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Now I'm finally getting around to shape Behold into its initial form!

After slimming down the numbering, I've gone after the Tags page. I had all these extra codes (a slash or @ sign) to indicate the type of Tag. After several comments that this is confusing, I've now reworked the display of tags so that only simple or compound GEDCOM tags are displayed. The special Behold tags are moving to a new Options page. Then I'll fix up the error messages in the log file to make them more consistent.

This will do a lot to increase the useability of Behold. It will not take nearly as long to understand (or explain) how these features work and what they do.

Setting up the Options page was easy. But setting it up to make it obvious, user friendly, and easy to use was another matter.

I really didn't want to get into adding options until after Version 1.0 was released, but the separation of GEDCOM tags from "other stuff" is necessary right now.

I spent the last week trying out various ideas. What I ended up doing was calling the page: "Report" because all the settings on it relate to the Everything Report. Rather than custom building the page at this time, since I'm sure I'll be changing items as I go, I've used a treeview where you can select the options. The treeview has three parts:

1. Contents - so you can select which sections of the Everything Report to include and what to name them.
2. Extra Info - listing some extra information generated by Behold you may want to include, such as Generation number, or AutoOrg relevance.
3. Text to Display - which lists some of the phrases used within the Everything Report, so you can change them if you want. Eventually all the phrases will be included. This will allow the Everything Report to be displayed in any language, and all I will need are volunteers to translate all the phrases (and also the Tag text). The idea is that I will make these available as Behold files for each language that will be downloadable from the Behold website.

I'll also be adding a needed Title and a Footer, both customizable, to the Everything Report.

So the hard part really was figuring out how to best set this up. I think it's good enough for the Version 1 release this way. A few more days and I should have this completed.

One of my programming dreams from long ago has finally come true. When I was a kid, I was really interested in Astronomy. During High School when I experimented with programming, one of the things I wanted to do was enter all the star locations, distances, and brightnesses into a data file and program the view of the sky from anywhere on the Earth at anytime.

I had a 300 page book with all the star information. But with everything else I was doing and with my computer chess work I was doing, I didn't have the time to enter 15,000 stars onto punched cards. They didn't have the Internet then to download the data. Nor did they have scanners to make data entry easy.

They have for awhile had many good sky programs and many of them are Open Source and free. The one I've heard best things about is Celestia, but I've never got to trying it myself. It was only a year ago that I got a computer that would be powerful enough for it.

But now, the company who is making it really happen again is ... you guessed it ... Google. Google Maps is great online, but Google Earth is amazing for its 3-D rendering. So now they have: Google Sky. With the new version 4.2 of Google Earth, you can switch from earth view to sky view and do in sky view what you can do in earth view. The links to images of objects and Wikipedia information makes it a wonderful tool.

But 20 minutes is about all I can spend on it. Behold's current version expires in 9 days so I've got to wrap up my changes quickly and get the new version out fast.

Finally, got through the merge from and merge into functions of the new Report options page. Following that, I hurried through the rest of the Tutorial in the help file. It may not be perfect right now, but it will get polished over time.

So what was going to be just adding the last set of features before going beta, ending up turning into some fairly major changes and usability improvements. A lot of the changes were based on user input and I thank everyone for that.

There are quite a few changes this version, many of them quite noticeable in the program and in the Everything Report. See my Version History for a complete list. I'll be sending out a mailing tonight to everyone who's purchased and tried Behold to let them know about the new version and some of the new features.

I apologise. Last night when I used my e-mailing program to send out the Behold News, the program timed out twice. Each time I had to restart it and I had never done that before. It was supposed to start up where it left off, but I found that 82 people ended up getting two of my mailings. That wasn't intended and I hope those who got two copies were not too annoyed.

On the download page, in the "how did you find out about Behold" box, I just got an answer that says: "Another person who uses it". Now that's how I would love everyone to find out about it!

On Thursday, I'm going to Vancouver for a cousin's wedding. So I'll probably be away from my e-mail for a few days, but I'll respond to any messages I miss when I get back.

I'm back from the wedding in Vancouver. A wedding is like a vacation for a genealogist. Time to catch up on family happenings in a joyous and friendly atmosphere.

On my computer, there's only 250 e-mails to respond to and a week's worth of RSS feeds to read. I've also got 2.5 GB of trip pictures and videos on my camera that I've got to clean up, organize and send to people.

I've had several small bugs reported in the new version of Behold. I should squash them in the next few days.

Noone reported this one, but on a machine with 3 GB of RAM, I found that the memory dials don't work. The Windows routines I used were old ones that used 32 bit integers and couldn't handle values over 2 GB. I think I've fixed that now, but I won't know for sure until I go back to that machine to test it.

There are "bookmarks" in Behold at every horizontal line, corresponding to every pair of people. I set it up that way when ID numbers had more relevance several versions ago.

