Number 44 (Update of Volume 5, Issue 1)

Welcome to our 44th monthly edition of Online Extra — the e-mail update of our articles in recent issues of the 3000 NewsWire, plus items that have surfaced since we mailed our previous First Class issue (October). We e-mail our subscribers this file between the First Class issues they receive by mail, updating stories and adding articles that have developed between issues.

Ron Seybold
Editor in Chief

IN THIS MONTH'S EXTRA

Interex gets new directors a-plenty in lean voting
3000 Solution Symposium: It's not IPROF
Blue/J cost is per developer, not per seat
Transact gets all B-tree retrieval modes
PowerHouse falls further behind in 3000 support
Y2K patches are in play for HP 3000s
Why would you NOT want HP to market the 3000?
Free utilities can fix your dates and clock on the 3000
Attachmate has another emulator option for 3000s

Interex gets new directors a-plenty in lean voting

The HP user group Interex announced five new directors for its seven-member board last week, with three being appointed and two being elected. Both elected directors have strong ties to the HP 3000 community; Janet Sharp worked for years with Allegro Consultants and Kelly Computing, and was a regular face at HP 3000 Regional User Group meetings and the annual Interex North American conference. Also elected was Denys Beauchemin of Hi-Comp America, supplier of HP 3000 enterprise backup solutions; Beauchemin served as the program director of many Interex North American conferences during the past six years. Beauchemin, who also serves on the SIGIMAGE Executive Committee, was elected with just 293 votes, the leading total in the election. Sharp was named on 210 ballots. Last year's Interex board election results had to be thrown out when the user group failed to record a quorum of 10 percent of its members, and Beauchemin addressed the withering participation in the user group's elections.

"There are many reasons for the low voter turnout," Beauchemin said in a posting to the 3000-L mailing list. "The main overriding one is apathy. The vote this year was also very small. It seems to me that few people care about Interex and what it does."

Interex appointed three other directors after Sharp and Beauchemin finished in the top two posts for voting. Barry Beieg and Bob Combs were named to three-year terms, and Ed Witkow was appointed to a two-year term. Beauchemin's term is three years, while Sharp's is a two-year slot, to stagger elections in coming years. The new Board members join Linda Roatch and Bill Hassell, whose terms end in December of 2000. Rick Saunders will continue as a non-voting member for one year in his capacity of Past Chairman.

3000 Solution Symposium: It's not IPROF

Just a few days after Interex opened registration for its new HP 3000 Solutions Symposium, a message appeared on the 3000-L mailing list. Forwarded through Wirt Atmar, it came from Ken Sletten, perennial chairman of the Interex Programmer's Forum, or IPROF -- the Interex conference which occupied the slot the Solutions Symposium is now taking up this coming February. Sletten wanted to remind the 3000 community the new Interex show isn't made up of the same players who have attended IPROF the last few years:

"Ken wanted to be sure that people on the list understood that the upcoming 3000 Solutions Symposium is *not* the old IPROF, and that people expecting to attend one kind of meeting wouldn't be mildly/wildly surprised when they actually arrived. The two meetings are quite different and are designed to serve different purposes. The new SolSymp is essentially a training session, while IPROF is a "SIG summit." At the moment, the next IPROF is unscheduled."

Atmar reported in his posting that Sletten has talked to Interex about the potential confusion, and that Interex had agreed to update their web pages in the next few days so as to eliminate the confusing text. And for the moment, nobody knows when the Special Interest Groups, or SIGs, will be meeting.

Blue/J cost is per developer, not per seat

After our October story about the HP 3000's Visage plan came out in print, we got a note from one of our contributors about the pricing for the Legacy/J product Blue/J. Cortlandt Wilson pointed out the cost for Blue/J, which takes your VPlus FORMSPEC files and turns them into Java screens, is $500 per development seat. "There is no run time fee, and all developed code can be distributed royalty-free," Wilson wrote. If you've only got one developer in your organization dedicated to getting your 3000 applications looking modern and fitting into Web browsers, then $500 is all the software would cost.

