Solutions
by Softech
Fourth
Edition – July 1998
Softech Solutions, Inc. 300
North C.R. 427 Suite 100 Longwood, FL 32750
1-407-331-TECH (8324)
1-407-331-5570(Fax)
SSI@SoftechSolutions.com
Softech
Solutions' Homepage
WELCOME! Sit back, relax, get a
cup of coffee, and enjoy this issue of Solutions by 
Softech. We hope you have all
noticed that we have a new logo! Along with the
new logo we also have all new stationary, business
cards, and some new golf shirts. We are planning
on giving a few away as a result of this issue, so
read on. It’s been a long time since our last Solutions
by Softech. We hate to make excuses, but we
have just been too busy to get one out! If it hadn’t
been over a year since the last one we probably
would not be doing one now. Now, while that may
sound a little like complaining, in actuality that
couldn’t be farther from the truth. We have
stayed ‘as busy as we want to be’ (sometimes
busier) while continuing to grow at a sustained
rate. We think that you will understand where we
have been, and what we have been doing after
reading this edition of Solutions by Softech.
If
a mime is arrested, does he have the right to
remain silent?
Solutions
Needed
As you
puzzle freaks out there are probably aware, we
really left you hanging last year with the AEIOU
word question. Well, once again we had two winners
and we decided, once again, to award golf
shirts to both of them. The correct answers (yes,
there were abstemious, arterious, annelidous,
and multiple correct answers) are facetiously,
lateriousneglected to consider words that
might have all the letters in reverse (questionable!).
We also alphabetical order like subcontinental
or uncomplimentary. We would like to thank
A-Word-A-Day (www.wordsmith.org) for the reverse
words, and also arterious, and annelidous, By the
way, since we just mentioned them, AWAD is an
excellent way to increase your vocabulary and is
also very entertaining.
To subscribe:
Send emails to wsmith@wordsmith.org with the word
subscribe followed by your name. E.g.
"subscribe John Doe".
Now for
the new puzzle: As usual, we are giving away a
golf shirt to the person whose name is drawn from
all who submit correct answers. The question for
this issue is "How can we solve the Y2K
problem for the entire world?" or more simply
put "What is the meaning of life?" Your
answers must be 50 words or less and must arrive
at Softech Solutions offices postmarked no later
than Jan 1 ’00 (is that 1900 or 2000 Postmaster
General?)
Only
kidding, the real puzzle is: You are in a room
with two doors. One is the door to life and one is
the door to death. There are two other people in
the room and you are told that one of these people
will always tell the truth and one will always
lie. You do not know which one is which and you
can only ask one question! What question could you
ask that would assure you of knowing which door is
the door to life?
Is
there another word for synonym?
Update::
Tic toc, tic toc -
well, there are now less than 2 years to go
and you still haven’t done anything about your
Y2K problem yet! Well don’t worry, you are not
although alone. It would seem that, many big
corporations have started their Y2K initiative
(why do they call it greater number an
initiative?), that a of small and medium size
companies still have their proverbial heads in the
web surfer you sand. If you are a should visit
www.year2000.com and surf for an hour or two. What
you find will be amazing
Time
is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of
it's students.
More Y2K - if you haven’t
secured the necessary resources to do your Y2K
conversion, do it NOW. From what we are seeing,
both in the demand for our services and the
difficulty we are having in hiring good resources,
this problem is going to get nothing but bigger
for the next 2 years!
We
have enough youth, how about a fountain of Smart?
Softech On
The Go!