But now if you click on a hyperlink to someone, you will go to the first person of the pair, and not necessarily to the person you intended to. Stephen let me know about this in the Behold Discussion Forum.

He's right and this needs reworking. I'm going to set it up so that both people as well as the info for the two of them each get their own bookmark so that links can go to the correct place.

While checking this, I also found a couple of bugs with the forward and backward history which use these bookmarks.

This will take a bit of debugging and some data restructure, but it's worth taking the time now and cleaning up that code.

Fixing the bookmarks was slightly more complicated than I expected.

I had been using the generated ID, eg. FAM-43 as the bookmark. But I saw that was wrong, since those IDs are specific to the run, and reorganizing may lose them or they might point to incorrect places. So I changed this to use the ID from the GEDCOM instead. This way, the bookmarks can be remembered between runs, as long as the GEDCOMs don't change.

But I had to work through each type of bookmark (individual, family, source, place, etc.) one by one to get them working, so its taking time. I'm almost done though, and should be able to wrap this up and move on in a day or two.

Finally! There are now bookmarks for the spouse and the family information. The bookmarks now internally use the GEDCOM ID number rather than the Behold generated number. The hyperlinks and Forward/Backward functions seem to work as they should. The forward/backward locations will deactivate if they cease to exist after the file is reorganized. And the right-mouse clicks select the person at the cursor correctly. That seems to be done and I've fixed a few related bugs along the way. There may be one or two bugs in the new code that I missed, but I'll rigorously test for them during the upcoming beta.

I really didn't want that to take three weeks, but if I work hard, I still may be able to get the beta out by my self-imposed deadline of the end of October, if I'm lucky.

Next: to clean up the error and warning messages in the log file.

Next on my To Do list was to redo the error messages. The idea was that I was going to list each message every time it happened along with the GEDCOM line it happened at.

But what I have already done was nicely organize the messages so that (in most cases) each message is listed only once along with a list of all the places that problem exists. Thinking about this, it actually makes more sense to show a message once with 200 references, rather than to repeat the same message 200 times for each reference.

Since Behold makes an attempt to read and interpret every variation of GEDCOM there is, many people won't care about the problems with the GEDCOMs, and are more interested in the data.

That said, Behold is very good at checking the data. So although the Log file is out of the way, it is valuable. So I will at least try to a better indication of when problems worth fixing have been found.

Sam saw my post from yesterday. He asked: "Why are the reports separate?" He suggested that instead of using the Log File, I display the warning messages in the Everything Report with the related data. For printing, Behold can have a toolbar item to toggle them on and off. He said this would eliminate the need to look at the error log and then search for the error in the main report.

That's a great idea! Basically, I can get rid of the log file completely by including that info in the Everything Report. I never really did like having to create the log file in the first place. But Sam pointed out the obvious that I might never have seen. Thank you, Sam.

Time for a bit of an interlude. There are a few things I found that don't work exactly right. Any hidden items need the sources they contain to be hidden as well. Hidden items must be numbered differently. References to notes are not being displayed. Concatenated lines used for titles of sources and citations are not being processed correctly.

I could fix each of these individually by adding patches to my code. For the hidden items, that code is already in a dozen places and already has gone through several versions of improvements. That all happened while I was still building my final data structure. Doing the patching would take time and would have to be done case by case checking each one along the way. Rather than doing that, it's probably worth my time right now to rework two important parts of Behold.

The first is to rework my input routine so that the Concatenated lines are pre-concatenated. Then I won't have to check for them everywhere. This would involve pre-reading the next line, and that's a little tougher than it sounds because of the way I've "globalized" that routine. It should only take a day or two.

The second and more important task is to get my five different types of GEDCOM objects that I'm handling combined into just two, and have both of them use a similar data structure, thus merging the separate functions into single ones that will work in all cases. This will "formalize" my implementation of what I call Behold's "Extended GEDCOM" data structure. There are two structures involved: Records and Links. Each can have subordinate data. Records can contain Links. Links always point to Records and can contain other Links. When a Link contains subordinate data, it becomes a citation. Now that may all sound confusing to you, and you need not worry about it, but the exact structure has been eluding me up to last night. It took a bike ride, a 2 a.m. awakening, and a shower for me to finally figure it out.

The nice thing about doing this now is that the beta coming up will be perfect to ensure this improved implementation is all bug free. Nothing on the outside will change because of it. The Everything Report will look the same except some bugs will be fixed. The code will be simplified and generalized, hopefully becoming somewhat faster because of improved data structures. But future changes will be much easier, and Behold will be better prepared for the reading in of data directly from other programs, and later for GEDCOM output and editing.

If all goes well, this all could be done within a week or two. Then back to the show.

The retooling the two parts of Behold was tricky, but its going well.

Moving the CONC tag to the input stage led to a few other simplifications. My large test file of 33,000 people that I use for timings takes about 35 seconds. This improvement actually cut a half a second off that.

