Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Today was the 1,000’th day I visited the Stack Overflow site where programmers ask and give answers to programming questions. I joined the site 3 years and 4 months ago, right after I discovered it and just a few weeks after it went live. Working that out, there has been an 82% chance on any particular day ...

Some tags in GEDCOM are misused, and the ALIA tag is one of the worst. Very often in a GEDCOM file you’ll find the following: 0 @I1@ INDI 1 NAME Thomas Jacob /Black/1 ALIA Jack /Black/This is definitely wrong. GEDCOM states: "Alias Names: One or two systems used the ALIAs tag for representing multiple names. ...

Determining people's ages at events is fun. For me, it's again grassroots. I have to add low-level code and think though logic and develop algorithms to do it. Why not just subtract one internal date from another? It's not quite that simple. You have to figure out date ranges. Then you have to subtract the ...

A wonderful software program doesn’t just get developed. It iterates and builds. It expands upon its concepts and enhances them. It refigures how to redo parts of itself based on the experience of its use and makes things better. It isn’t created wonderful, but it evolves into wonderful. You look at your ...

In my past life as a Computer Chess programmer, I became quite an expert in developing data structures, implementing algorithms and heuristics, and optimizing programs to the n’th degree. So doing something like sorting the events within a person in Behold shouldn’t have been much of a problem. It’s very ...

There I was at RootsTech sitting on a panel with Bruce Buzbee of RootsMagic as we were both panelists for the Sources, Citations, Metadata session. Little did I know the pain his RootsMagic program would soon be causing me. That same day, Bart Brenner, one of the four Behold users I met in person at the ...

You must be patient when waiting for Microsoft, as I had to be. But at last, Microsoft has posted at its Windows 7 Compatibility Center confirmation showing that Behold has attained Compatible with Windows 7 status. I’ve been talking about getting a logo certification for quite some time. You do have to make ...

While I was at #RootsTech, I was surprised to find out that Tamura Jones did a review of Version 1.0 of Behold. I have said for a long time that Tamura writes the most comprehensive and accurate reviews of Genealogy software anywhere. Tamura has written full articles about Behold in the past:  Version ...

These are the exact notes I took during Ryan's two GEDCOM X talks. Also included are photos I took for my own reference (please don't distribute them further). Click on them to get larger versions. First session: "A New GEDCOM: Project Scope, Goals, and Governance" Shout out to legacy GEDCOM. It's time ...

As I sort through my #RootsTech binder one last time before I file it on my genealogy bookshelf, I am reflecting on the happenings of the last week. Most of all, it was great meeting people face-to-face instead of just virtually. I especially enjoyed meeting my BetterGEDCOM group, my Behold users, other ...