Re: Moving Microfocus 3.1 to a better laptop

Pete Dashwood wrote:

Still NON-COBOL related, so folks ignore if you like.

"James J. Gavan" <jgavandeletethis@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:hGeBk.15988$rV4.14867@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<snip>

Pete - Somebody, not associated with the licensing, has already offered to follow-up on my key in so far as he can. The Incident Report goes back to mid-April. Other than no reply, not their fault it wasn't concluded. In my declining enthusiasm for programming and having had hip surgery May 2007, I thought "Sod it! I'm going to spend this year in the garden".


<non-COBOL related text.>
Good for you, Jimmy. I have a number of friends here who've had hip or knee replacements and it gives them a whole new lease of life. Be careful with the squatting, if you're gardening, (but I'm sure they've told you what and what not to do :-)). Personally, I'm a hopeless gardener and employ someone to do it. From where I'm sitting I can see the first of the roses and the last of the orchids, the nectarine and peach trees have shed their glorious blossoms and decided it is now Summer, and there are various wildflowers making an appearance. It is really enjoyable to look at.

Hip wise I was lucky, almost like a non-event. Something like a 6 - 8
inch incision. (A house-visiting threpaist told me I could see vidoes
where the surgeon converts to butcher mode to saw out the defunct bone.
No thanks very bloody much I don't watch any of the medic programs on
TV; just occasionally Black Adder's sidekick, Hugh Laurie in 'House').

I hardly have a scar now. My female surgeon, Dr. Maureen O'Brien, (god
bless the little Irish darlin' - well a generation or two back), uses
her favoured technique. I still call 'em sticthes but they've become
sutures. She uses a continuous piece of steel (?) thread and when it
comes to taking it out you just snip both ends and gently pull the
thread - no twitches from patient.

You'd think I would have suffered from that incision; not at all. The
pain came from re-discovering all those nerves in my body which are
buddy-buddy with the hip. Pain-wise the nurses, (an absolutely dedicated
group of people), came around asking, "How is you pain on a scale of 1
to 10 ?". Invariably I answerd "Three". "Do you want one or two Tylenol
3's ?". I could cope with just one; the second tablet would have been in
reserve if I needed it.

I'm happily doggy-walking again' deliberately attempting to stand
upright, (Military - "Chin and stomach in, chest out !"). I don't have
the old 100% balance in the left leg and I'm in tourble when out if I
need to pick something up - like doggy doo - NO ! not with my hands; I
pick it up with a plasitc bag. So I still use a walking cane, using it
as a pivot and swing my left leg up behind me and then bend over.

Eileen incidentaly has had both knees done. Bad reaction to the second
abut two years after the first; must have picked up a bug in hospital;
it didn't healing properly asnd wasa weeping. She also got something
called Baker's Cyst. Heard of it ? Occurs bewhind the knee and not much
than can do but let it cure itself.

Met a Lady only last night. Her dad (93) was from Yeovil, Somerset and
she said he worked in a laboratory. Well about the only industry in the
town when he would have been there waas glove making. But she's written
to ask him - was it the Aplin and Barrett Laborartory, makers of St.
Ivel Lactic Cheese and St. Ivel paste, (pates). Part of Unigate, that's
how I ended up in Yeovil just prior to switching to EDP.

After the long blurb about her dad - she had a very bad reaction to knee
surgery. She was in constant pain and they kept feeding her morphine.
Turns out she was allergic to morphine - you can imagine the reaction.

I enjoy cooking and the dining (and wining...) experience. At the moment I can pick oranges through my kitchen window :-)... it makes me smile every time I see the laden trees. I picked 4 this morning (through the window, just because I can... :-)) and juiced them, delicious.

My neighbours have a vegetable garden as well as their citrus but they don't have apples, nectarines, or peaches, so we sometimes trade :-)

Another of my friends grows the most unbelievable grapes and has her house virtually covered in them around February. This year she's decided to make wine... I need to figure out something I can offer her... :-)


Needless to say, couldn't do much last year so both physically and mentally it was a good exercise I've been enjoying, and continue to enjoy until everything gets zapped with frost in late September, (weather is gorgeous today).


I remember the winters are pretty fierce in Calgary. Doesn't this kill off most of the garden, or do you protect the plants? Do you plant species that can survive? I'm interested to know how gardening in a climate like yours differs from gardening in a sub-tropical climate like mine.

Well certainly we can't grow any of the delectables that you've
mentioned. But here goes - fruitwise - apple trees - was a very modest
size apple and quickly turned to a pulp texture, so we dug it up. I did
grow black and red curreants and goosberries. Snag is, from a family of
four I was the only one that did the picking; the other three helped eat
them. We got delicious black currants but the plants tend to get a
mildew. Red currants were OK, but tastewise nothing like the sharp taste
of black currants.

Had one of my beloved dogs creamated years ago and half of her is
scattered at El Poca Heights in Kananaskis country, a winding drive up
some 6 kms of gravel. Up at that height goosberries grow wild. My own
goosberries, the size of the knob on the end of a ball-point pen - just
plain bloody pathetic. I did a number when I went back to UK in 2000,
and before going to the COBOL 'thing' at Newbury, stayed at Englefield
Green just above the RAF Memorial and Runnymede, our friend offered us
appple pie or gooseberry pie. I was like one of Snow White's Seven
Dwarfs, "GOOSEBERRY PIE !". I devoured the whole bloody thing by myself
while the others looked on in amusment.

Back to my own goosberries. I loved her dearly, (now dead), but my
sister-in-law was watching me pick gooseberries, and me enduring the
prickles, she casually said, "We leave those on the bushes back home".
Her holiday eventually finished and when she was gone, I thought "Sod
you !" and dug the bloody things up !