- here is a brief recap of what we have been doing
for the last year. Suffice it to say we have all 
been really busy. We have
all traveled a lot, including trips to California,
Canada, Oregon, Israel, Indonesia and Bahrain. Our
Road Warrior award for the past year goes
to Ed who spent more time than any of us want to
spend on the road. Ron has worked on multiple
projects for multiple clients and has spent a
considerable amount of time in California and
Canada. Among his ‘favorite’ projects was a
benchmark involving porting the PaySys Vision Plus
product to a Unix platform. He has also enjoyed
his free time in California where he has spent
time on the ski slopes and at the blackjack tables
in Lake Tahoe! Ed has come up with a much better
way to hang paper with one arm! He is keeping his
secret to himself but we know that it involves
roller skates and afterburners. He has been going
non-stop all year and has been involved in
performance tuning, VISA, MasterCard & Private
Label communications and certification as well as
many other projects too numerous to mention. Bill
has kept busy on a multitude of projects including
a major Y2K conversion, several Microsoft Access,
Mainframe integration projects and he continues to
try to maintain some semblance of order in the
office. Doug Lester, who join Softech in late
August, has already reached Medallion level as a
Delta frequent flyer and is currently doing
multiple projects that involved Visa and
MasterCard communications and certification. Doug’s
wife, Gisele, a graphics designer, did all the
design work for our new logo, stationary,
envelops, etc. She did a terrific job and is
always ready to take on additional projects if you
have the need. Call Doug if you are interested.
Ron’s son, Aaron Merrell, joined us in July of
‘97. Aaron is a Computer Science major at the
University of Central Florida and is getting his
‘baptism by fire’ working ‘part time’ for
Softech. For those of you who don’t know it, UCF
has a nationally acclaimed program in Computer
Science, and we do consider ourselves lucky to
have Aaron as part of our staff. Joy Andrews
joined us in February this year and brings a
wealth of training experience on PaySys’
products to Softech. We also have 8 other
associates who provide us with additional resource
help when needed. Softech not only has grown but
we have also moved! We changed floors in our
building and now occupy suites 308-310 in a much
more spacious environment. We are still operating
in a Windows for Workgroups and Windows 95
peer-network environment with dial up access to
almost all our clients.
Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer
than they appear
Techie
Tips
Whether to expand
or to window that is the question. The
expansion approach is the cleanest, safest, and we
believe, for applications that are expected to
have a useful life of more that a couple of years,
the only solution. Simply put, you go back and do
the code the way it should have been done in the
first place, if disk storage hadn’t be so
expensive! Change all your record and file
descriptions, convert all your data files and
programs test like crazy and hope that it will all
work! Or, alternatively, adopt a windowing
approach, which with a few notable exceptions will
probably get you through the crisis. Windowing
will dates that are part NOT work for of
keys or indexes to files or for date fields thatin
sorts. Given that there should not be too many
places are used where this occurs, windowing will
work just fine for the rest of the code, and
combining it with expansion should provide a
viable solution to your Y2K problem. The best way
to explain windowing is to show an example of code
that has been modified to adopt a windowing
methodology.
- Old code:
- . . .
- 05 TODAYS-DATE PIC 9(06).
- 05 FILLER REDEFINES TODAYS-DATE.
- 10 TODAYS-DATE-YY PIC
9(02).
- 10 TODAYS-DATE-MM PIC
9(02).
- 10 TODAYS-DATE-DD PIC
9(02).
- . . .
- 05 TRANSACTION-DATE PIC
9(06).
- 05 FILLER REDEFINES
TRANSACTION-DATE.
- 10 TRANSACTION-DATE-YY
PIC 9(02).
- 10 TRANSACTION-DATE-MM
PIC 9(02).
- 10 TRANSACTION-DATE-DD
PIC 9(02).
- . . .
- IF TRANSACTION-DATE IS LESS
THAN TODAYS-DATE
- PERFORM BACKDATE-ROUTINE.
-
- Existing Data
Division stays the same except the following
fields are added.
-
- 01 FSWS-WORK-AREAS-YYMMDD.
- 05
FSWS-NBR-DATES-YYMMDD.
- 05 FSWS-CYMD1 PIC
9(08).
- 05 FSWS-CYMD2 PIC
9(08).
- 05 FSWS-CYMD3 PIC
9(08).
- 05 FSWS-CYMD1-WINDOW
PIC 9(02).
- 05 FSWS-CYMD2-WINDOW
PIC 9(02).