But changing the storage of each record's data lines from a linked list into a single long string had me worried. You can't get much faster than a linked list, but I already needed citations in a string and didn't want to continue to process data lines in two separate ways. I was relieved when it only added about a second of time on, or only about 3%. But it did reduce the RAM requirement by about 30MB down to 650MB for that file, or about 5%.

For most programmers, the recommendation is to always use more memory if you can save time. But Behold is a bit different in this regard. For very large GEDCOM files, it is often the memory that is Behold's limitation, so anything I can reduce from that is worth it.

Over the weekend, hopefully I'll finish this as I merge the display algorithms together and eliminate many inconsistencies and bugs during the process.

I surprised myself. After a few more fixes in attempting to merge the display algorithms, I realized that my Friday arguments weren't beneficial enough to go through that right now. So I left the input improvements and backed out of my data structure changes. Now back towards getting done what's needed to get to beta.

On the Internet, the competition for family networking and build-your-trees online sites is getting crazy. New sites are popping up every day. Almost all are free and "secure" and have the goal of linking everyone in the world into one big tree.

So how do you pick between: AGES-online, Amiglia, AprilTree, Distributed Family Tree Project, FamiliaOnline, Famillion, FamilyInHistory, FamilyLink, Family Pursuit, FamilyRelatives, FamilyTrackers, Family Tree Drillet, FamilyTree (for Facebook), Family Tree Guide, Findmypast, Genealogia, Genebase, Genes Reunited, Geni, GNTP, JotSpot, LostCousins, My Great Big Family, MyTrees Online, OneFamilyTree, One Great Family, Online Family Tree, PedigreeSoft, SharedTree, TreeX, TribalPages, WeRelate and Zooof? Then there's the 3 more I just found out about and added today: Famiva, Genoom and Kincafe to my Online Genealogy Programs section of my Genealogy Software Links page. Have I missed any?

If there's money to be made in this, then someone will step in and start to buy a few out and the others will fold. Maybe the general public and younger audiences like social networking. But I'm not sure if true family genealogists really want what they're offering. Go back to my March 25, 2007 post for my previous thoughts on this.

Dick Eastman yesterday wrote an interesting article titled "PAF on a stick". You have to be a Plus subscriber to see the whole article, but basically Dick was talking about using a Jump/USB/Pen drive (it has many names) to carry, not only your genealogy data, but also your genealogy program around with you.

The problem with putting a program on a those portable drives is that since Windows 98, Microsoft has encouraged programmers to change from using INI files to store program settings to using the Windows Registry. They wanted to allow different users to login to the same machine and each would have their own settings. So almost all programs, Behold included, have adopted the use of the Registry as Microsoft has wanted.

But the latest craze is to use these pen drives to take your software and data with you. This allows you to run your program with your data on a library computer, a friend's computer, a school computer or anywhere else, without the need to install the program or use or modify that computer's Registry (which sometimes is even locked out from you). The new tech term is "portable application".

Behold would be a great application for this. First it is simple and has just one .EXE file, one help file, and does not need its own DLL (system) files. Wouldn't it be great to take Behold and your data with you and use it anywhere? You'll be able to use it to display your data, wherever you are. When version 2.0 comes, you'll be able to edit your data too, wherever you are!

All it would require is being able to read/write it's Registry info from/to a special file instead of the Registry. I can get Behold to detect if the file is there to use that file, and if not, to use the Registry. Then I'll add a menu/toolbar item in Behold to export Behold to a pen drive (i.e. as a portable application).

All of this would not be that difficult for me to do. I might be able to squeeze it in before for the beta version. I think that would be the cat's meow.

So first I was told that Behold was not detecting the new version when you "Check Online for New Version".

What had happened was I went from version 0.98.9d to 0.98.9.5. I changed from the letter suffix to the point number for Vista compatibility.

Version 0.98.9d detects the new version okay, but 0.98.9c, b, or a do not. Those three previous versions checked to see that the running program's version is LESS than the online version. But that's a problem because "." is greater than "a" or "b" or "c" in a computer string comparison. I changed the check in the 0.98.9d version that it be UNEQUAL rather than LESS than. So it's not a problem if you previously had upgraded to 0.98.9d.

The bottom line here is that if you still have the 0.98.9a, b or c versions, you will not be able to use the "Check Online for New Version" to upgrade. Instead, you'll have to go to the Behold download page, click on the "Click Here to Download" and say "Run". That will run the new install file and put the newest 0.98.9.5 version on your machine. You won't have to re-register.

The second problem was that Behold stopped working in Windows 98. I didn't realize that I still had a user using Windows 98, but I do. It ended up being a memory call that I purposely changed so that more than 2 GB could be reported. Unfortunately that call causes an error in Windows 98.

So I found a way to make the correct call depending on the Operating System. Google searches do wonders. It found the method to do this in a forum, and it didn't matter that the forum was in German.

So if you are still running in Windows 98, let me know, and I'll give you a link to the fix you need.

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