools on MPE/iX. By the way, we don't want to single out PowerHouse as the only program that will cause orphaned child processes. For example, HP's LinkEdit and Robelle's Suprtool have the same "feature". In the case of PowerHouse, though, the powerful suspend-reactivate capability is one that Cognos users have benefited from for years, and which has now been removed. Robelle Products: Problems, Solutions, and Suggestions Qedit Version 4.0 X-Windows and Visual Mode Correction Notice. In the last issue we reported that HP had fixed the problem of lines being deleted in Visual Mode from Unix X-Windows terminals. Unfortunately, we printed the wrong patch numbers. Our apologies. The correct ones are: PHNE_1025 is for the S300 and S400 systems. PHNE_1026 is for the S700 systems. PHNE_1027 is for the S800 systems. Quick No Longer Suspends. As of release 6.09 of PowerHouse, the Quick module no longer suspends properly when run from Qedit. If Quick 6.09 is run with the info="suspend" parameter, it will suspend when exiting from Quick back to Qedit, but will leave the terminal in a state unusable to Qedit. The only workaround is to stop using the "suspend" parameter. Starting with Quick version 7.09 the terminal is no longer messed up, even if "suspend" is specified. This is only because Quick 7.09 ignores the parameter totally, always terminating instead of suspending. Note: The other PowerHouse modules continue to support suspending as of version 7.09. Only Quick no longer supports Suspend. We would like to know if this is a concern to you. Please let us know. Of course, since all of this is due to changes made by Cognos, you should also let them know if you don't like the change. Suprtool Version 3.4 This Month's Brain Teaser. A user called us with a perplexing situation. He wrote a Suprtool task to delete all manual master records which did not have any associated detail records. After running it there were still some of these records in the dataset. It took us a while to figure out what had happened. Here's an interesting puzzle for you. See if you can find the solution. >base doc.log,1,password >set ignore on >set dumponerror off >get log-master {manual master} >output $null >delete >xeq Delete all records from the LOG-MASTER dataset [no]: YES Warning: Using DBGET for the input records Warning: NUMRECS exceeded; some records not processed. IN=35814, OUT=35813. 18167 chain-head(s) not deleted Remember, the task was to delete the master entries which no longer had any detail records. This accounted for about half the records in the set. The way the task was written, Suprtool was instructed to simply delete all the records. The user knew that IMAGE would reject a Dbdelete for any master entry which still had a detail chain. Suprtool was configured to keep on executing, even with failed Dbdelete attempts, via the Set Ignore ON and Set DumpOnError OFF commands. The problem is that the task stopped prematurely; Suprtool did not delete all the records that it should have. That is, after Suprtool was done, there remained some master records which had no details. Answer: The culprit was our old friend, the migrating secondary. As some primary records were deleted, secondaries moved into the primary location. Suprtool re-read the location so as not to miss any, but in doing so re-read some entries that it had already read. This caused the IN count to be higher than it should have been, making Suprtool stop before reading all of the records in the dataset. Workaround 1: Do the job again. This is not guaranteed to work on the first try, so keep running the job until there are no records to delete. Workaround 2: Use SET EOFREAD ON to cause Suprtool to read to the "hard" end of the dataset instead of stopping when the initial number of records is satisfied. Xpress Version 2.9 Sending a message - NOT! When in the middle of sending a message to a list of people, and you have already typed some user names or numbers, you can choose not to send the message in two ways: 1) Press any function key. Xpress abandons the Out Basket function and goes immediately to the area corresponding to the function key pressed. The Out Basket message is not sent, and is not saved anywhere. 2) Type a "7" at the user number prompt. Xpress sends your message immediately to the Waste Basket. It is not sent to any of the users you may have specified up to that point. Your message is waiting in the Waste Basket for editing and/or re-sending. Cookie Version 1.8 We have had complaints from two users regarding one of the fortune cookies in the last cookie file. We apologize for the offense, which is entirely unintentional. The Cookie program is designed to amuse you, not cause you grief. The fortune cookie in question has been removed from the file, along with a number of others which were re-evaluated and judged to be inappropriate. The new file will be included on your next software update tape, or can be obtained by calling Robelle. The fortune cookies in our file come from many sources. Each cookie is reviewed and voted on by Robelle staff before inclusion into the distributed file. Despite our best efforts to remove undesirable messages, the cookie file may contain a few that don't appeal to everybody. The file is called cookie.qlibdata.robelle, and is structured to allow fast addition, deletion, or modification of its messages. You can edit the file quite easily using any text editor. This is especially easy if you use Qedit, because Qedit can retain the file's user labels. :hello mgr.robelle :run qedit.pub /text cookie.qlibdata,labels /find "You can make almost any fortune cookie more" /{make changes and deletions} /keep /exit If you used Qedit, you are done. If you used another text editor, you will have to go through one extra step after keeping the file. In this case, make sure you keep the file under a new name (e.g., Newcook). :run cookie.qlib,maint 7 {Load File} Newcook {File to load from} O {Overwrite} [Return] {Cookie.Qlibdata.Robelle} S {Sequential} 1 {Exit} If you do not want to change the file yourself or wait for your next software update tape, just give us a call. We will ship you the latest cookie file as soon as we hear from you. Prose Version 3.4 Drawing Boxes using Prose. The newest version of Prose, our text formatter, has the capability of drawing boxes when printing to a LaserJet printer. This is implemented using a new BOX command, which accepts parameters and draws boxes such as the one bordering the fortune cookie of the month. This new version of Prose will be distributed with the Qedit 4.1 release at the end of this year. Fortune Cookie of the Month If it weren't for C, we would be using BASI, PASAL and OBOL! Release Announcement [puppy] [logo] The New XPRESS 2.9 Improves Screen Interface Xpress is an electronic mail system that is so easy to use you can start exchanging mail the first day without formal training. Xpress works on any HP 3000 hardware, and on all versions of MPE (including MPE/XL). Xpress has a streamlined design that keeps the load on your machine low, but still offers all of the functions you need. Highlights of the new XPRESS Mail: * A new screen interface. The new screen interface takes advantage of the features of your HP terminal or emulator, giving a new look to Xpress. It clears the screen between tasks and writes a header line identifying the current basket and function. Entry fields are highlighted to indicate the exact data length that Xpress is expecting. The function key labels are updated as their meanings change, according to the basket and function selected. The result: Xpress is even more intuitive and easy to use. * Xpress can connect with MCI Mail to talk to the world. Through a joint project with E-Mail, Inc., we have given Xpress the optional ability of exchanging messages with MCI Mail, a public electronic mail network. An Xpress user can now send a message to any fax number or MCI user in the world. You simply type the message into Xpress and indicate the MCI destination. Gateway/3000 and MCI Mail take over and ensure that the message arrives. MCI Mail can then send a message back to you confirming delivery. The interface from Xpress to MCI Mail is created by adding the Gateway/3000 product of E-Mail, Inc. to your system. If you are interested in this capability, contact the Robelle sales staff. * Send standardized messages with fill-in-the-blanks ease. Xpedit, the full-screen editor for Xpress users, now allows you to send form messages (such as purchase orders, operations requests, or telephone pink slips) and just about anything else that can be defined in a VPLUS forms file. You just select a form from a menu of defined templates, and fill in the blanks. If you like, using HP's Formspec program, you can use VPLUS editing to provide default values and enforce required fields. You will find a full description of these and other new features in our latest change notice. All Xpress owners who have service coverage automatically received a change notice and update tape. The update tape also contains revised user manuals. You can print copies or use the complete on-line help instead. If you are not yet convinced of the benefits of electronic mail, just call for a free demo. We think you'll like what you see.