- 05 FSWS-CYMD3-WINDOW
PIC 9(02).
- Procedure
Division changes as follows:
- MOVE TRANSACTION-DATE TO
FSWS-CYMD1.
- MOVE 50 TO
FSWS-CYMD1-WINDOW.
- MOVE 50 TO
FSWS-CYMD2-WINDOW.
- MOVE TODAYS-DATE TO
FSWS-CYMD2.
- MOVE +2 TO
FSWS-NBR-DATES-YYMMDD.
- CALL "FSDTRT1’ USING
FSWS-WORK-AREAS-YYMMDD.
- *IF TRANSACTION-DATE IS
LESS THAN TODAYS-DATE
- IF FSWS-CYMD1 IS LESS THAN
FSWS-CYMD2
- PERFORM
BACKDATE-ROUTINE
The call to the
subroutine "FSDTRT1" takes the two dates
that are without centuries and, using the two ‘windows’
adds the appropriate centuries to them. It then
returns the dates with the centuries back in the
fields FSWS-CYMD1 and FSWS-CYMD2 which are then
used in place of the original dates to determine
if the BACKDATE-ROUTINE should be performed. There
are packages available today that can facilitate a
partially automated windowing solution. Call us if
you would like more information.
If
at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for
you.
Softech
around the globe
It has been a very
interesting time for Softech in the international
arena. We have added six new international clients
in Canada, Israel, Bahrain and Indonesia to go
along with the existing international clients we
have in Australia, South Africa, England, and
Mexico.
The
Gene Pool needs some more chlorine!
The 1997 Darwin
Award competition has announced its winners. 
These awards are given
each year to honor those individuals, who through
the ultimate in self-sacrifice, have done the
utmost to remove undesirable elements from the
gene pool. (Namely: themselves). Last year's
winner, you will remember, was the fellow who was
killed when he attached a JATO (Jet Assisted Take
Off) unit to his Chevy Impala and shot himself
into a desert cliff at 300 M.P.H.....
Now this year's
winners:
(The late) John
Pernicky and his friend, (the late) Sal Hawkins,
of Washington state, decided to attend a local
Metallica concert at the George Washington
amphitheater. Having no tickets (but having had 18
beers between them), they thought it would be easy
to "hop" over the nine-foot fence and
sneak into the show. They pulled their pick-up
truck over to the fence and the plan was for (the
late) Mr. Pernicky (who was 100 pounds heavier
than Mr. Hawkins) to hop the fence and then assist
his friend over. Unfortunately for (the late) Mr.
Pernicky, there was a 30-foot drop on the other
side of the fence. Having heaved himself over, he
crashed through a tree. His fall was abruptly
halted (and broken, along with his arm, as it
were) by a large branch that snagged him by his
shorts. Dangling from the tree with a broken arm,
he looked down and saw some bushes below him.
(Possibly)
figuring the bushes would break his fall, he
removed his pocketknife and proceeded cut himself
away from his shorts to free himself from the
tree. Finally free, (did I mention he is THE LATE)
Mr. Pernicky crashed into a group of Holly bushes.
The sharp leaves scratched his ENTIRE body and to
even make matters worse, upon landing, his pocket
knife had penetrated 3-inches into his thigh. (The
late) Mr. Hawkins, on seeing his friend in
considerable pain and agony, decided to throw him
a rope and pull him to safety by tying the rope to
the pick-up truck and slowly driving away.
However, in his drunken haste/state, he put the
truck into reverse and crashed through the fence
landing on his friend and killing him. Police
arrived on the scene to find the crashed pick-up
with its driver thrown 100-feet from the truck and
dead at the scene from massive internal injuries.
Upon moving the truck, they found (The Late) Mr.
Pernicky under it, half-naked with scratches on
his body, a knife in his thigh, and his shorts
dangling from a tree branch 25-feet in the air.
Congratulations
gentlemen, you win...
The
Trouble with doing something right the first time
is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.
Copyright
© 2000 [Softech Solutions, Inc]. All rights
reserved.