However, we've learned in the last few weeks that Blue/J is going through some changes that will increase the costs on getting from VPlus to Java. Legacy/J will be doing the conversion for you now, and the cost will be $100 per screen. "Our concern is this is complicated, and if we don't almost hold your hand, you're going to have a hard time," said Chuck Townsend of Legacy/J. In the last few weeks a new product is emerging at his company called View/J, offered with Blue/J. ViewJ is Remote Client software for VPlus, and now LegacyJ will convert your VPlus Screens to Java. ViewJ offers a communication layer between MPE/iX and Graphical Clients, and its Intrinsic Intercepts will be allowing existing and graphical clients to work together. HP was very clear that its Visage plan is in flux, and they're waiting for customers to tell them if the designated pieces seem to make sense for 3000 sites. We'll be taking a closer look at HP's Java strategy for the 3000 in our December issue.

Transact gets all B-tree retrieval modes

SIGRAPID supporter and Transact customer Ken Sletten dropped us a note about our FlashPaper item from last issue regarding Open Transact, and other improvements in HP's rapid development language. At one time HP was giving away Transact, so it's in wider use in the 3000 environment that some might suspect. And it's advocates like Sletten call it a "three-and-a-half generation language" because of its rapid development capabilities versus COBOL. Sletten notes:

Thanks for mention of Transact in your October FlashPaper. Having said that, now let me get on to nit-picking...

(1) You said "The patches make up the “Open Transact” enhancement, which allows Transact to import the file IDs of files opened by a calling program in another language." While in one sense that is correct, we usually try and say: ".... import database and file IDs."

(2) You said ".... and support for IMAGE B-trees." Just like all (or at least most) other systems, Transact has supported Mode 1 B-Tree retrieval since it came out: All you had to do was turn it on in the database. What this more correctly might have said is: ".... and full support for all IMAGE B-tree retrieval modes."; that is something Transact could NOT do until now without resorting to a PROC call.

(3) With regard to the "cannot reposition on B-Tree superchain with a PERFORM" problem, as far as I know (and I'm pretty sure I'm correct) this is a problem not just for Transact but for ALL languages that try to do similar processing.; i.e.: Transact is not the only language that needs a workfile as a workaround... "

Our thanks go to Ken for helping us better understand what HP is doing to improve the workhorse language.

PowerHouse falls further behind in 3000 support

Software schedules are often subject to change, and it looks as if Cognos is losing a step on Speedware this fall in the contest to get Web capability for 3000 4GLs. In an earlier edition of the Extra we reported that Cognos expected to have PowerHouse Web for MPE/iX available this month. Now it looks as if it won't be shipping until sometime next year. PowerHouse Web Product Manager Bob Deskin of Cognos reported to his customers on the Internet that "PowerHouse Web for MPE/iX is in development. I expect it to be in field test by the end of the year."

From the looks of some comments, it would appear the 4GL that's most widely installed in the 3000 base is still lagging behind in some other areas, too. Neil Harvey asked if PowerHouse's Quiz or Quick modules support IMAGE/SQL b-trees, a powerful index that's been included free with the 3000 database since last year:

Harvey said, "I may be missing something, but I'm not able to get them to work.

Here are the steps I took :-

DBUTIL
addindex <database> for <dataset>

the dataset was a master, with an x(10) key, and the index was duly built.

set <database> btreemode1=on

and DBUTIL faithfully reports that btreemode1 is on, and wildcard is @


Then Quiz

access <dataset>
choose <key> "030@"
rep all
go

and nothing is returned, although there are hundreds of entries that start with 030 and run for 10 characters."

NewsWire contributor Shawn Gordon, who's worked plenty with the 4GL reported the answer to Neil's question is "Not without some special routine you'll have to write." To wit:

"I spent a lot of time with this. and finally traced the calls that Powerhouse was making. Turns out the b-trees work, but then PowerHouse checks the value of the key that is returned to what you entered. Because the value you entered has the wild card in it, it doesn't match what is returned from the database.

In typical Cognos fashion, they have no current plans to support b-trees (at least last time I talked to them). If they would just take out the darn error checking then it would work. You will have to write a stub routine to return the values to a temp file and feed them to the powerhouse stuff.

Y2K patches are in play for HP 3000s

With only about six weeks left until the millennium shift, patches are plentiful for HP 3000s and the software that makes the systems so trustworthy. In a recent transmission from the HP Support Center we saw a handful you might be looking for:

VPLKXR3E -- A VPlus Fix for the VSETNEXTCENTURY JCW Problem and the constant $TODAY. The patch essentially gives you a B.06.08 version of VPlus. Service Requests related to the VPlus Year 2000 enhancement have been fixed. VPlus now supports 4-character date forms. 4-digit years in dates are accepted without separators. A new method of interpretation of 2-digit year values is also supported with this enhancement. Also, the Vprintform intrinsic now has an option to disable data in "S" fields (security) to be printed. A new mode has been introduced for this purpose.

