Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Windows 10 first released on July 29. It was a staged release, being rolled out in phases to help manage the demand. I had “reserved” my copy early, like millions of others, and was anxiously awaiting it telling me my upgrade was ready. I even tweeted this: So then I waited, and waited, and waited, as ...

My websites, beholdgenealogy.com, lkessler.com, and gensoftreviews.com have been experiencing unfortunate periods of downtime over the past couple of months. Yesterday, I put in my third ticket with Netfirms, my hosting company, about this. My first ticket was Oct 15 and I titled it:  “My sites are ...

This is why I’m switching from using @BlueSnapInc to @FastSpring to process payments for Behold. I started about 10 years ago with what was then Plimus. Plimus was founded in 2001. They were a payment processor that would accept payments for Behold on my behalf. They had a nice interface to produce a buy now ...

I think I’ve got it right this time. Life Events have been cut down to include only the really relevant events that will be important in your research. Children and parent birth, marriage and death events are important. Siblings are as well until the person of interest gets married. Half-family, stepfamily ...

Its been a while since my last post so I wanted to let you know I’m still here. I’ve been working quite hard to finish off Version 1.1.1 which will be much, much, much better than 1.1. Hopefully not more than a couple of weeks left (but I know I’ve said that before). I’ve removed piles of code and ...

I’ve been bothered with the worry that I may have taken Behold in the wrong direction. My original goals I believe were solid. Display the user’s information clearly and concisely in one report so that everything’s available and nicely cross referenced in the indexes. Behold was doing this task well and ...

Installing a database into Behold is a major endeavour that I am doing carefully. It is, in many ways, not unlike the work that has been going on at a house I have been passing by for the past couple of months. This is a beautiful home, about 100 years old, that supposedly was used for a movie set many years ...

This post is total plagiarism of an article just written today by Matt Sherman on the StackExchange Blog titled “Why are there so many programming languages?”  The article struck me as also being totally true when applied to genealogy software, so I am reproducing it here and just changing a few ...

One of my concerns about switching from in-memory data structures to an on-disk database has been with regards to speed. Memory is faster than disk. Writing to disk will slow things down. But it better not slow things down too much. For normal-sized genealogy files (say up to 10,000 people), everything should ...

I noticed a problem in the Behold Forum last night where a post was not always showing up. Last night I attempted to fix it with somewhat disastrous results. Unbeknownst to me, I crashed both the Forum and Blog last night at 11:45 p.m. and it took me a few hours today to bring them back up today. I still ...