Raspberries - just great. This was a poor year for gardening much too
cold/coll in the spring/summer start. For no apparent reason some plants
have died off so we only got about a 25% return. 2006 and 2007, I kid
you not, we had raspberry canes which were 8 feet tall.

Blackberries - a disaster in Calgary though they grow in BC, and the
Island for sure, and probably back East in Ontario. We planted a
domestic plant which threw out one branch, but the winter killed that
off and second year you are back to the plant attempting to grow again.

Both in BC and Ontario, in additioin to apples they grow numerous other
fruits. Around southern Ontario near Niagra they have vineyards. My
daughter's kid's gave here a bottle of Ice Wine for Mother's Day. The
grapes are picked in late October after the first frosts. She and I
shared the bottle - nectar.

Trees - well firs of course, and aspens which books claim are actually
more numerous than fir trees in Canada. In our garden we have several
spruce, weeping birch (the white speckled bark with elgant branches
hanging down to the ground), rowan/mountain ash - the latter attracts a
flock of bohemian waxwings who shred the red berries from the tree in
late winter. Lilacs of course.

Flower wise - a bit of a challenge. Tried both rosemary and lavendar by
keeping them covered with polystreen pots from the auntumn until at
least mid-May. After a couple of years they succumbed. The bulb family
does well, both daffodills and tulips. We don't bother too much with the
latter, deer eat the tulip heads and ignore the daffodills; they come up
from Fish Creek Provincial Park, about ten minutes walk - and its the
largest urban park in Canada; not manicured and left as is).

Perennials - no correct that - Biennials like Canterbury Bells and
English Wallflowers require nursing; cover them with leaves in the
autumn once the young plants have grown and then plant them out in the
spring. That's a chore I don't much care for, so don't bother. We do
extremely well with delphiniums, planted several colours and the birds
kindly brought in the colours we didn't have - colour range of a
mauve/purple shade.

Roses are tricky - I dug up a wild Alberta Rose, our provincial emblem,
(colour reminiscent of the Queen Alexandra Rose used on the flag day in
the UK). You can grow domestic varities but need a lot of nursing and
protection. We have zcouple in the back, (what's the terminology),
shoots growing up from the ground and one in the front, which our friend
had no success with; it just likes its mini environment and shoots up
to some 8 feet blocking our friend window - still showing some budes but
we'll have to severly chop it back soon.

Rhododendrohns, azaleas wouldn't stand a chance in hell. Certain days
can be a bit harsh but the winters have considerably diminished since I
came here in '75. And regardless of what Judson or his fellow
anti-greenies have to say, the bloody Arctic is melting and the Artic
countries, (Denmark (Greenland), Canada, Russia,USA, is it Norway ?),
with an interest in the North West Passage concept are vying for water
territorial claims. Surprise, surprise - they disagree on who realy owns
what - Canda/USA as just one example.

Just as a close off, the winters kill off everything dead, dead,
dead..... The grass goes hay-coloured primarily from being oovered with
snow. Then comes the spring, April sometime those flowerbeds look asleep
until suddenly green starts popping up and one of the first - Lily of
the Valley. Slowly the grass takes on a yellowish-green look and
eventually switches to green - but never to the extent of the
multi-coloured greens of UK. The other thing that affects Calgary's
weather is the Chinooks - not the helicopter, the winds. Breezes blow in
from BC wind their way across the mountains, slip into southern Alberta
and a garden can change from snow to semi-green grass in less than 24
hours. Back in April '75 I phoned Eileen, still in UK . "What do you
mean?", she said. "You had snow at breakfast time and now you are out in
the aternoon sunning yourselves !" Perfectly truye - and weather, not
politics, (#2) is the main topic in Calgary :-)

</non-COBOL related text>

Regrettably, think I'm going to have to reformat my XP and re-load everything. Uggh ! I'll do an 'OT' on the re-install which answers some of the points you made.


I don't understand 'OT'

try Off Topic :-)

I'll get back on the Re-install jazz. No more below.

Jimmy


Never mind. While this is drastic (it would be unthinkable for me; my notebook has 1.7 million files on it...:-)) it is definitely the way to ensure peace of mind.

Once you have the clean install it will be flooded by windows update requests if you have Automatic Update turned on. I'd keep it off until you have a successful manual update of SP 3 (see previous post). After that it should be OK.

Good luck and sing out if you need help.


Let's use a Pareto analysis; there are 99.8% good guys using their compiler, so just to ensure 0.2% bad guys don't get away with a freebie version, penalize and irritate the 99.8% with License Keys.


Yep. That's about the size of it. However, they are unlikely to change it now, and to be fair, it isn't as bad as the early Fujitsu one I described. Still academic though. People who want to will circumvent it, and the people who want to, are the people it was supposed to protect against.


There are currently very few messages in the M/F Forum on a daily basis - I've been wondering why for some time now - dotNet perhaps ?


You mean the MF .NET compiler? I'm sure many businesses will take this up, believing they HAVE to if they want to play COBOL on the Elysian fields of the .NET framework. While it is good to have if you can afford it, and are committed to continuing development in COBOL, it is really not needed if you are planning to move away from COBOL, and only want your legacy to run on .NET, alongside new development in new languages.

A comprehensive example of this (with full source code) will be available in the coming week.



From a couple of messages, and I'm sure originally he was enthused, Rene
doesn't sound like a happy camper.



I don't blame him.


I want to get back and answer John with his Easytrieve problem. I get the feeling he is young and 'drowning' a bit.



Easytrieve? Watch it Jimmy, you may find yourself working on a mainframe site :-)

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."




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