Posted on

09-Nov-2012

Site changes in progress
The current homepage of this site is based on a set of routines I wrote years ago in Fortran77 on Vax, and included a program to test the function of the routines, and by that, it was used as a demonstration on how to use these routines. It uses the functions that VMS offers for memory management, and contained a number of MACRO routines; one in particular: that one is used to figue out which of teh parameters were actually passed: Fortran77 doesn’t really allow optional parameters and there was no other way to find out whether a parameter was actually passed, or not.
The Alpha architecture doesn’t contain the registers used in this macro so a one-to-one port wasn’t possible. Luckily, Fortran95 offers an alternative, and so it was easy to prot these routines to Alpha.
The demo-program was used to create a program that would create the HTML output.
Works great – and fast. But changing layout is quite a menace because the files are in a text library, and I still have to write a text file for the content. I have been looking for a way to change the text using a web-based interface but couldn’t find a good solution.
Then Mark Daniel – thw author of WASD – came with VWCMS – a VmsWasd based Content Management System. I have checked it in the past and it looks nice. It uses a javascript editor, that I cpould include in my program, for editing the main text. But VWCMS evolved, and it became quite feasable to use that. And so I started converting the home page into the format that VWCMS uses.
The basics are now done, and so I wanted to make it public. That means I have to adapt the WASD configuration as well, but how? So I asked, and I got an answer that does exactly what I need. I had to do some more adjustments, to be able to access the sub-sites (on OpenVMS , for instance), but the advantage outwages the extra effort: the configuration now holds clearly all parts that are accessable.

So that works fine, but I’m not completely satisfied with the homepage itself, there is some work to eb done before I can make it public. Until that time, the previous homepage will remain active.
Physical moves
The HSZ50-controller uses a battery to power the write-back cache; so no data is lost when deferred-write is interrupted due to a power outage. But that battery now fails, and write-through is disabled by the controller. And siince I could not actually use the shared-SCSI bus, there is no real need for this controller. For what I’ve heard, it slows down IO anyway: for the hardware, it’s a 10Mb/s connection but the disks are accessed with half the speed. The big advantaghe is that I can access multple cabinets – up to 6, though I have only 4 cables so I can access 4 at most….
So the question is: do I take it out of the chain? To be prepared, I made all disks in one cabinet “Transporable” so that cabinet can be taken out and be accessed directly, after I have created the contents using BACKUP/IMAGE. That is to be tested – I still have a PWS available for testing 🙂
If that works, I may swicth to basic SCSI-2 again….

Posted on

19-Sep-2012

Building the new site
Setting up the new structure using VWCMS proves to be more complex than expected. Even translating the current homepage into VWCMS format is not as easy as expected. However, the kit comes with all documentation in the right format so there is a very god example on how things must be changed.
So I use that as the template, trying to transfer the existing homepage into VWCMS format – and, eventually, at least one of the downloaded templates. But it takes time to find out how it really works…. But taking little steps at a time, I get a good idea how the whole things works. It is q requirement to have a web display and a terminal session at hand, side by side…

Update

But that paid off, soon enough. By applying small changes to a file on the terminal, and immediately refresh the browser, the result can be viewed, and if changes are required, what and where is easily found.

Once the basic layout has been determined (I still need to do some style changes, but these are minimal), the next thing is to change and add content. But that was quite a different matter.

It took some digging why adding or modifying data didn’t really work suing the web-based editor; of course the the data can be added or modified directly in the file (it does have advantages not using a database!) but it should of course be possible to use the supplied editors. As it turned out: there is one file, _included.conf, that holds the [readonly] directive, and ;I placed the $$ADVISE$$ macro (that should show this) a bit out-of-sight, at the bottom….

One this directive was removed, it all worked. For the time being, I have left the documentation that Mark Daniel has written, available for reference.

We’ll get there, step by step. It won’t be very long before at least the home page of the site is renewed!

By the way: IE9 has trouble with the javascript-based editor in WordPress (at least, this version). But although the font is really small, it seems to work with the same editor in VWCMS….