[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG]

In article <ke3klb$evf$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:
>On 2013-01-27 05:37:42 +0000, Alan Feldman said:
>
>> My boss's boss maintains an XL spreadsheet with all of our apps listed
>> with much information about each app. There are maybe two dozen
>> columns of stuff for close to 284 apps. I need only 5 of those columns
>> to post in the Application Owner Table (AOT) on our Confluence wiki,
>> which runs on a Unix system.
>> 
>> Now, sometimes he has to make changes: add or remove apps, or change
>> owners (each app has "owners"). So every once in a while he updates
>> his copy and emails it to me. I FTP it to the VAX. I do some very
>> quick edits (using EVE, as the lines are too long for EDT!) to take
>> care of a couple of things that would be far too time-consuming to
>> code. Then I run it through a DCL command procedure (which calls other
>> DCL routines). The DCL routine extracts the 5 columns I need and
>> converts them to wiki markup. It also adds headers and a short
>> informational note. I then FTP the wiki file back to my PC. I open it
>> in Wordpad and copy and paste the wiki markup into the appropriate
>> Confluence page.
>> 
>> That's it! That's ALL I use the VAX for. Yes, I know it's depressing,
>> and perhaps hard to believe, but that's it. Oh, I also use the SEARCH
>> command to check what owners own a given app when I need to know that.
>> But that's it. Certainly not worth buying new hardware for!
>
>This collection[1] of DCL command procedures is probably not likely 
>worth keeping the existing hardware and software, much less the effort 
>involved with migrating that DCL into emulation and licensing and 
>maintaining and using that, for that matter.
>
>Something akin to <http://dmcritchie.mvps.org/excel/xl2html.htm> 
>implemented in VBA on Microsoft Windows, or some other Microsoft-based 
>technology[2] and probably with Python on Unix.  Java, Perl, Lua and 
>other programming languages can also all be used, as can a bash script 
>with awk or xml_grep or sed.
>
>Rather than manually processing the file format translation, it's 
>usually feasible to configure a Unix mail server using a sieve script 
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)> or 
>analogous, and automating the whole conversion-to-posting sequence.
>
>Other approaches include migrating the data into a database, and using 
>Excel as a front-end to access that shared data directly, and coding 
>another tool (in most any recent scripting language) that retrieves 
>that SQL data and dumps it to something suitable for viewing more or 
>less directly within your target web server.
>
>Further finessing the requirements — or massively over-designing the 
>solution, depending on one's own perspective here — consider migrating 
>entirely from Excel spreadsheets[4] as your primary data to Trac 
><http://trac.edgewall.org>, Bugzilla <http://www.bugzilla.org>, Mantis 
><http://www.mantisbt.org> or whatever your organization uses for 
>tracking tools and bugs and applications, and move both the application 
>inventory as well as the tracking for the errors and updates and 
>enhancements into the same system.  There are also various commercial 
>inventory and asset-tracking and bug-tracking databases around, and 
>your organization may have one of these systems already installed.
>
>If you do head toward emulation, then simh will probably work for you — 
>I'm testing some tools with that, for reasons not germane here — and 
>there are commercial emuation options.
>
>————
>[1] Does anybody have a suggestion for a collective noun 
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collective_nouns_for_birds> for 
>DCL procedures?  A collection of DCL procedures?  A nest?  Wad?  
>Accretion?  Scrum?  Heap?

Why birds?  If looking for a term with some alliteration to describe such
a collection, I'd suggest a 'digest of DCL'.

-- 
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker    VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.