OSPKXP0A -- Applies what HP calls "final" Y2K fixes for Onsite Predictive Support for MPE iX 5.5. The patch includes all fixes covered in OSPKXM6 A,OSPKXA8 A, OSPKX32 A and OSPJXV3 A. HP said this version of Predictive will NOT report Level 2 cache errors, but it will not cause it to stop processing memory errors. Level 2 cache errors will be reported in the next release of Predictive for MPE iX 5.5 and in the submittal for MPE/iX 6.0.

TDPKXG2A -- This updates a favorite text processing tool from way back, TDP. TDP's CATALOG command has been returning incorrect creation dates in the 21st century, as well as TDP/V Y2K problems in BANNER and HEADLINE internal procedures.

HP's been adding patches on top of PowerPatch 7 5.5 and Express 1 6.0 for Y2K compliance. We'll have an update on where to go to get a full list in our December issue.

Why would you NOT want HP to market the 3000?

You might think that marketing the HP 3000 would always be a good thing to observe HP doing, when you see the company doing it. But a few HP customers in Europe were less than happy when they got online to check their e-mail last month and caught a 4 megabyte attachment in their mailboxes unsolicited. The 3000 division's marketing team in Europe has been leading the pack for awhile, but this innovation might not be advisable to export to US prospects. Marketing zeal got out of hand when the big attachments got mailed to prospect lists, then customers on 56.6 dialup lines fumed while the big file came across their narrow pipelines, slowly.

"But it's great that we were blamed for sending TOO MUCH information," said Regional Business Manager Ivicia Juresa. "Usually it's the other way around."

It wasn't so long ago that the NewsWire had that kind of conservative bandwidth, and we remember how we'd cringe at the upcoming holidays. E-mail invariably had Christmas tree programs or Santa artwork in a megabyte-big attachment. We can't imagine what kind of marketing goodies might be in a 4-meg file. But at the risk of creating an international incident, HP's partners should be asking before doing a mass transmission of that size.

We never thought we'd ever be cautioning HP about marketing the 3000. But isn't this kind of file the sort of thing you could put on a Web server, with a link inside the e-mail and warning of the size of the file? Where's e-speak when you need it, to negotiate this kind of thing?

Free utility can fix your dates on the 3000

Testing is in heavy rotation in the 3000 community this month, as companies check their systems and the Y2K remediation work that's the focus of the IT community's efforts. A couple of free utilities at the Allegro Consultants' site can help in getting clocks and dates set back to where they ought to be after rolling things forward during testing.

Stan Sieler noted, "The basic "problem" is that you may have some files marked with a "future" creation/modification/access date. This may or may not be a problem. Let's say A.B.C has a modification date of 2000-01-01. If you've returned to 1999, and your daily partial backup says "backup everything modified since last week", then A.B.C will be backed up every week until 2000-01-08."

"We have a free utility that will search out every file on the system with a future date and reset it to today. It's FIXFDATE: http://www.allegro.co m/software/#FIXFDATE

"Note: if you set your clock ahead by changing the date at bootup, or by using "SETCLOCK;NOW" or by using HourGlass 2000 for the HP 3000, then you're likely to run into this situation (having future date files when you return to "today")." Sieler then noted that he believes Allegro's HourGlass, marketed by ORBiT Software, tests for more than the competition.

Attachmate has another emulator option for 3000s

It may not be in very wide use, but there's another alternative for HP 3000 terminal emulation that's gotten a new version recently. Attachmate released KEA! 700/98 version 5.1 at HP World 99, and the company partnered with CSL in the UK (makers of the Linkway ODBC solution for the 3000) to enhance and test its HP emulation offering.

You can kick the tires on new KEA! 700/98. From the following URL http://www.attachmate.com/products/kea!hp/default.asp you can download a fully-functional 90-day timeout version of the product.

Rob Hartley of Attachmate reports, "Yes, it is priced in between Reflection and MS92. KEA! has been around for the VT emulation market as a high end VT emulator as long as Reflection, and is a very feature-rich product. Attachmate is big in the IBM mainframe environment with our EXTRA! product line and it was that customer base that initially requested we do HP."