Finally, I'm back to when I finished setting up my Blog on Nov 12th. I made quite a few additions and improvements and bug fixes, but now I can get back and make some progress and hopefully be able to finish a few items on my Behold Main Page so that I can increase that "80%" complete figure.
So before I get ...
Back on track today. Finish checking to see if adding adding Families from the Name Index works. There are a few problems. Looks like it would be better to rewrite the way the Name Index can apply families. Then I might be able to handle family deletions from the Name Index as well.
Worked on this for a ...
Got a little off-track today. It happens from time-to-time. During my work yesterday, I found a bug in my implementation of "overwrite" mode that causes Behold to crash. Overwrite mode is what you normally change to in an editor when you press the Insert key. Then all keys you press will overwrite the character ...
After figuring out what to say in the text of the message which is always hard to keep it short yet understandable. For now I decided on: "nnn families from deleted GEDCOMs were not added", where "nnn" is the number not added. Of course, you have to be careful and say 1 "family" and "was", not "families" and ...
I can't tell you how many useful ideas I've had during my morning shower. This morning my mind starting thinking about some of the inadequacies of GEDCOM and how I might get around them for version 2 of Behold, when editing is added. I want a Place entity, but GEDCOM doesn't have one. It struck me that I ...
Back to the new version of Richview and getting the checkpoint names to work in exported html and rtf. A new option to UseCheckpointName was added to Richview and I can use that instead of my custom code. Setting that up, it seems to almost work. All the hyperlinks work fine to create an html document. But ...
Also with the new Richview package, I have to update the Richview help file and the Richview demo files. I always go through the new help file to see what new features were added. The demos are always useful to see how to do things with Richview.
I get all sorts of ideas for Behold, not only from what I ...
The process of reinstalling the new version of Richview takes a bit of patience. First, download the new package. Make a copy of the old package source code. Extract the new package. Now I have three routines that I have customized: CRVData includes code for my progress bar, and code to allow the checkpoint ...
Sometimes it's nice to be able to advance my own Genealogical research. Over the last week or so, I've been in contact via e-mail with some possible relative on my family's Focsaner side from Romania. With a flurry of activity, we found a few clues that almost definitely have tied us together. Not only now ...
One of the third-party packages I use for Behold's main report window, called RichView, has upgraded to a new version. In this version, the Print Preview is said to be fixed to render the image of the printout much more accurately. This is great to hear, since the old Print Preview looked very bad with text ...
I found out that Ancestral Quest has released their new 2002 version. Looking at their Ancestral Quest 2002 New Features page, it looks like they've got some good people working on the updates now. Their ideas are going in the right direction, with a Research Manager and To Do list, Spell Checker, Bookmark ...
Looking through the code I printed, everything looked pretty good. The code looked quite clean despite the massive surgery, and I couldn't find any obvious bugs or changes to make. That was quite reassuring, and again puts me on the right track. The Organize code for keeping track of the GEDCOM files now ...
The non-modal window error problem surprisingly turned out not to be a bug at all! I set up a small test program with three windows, and they each seem to slide in front of each other properly. So in Behold, I set all the windows back to be normal windows, and using the function keys to switch between them ...
The error that popped up when exiting turned out to be a relatively easy one. The error only occurred when the Input Log window was opened during the course of the program. The GEDCOM File list was being closed in the wrong place, so when the program exited, and attempt was made to close it a second time.
...
Developing a genealogy program is not all programming. There are many parallel tasks that must go on simultaneously. The most important of these is research. I am continuously on the lookout for new genealogical developments and innovations. For that reason I maintain my Genealogical Program Links Page and ...
Without getting a chance to work on it, I was thinking about the bug most of the week. The idea I have is instead of deleting the GEDCOM file from the list, let's just hide it. Tried it, and it seems to do the trick! This bug may be solved. But still a few loose ends to tie up. The other windows still may ...
Sometimes, personal issues keep me away from Behold for a few days. I hate when that happens. The major reason for creating this Blog was to keep me motivated and on track and making some progress every day. It is especially difficult to stay motivated and on track when in the middle of bug solving. The ...
Let's make the bug fix I found on Sunday. Takes only a minute to implement and ... oh oh! It fixed part of it, since internal numbers are now correct, but the GEDCOM ID is still incorrectly duplicated. More debugging will be required.
The other outstanding non-Behold problem left is that Windows Update bug I've got (See Friday, Nov 22). My ISP had got back to me and told me I should try upgrading to the latest Entered software. I installed the new upgrade on top of the old, but it didn't solve the problem and I e-mailed them to let them ...
