unsigned long geek = random(); » SAP

On my way to Bangalore

Michael-John Turner — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:33:39 +0000

As some of you know, next week I’ll be in Bangalore, attending SAP TechEd. I’m quite looking forward to it – SDN Day will be an opportunity to meet some fellow SDNers, and the content of the conference looks great.

Sadly, there won’t be much time for sightseeing as the trip is quite short, but I’m going to do my best to try and see at least part of the city while I’m there.

ABAP documentation musical references redux

Michael-John Turner — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 07:02:00 +0000

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about ABAP documentation referencing Pink Floyd’s Careful with that Axe, Eugene, I decided to do some further digging. It seems that there are quite a few musical references in the documentation:

concatenate – Louis Armstrong’s We have all the time in the World
condense – Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne
find – Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Everybody Knows this is Nowhere
replace and shift- Lyle Lovett’s I Know You Know
search – Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven
split – The Rolling Stones’ Mother’s Little Helper
translate – Pink Floyd’s Careful with that Axe, Eugene

There are probably some other little gems in the documentation, but I’ll leave those for someone else to find

SAP runs Pink Floyd

Michael-John Turner — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 06:24:22 +0000

Spotted this gem in the ABAP documentation for the translate statement on a SAP WAS 6.40 system today:

After the conversion, the variable text contains “CAREFUL WITH THAT AXE, EUGENE”. DATA text TYPE string. text = `Careful with that Axe, Eugene`. TRANSLATE text TO UPPER CASE.

I guess someone in Walldorf likes Pink Floyd

SAP GUI for Java 6.40r6

Michael-John Turner — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 15:50:34 +0000

Spotted this morning that revision 6 of the SAP GUI for Java 6.40 is available. See the release notes for info on what’s new.

You can grab it from ftp://ftp.sap.com/pub/sapgui/java/640r6/.

SAPGUI 6.40 and Crossover Office

Michael-John Turner — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 16:46:06 +0000

After several weeks of meaning to, today I finally got around to trying SAPGUI for Windows (the client application for most SAP solutions) under CrossOver Office 5.0. After a few false starts, I managed to get it to install and run (the installer wouldn’t even start correctly under CrossOver 4.2). Woot! It doesn’t work properly (or even well enough to be usable), but CodeWeavers and the Wine team are making some good progress.

Some tips:

Install into a Windows 98 bottle. Even though SAPGUI no longer supports Windows 98, when using a Windows 2000 bottle the installer continually reboots the Wine session.
Install Internet Explorer 6.0 before installing SAPGUI.
Once SAPGUI is installed, guilogon.exe doesn’t seem to work correctly (possible a Unicode issue) – it runs, but any entries that are added don’t get displayed in the logon pad. In addition, it doesn’t pass parameters to sapgui.exe correctly. The solution is to execute sapgui.exe directly, passing it the server details (for example, sapgui.exe /H/my.sapsystem.com/S/3200).

I used the GA version of CrossOver Office Professional 5.0 on a Debian 3.1 system running kernel 2.6.13. I did the installation from the SAPGUI 6.40 Compilation 3 DVD.

If you’re interested in checking the progress or testing SAPGUI under CrossOver, be sure to check out its entry in their compatibility list.

Logon screen

Easy access

Transaction OS06

Transaction SE38

The IMG

SE38 control shortdump

Planet SAP

Michael-John Turner — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 09:32:58 +0000

Just spotted that DJ Adams has put together Planet SAP, an aggregation of interesing SAP-related blogs. The majority of them come from SDN (which still has lousy XML feeds), but it’s a good start.

SAPGUI 6.40

Michael-John Turner — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 19:28:00 +0000

A few days ago I finally installed SAPGUI 6.40 for Windows on my laptop. I upgraded from 6.20 patch 47 and the installation went very smoothly and pretty quickly – less than 10 minutes on my 1.5GHz Pentium-M (I didn’t bother running SAPSweep beforehand). One thing to be aware of – the upgrade only upgrades already installed functionality. If you want the new stuff (eg Adobe Designer), once you’ve upgraded, you need to run the setup program again and install any missing components that you need.

The performance seems pretty similar to 6.20 and with 7 sessions open to two systems, memory usage was at 31,440K according to Windows Task Manager. New with 6.40 is the ability to have the GUI use the Windows shell visual style if using XP or Server 2003 (I still use the Streamline look and feel which debuted with one of the later 6.20 patches)

For more info on the new features in the 6.40 GUI, check out OSS note 710720.

Overall, seems like a worthy, fairly painless upgrade.