Well, after having driven much of the night before, having Al Franken for a
speaker turned out to be a good thing . . . his speech kept getting farther and
farther off-color and I gave up and walked out and went back to the hotel for
some much-needed sleep.  Consider this my vote, too, that the Franken mistake
not be repeated.  At least Dave Barry was aware that he was talking to computer
people and attempted to tailor his speech to the audience.  Franken said, "I
find that I talk to a lot of corporate groups which tend to be made up mostly of
Republicans, but I've discovered that the Democrats can't afford me.  So the way
it works is that I make fun of Republicans, you laugh and then you pay me."  With
the exception of the laughing (which I pretty well didn't) I suspect he was
right.

The speeches by Carly Fiorina and Ann Livermore were both good.  Carly worked in
some good 3000 references without seeming to have to go out of her way to do so
(nicely done) and Ann stopped and made a big deal of assuring us that HP is glad
for us.  She seemed to have had to make a special effort to do so and she said
that HP would be happy to help anyone who wished to move off the platform, but
I would say we definitely got heard.  Now to find out if they can do more than
preach to the choir . . . :-).

Alfredo made a very efficient job of the SIGIMAGE meeting.  I would have been
glad to take some time and hash at the Enchilada some, but I think that if he'd
opened up that issue, we'd've likely gone overtime by a couple of hours, so it's
just as well he didn't.  The discussion we did have ended in asking HP to
appoint an Enchilada representative so we have someone with whom to talk.
Perhaps Wirt could provide the representative with some samples to, uh, chew
on :-).

Dave Wilde spoke at some length with the group as did Jon Bale.  There is
definite interest on the part of SIGIMAGE to keep the Oracle customers on the
platform, moving them to Allbase and they wanted to know if HP has the same
interest.  It appears that HP does.

Then I spent an hour plus at the Adager booth putting together a Tensegrity
model with (am I getting her name right?) Michelle Paul.  The booth is, as the
Adager booth seems always to be, an island of peace in a sea of chaos (a lot
like IMAGE and the 3000 in the workplace :-).  The theme is Tension and
Compression and how complex structures can be built out of those two simple
ideas.

After lunch and some more time in the expo, I headed for the SIGSysman meeting.
That was a tough decision as it was scheduled at the same time as the Management
Roundtable, MPE System Configuration and MPE/iX Intermediat Performance (as well
as a number of other sessions).  They'd scheduled it in a double-size room and
with that competition, there weren't more than about a dozen warm bodies there
at the beginning (though more trickled in as time went on).

Kris Rant held a useful discussion on the HP Grant program.  There's a
significant need for networking between businesses which need MPE professionals
and Universities.  The grant program can put 3000s in the schools, but the
schools need a good business case for using them and may need some teacher
training or contract/volunteer teaching--with which the companies can help.
Also, there are HP-employed trainers who would be willing to get involved in
their local areas.

Walter McCullough gave an update on High-availability Failover.  As of 6.5PP2,
MPE will have the ability with and XP256 box to reroute disk packets through a
single channel if one of the controllers goes down.  This is also true (or soon
to be true, I don't remember which) with the XP512 and autoraid (someone correct
me if I have that one wrong).  He also described a product which will be
available which will allow a disk array owned by one 3000 to be quickly switched
to a second 3000, allowing very fast recovery in case of a down box.  He also
took a quick survey to find out how many would be interested in a hardware
mirroring option costing the same as Mirrored Disk/iX which would also mirror
LDEV 1.

Then a thank-you to HP for two 6.0 patches.  MPEKXY7 with various BULDACCT
enhancements (including getting rid of the inline Pascal code) and MPELX11 which
has store-to-disc, an enhanced CI INPUT() function and AbortProc.  Thanks also
for DBUTIL patch available on Jazz.

Then Donna spent some time expressing her concern that we keep our 3000s up to
date and that we explore the new technologies on the box and share them with our
programmers or users.

Followed some extensive discussion of various SIB items.  In particular, we
spent a lot of time considering the integration of the MPE and UPS and the
related :shutdown (and possibly :reboot) request.  The upshot of that was, I
think, that the big concern is the UPS connection.  We can live without the
other fairly comfortably, but we want some way to tell the 3000 what to do with
the last few electrons from the UPS (or at least the ones just prior to those
being used to write main memory to disk :-).

After the SIB items, we discussed how we can partner with CSY and Jeff Vance
reported that he has, if I understood correctly, the green light to make
available, in some fashion or other, code and basic support for external
programmers to help out with the top SIB items.

SIG MPE did a lot of housekeeping with various items which are no longer of
interest or which have been completed being weeded out and the others getting
approximate interest numbers put to them so that CSY will know where to direct
their efforts.

It seems fairly clear that CSY is stretched fairly thin at this point and I think
it worth while to say again how much we appreciate all they are doing.  CSY,
we're proud of you and very grateful.  Keep up the good work and let us know
how we can help.

Ted
--
Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Sys, Southern Adventist University
          ==========================================================
Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a
journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost.
Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and
the real explorers have gone elsewhere.
                                        -- Anglin, W.S.
          ==========================================================
         Deep thoughts to be found at http://www.southern.edu/~ashted