A bit of a diversion today. Had an idea on the program I developed to help my daughters get good scores on Destructo Match on Neopets. The hard part is entering the position, but by copying the position to the clipboard and getting the program to read the colors of the pixels at a specific point in each ...
I may have found the bug. If I'm right, it is a simple 3 line fix. No time to try it today. Want to look through the rest of the routine for similar problems.
Starting a fresh night on "the" bug. Now at least I know not to look only in my new code, so hopefully I can track it down.
Aha! Found the protection exception when the program is closed. It was caused by freeing an internal copy of the Behold file in the wrong close routine.
No luck yet looking tracing ...
This bug is getting difficult. It appears not to have been caused by my recent reorganization, but might have been there before. That made it hard to trace since I was mostly looking through my new code. It looks like I'll have to bear down and work on it when I have a few hours in a row to do so.
I wish ...
Yikes! Here's a tough one. Open a GEDCOM. Add another GEDCOMs. Delete the 1st. Now add another. This time, the Gedcom IDs for on the Families Organize page that should be the IDs of the 2rd GEDCOM are instead the IDs of the 1st GEDCOM. Also, when the program is closed, a protection exception error ...
Bug finding is sometimes a lot of work, but fixing them gives me a lot of satisfaction. The best thing about it in computer programs is that once you've fixed it, then it's fixed forever. Too bad people aren't that way too.
So a couple more days to catch AMBAP (As Many Bugs As Possible).
So after "major surgery", it is always important to do an initial check to see that everything is connected right. Often problems show up as program crashes due to accessing invalid memory locations. These are relatively easy problems to find, since the exact location of the error in the program can be ...
The GEDCOMs in the log files was an essential piece. Without it, the files wouldn't load. The GEDCOM structure was no longer there to hold the GEDCOM files so I needed a new place for them. Unfortunately, the GEDCOM log pages structure is not extendable and there is no place for the pointers to the files. I ...
I thought I'd check out what other genealogy Blogs are out there. I went to Google and searched for: "genealogy blog" and was very surprised that My Behold Blog (this page), came in at number 6 spot, despite it being quite new. The other main page mentioned was about the genealogy of Blogs. Interesting, but ...
The morning shower is a great place to sort things out. The complication seems to be because I had some early data structures and code to maintain the GEDCOM and Families lists in the User Interface unit. This basically has to do all the same functions that the code in my Organize unit does for its GEDCOM and ...
Leaving something overnight always gets me to clear up in my mind exactly what needs to be done. First, this is a fairly extensive change, so a backup is needed.
So I moved all the Behold file routines to the Organize unit, and started testing. First I lost the filename in Behold's caption line at the top of ...
It took 5 days to research and setup my Blog and then update my Behold web pages. Now its time to get back to development of Behold.
I last left off working on the Organize pages. I've finished the GEDCOMs and Families pages. I'm on the Numbering page and I've now got to implement and test the various ...
One thing I was thinking about overnight. My Behold Blog starts rather abruptly on November 6th. I should have a bit of "Pre-History" included. I've got My Genealogical Activities Page that is pretty much the right idea, but it is oh so out of date.
Whew. That's better. About 2 hours of work needed to ...
Finishing my Behold Blog meant that I would have to restructure my Behold site a bit to incorporate it. Hmmm. I don't want to just say "Coming Soon" anymore on the Behold Home Page since people can now see my progress in my Blog. Time for a bit of restructuring.
I moved the "Things Behold will do for you" ...
Fantastic! I finished setting up my Behold blog page. It took about 3 hours to get everything right. I just love the way it looks.
The template I picked up from Blogger.com was originally done by Eric Costello and is a magnificent piece of work. Written with javascript and CSS, it does require newer ...
Now that I've decided on putting up a blog, the next step is a bit of research. The Genealogical Computing article refers to the online tool Blogger for helping set up blogs. I went there and found that I really like their interface. I signed up and started trying to set up my Behold blog. I already started ...
In the latest Genealogical Computing magazine, Oct-Dec 2002 that I just received, I read an interesting article about genealogy blogging. The article refers mostly to recording your family history research in an online weblog for all to see. I was somewhat familiar with the term blogging (coined from "weB ...
This is where my blog begins. If you would like a bit more about what happened before this, I've got some stuff on My Genealogical Activities Page.
Thanks for reading this far.
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