It started snowing yesterday at noon. And it kept snowing all night. This morning I woke up at 6:30 a.m. and there was a foot of new snow on the ground, on top of the 4 inches we already had.
So out I go to shovel my forty-foot driveway. Some places are only 6 inches deep, but others have drifted up to two ...
Tonight I finished off the last remaining glitches (that I know of) in my Organizing info that I mentioned on November 4th. Deleting a GEDCOM caused problems in the Instant Organize history list, but this ended up being due to the GEDCOM entry not being deleted before the IO history list was recalculated (I've ...
My problem from November 14th was in fact, not resolved. There was still something wrong between the Instant Organize History List and its associated Popup list. The "enabled" status of the Popup list would not always get passed through to the History List.
I was using the Elpack MRU (Most Recently Used) ...
I spent the weekend finishing off the things I wanted to do with the Forum, primarily making an RSS feed for it. I wanted that feed so that I wouldn't have to constantly check for new messages. Every time I loaded all the feeds I'm monitoring into my RSS Reader, I would see if there were any new messages.
...
On Wednesday, my two-year term as President of my Heritage Centre ends, and I'm looking forward to devoting a lot more time to Behold. The extra 10 or so hours I will have to myself each week should go a long way to moving Behold to completion.
In fact, I'm going to step out on a limb and set my goal for the ...
A couple of days of testing Surfulater, and it seems to have enough potential to help me the way I would hope it could. For the relatively low cost, I purchased it, and will join the forums to put in my two cents worth.
In my seemingly neverending quest for the "perfect" research organizing software, I came across another new product. This one was just released a month ago and was in Beta before that. It is called Surfulater. It is easy to miss when looking for note-taking software because it primarily lists itself as being ...
I took a few days off Behold to do something I've wanted to do for a long time. That is to become an Amazon.com
associate. I've always been a fan of Amazon (in my case Amazon.ca), and I have ordered many books and other items through them. My goal was to integrate my book recommendations into my site, mostly ...
Want to know a secret? I did a little more looking into Research Organizing programs and found a couple of pages: Overview of Windows Outlining Programs by John Buckman and Software for Research (using Windows) by Jay Tate. The state of these programs is really no better than that of Genealogy programs. They ...
I had designed the four non-modal forms that are the Main Form (Everything Report), Organize Pages, Name Index and GEDCOM List/Log so that the function keys: F9, F10, F11 and F12 would conveniently take you to the respective forms. I know I had this working a long time ago, but somewhere in the last while, this ...
I have been constantly looking for good research organizing software, partly as a model for certain aspects of Behold, but also for the purpose of organizing all my programming techniques, code snippets, and info about Delphi sites and Delphi components available on the web. Over the last few years I have ...
This is just a link I "had" to include into my Blog: Computer Stupidities
I was going in circles for the last few days, trying to isolate why the InstantOrganize entries were not being properly validated following the processing. After hours of work, it led to an interaction problem in that the Instant Organize History List wiped out the settings on the Popup list. I don't know ...
To properly update the Instant Organize history menus, I finally determined that I had to update the Gedcom numbers before doing the Processing, and then check and update the entries following the Processing. I had to be quite meticulous to get the actual processing of this just right.
It's unfortunate, but ...
The last few nagging little things are just dragging on: (1) Found that Instant Org in the Everything Report and Instant Org in the Tree View are done quite inconsistently and their routines need to be merged. (2) Instant Org wasn't working after unchecking a GEDCOM. (3) Instant Org wasn't working after ...
The Instant Organize history is a bit different than the rest of the Organize info. The history changes whenever a new Instant Organize is done. But if the program is exited without the Organize info being saved, then the last IOs that were done will not be in the saved info. This made me realize that I have ...
It's always easier implementing something a second time. And yes, I think this other method is better. Still a few tweaks remaining to get the update of the Instant Organize history entries working just right.
Adding the extra field added more complications than expected. Three days of work and there's still little things that worked before that don't work now with the changes. Much of the code had to be changed to use this field instead of the GEDCOM number field, but not all of it. In addition, a maximum GEDCOM ...
There seem to be two possible ways to do this. I don't know which is better. So I'll save my present development folder in case it doesn't work out. One way is to add another field in my GEDCOMs list that indicates a physical GEDCOM number that will not change. The other way is to make the changes to the ...
Nope: The last of those four things has revealed a problem. Previously, I had set up the GEDCOM number as the order in which the GEDCOMs are read in. If GEDCOMs are added or deleted or reordered, then the numbering is changed and the new numbering is loaded into the Behold file next time around. The Instant ...
Finishing the few Organizing things left on my list: (1) When a Surname Organize is done, the next load starts with a Surname Organize, but should start with an Auto Organize. Fixing the defaults fixes this. (2) Need to add code to save the Instant Organize history into the Behold file whenever a new Instant ...
Ahhh! Very close now. After an hour of thinking yesterday, I finally figured out how it could all logically work. On a one page "napkin" (a napkin of course is the note-taking material preferred by most eccentrics) I mapped out how the buttons would interact with the active Organize info, the Last Processed ...
Finally, I'm making some headway again. I spent a lot of time in the last week trying to get past the stumbling block that I left for myself way back on May 27. I was stuck with getting Auto Organize, Surname Organize, Instant Organize and Reorganize all working correctly together with the EE and RM buttons ...
Well, that "simple" patch to the forum was once again not as simple as expected. It took me almost all day to get the e-mail notifications working, first because my ISP's JMail server had changed, and second because I couldn't get any notifications sent to myself. Wouldn't you know it ended up being because ...
It was nice working on Behold again, even if it was just to repair an algorithm. I haven't really worked on Behold itself since July. In between, its been working on Spam problems, RSS and the Forum. The Forum took on a life of its own as "one week's work" seems to have stretched out much longer than that.
...
It took me a while to figure out how I could count the ancestors and descendants properly. I was hoping I would figure out an algorithm that would not require a manual search of the ancestor and descendant tree for every individual. Unfortunately, as it turns out that is exactly what you have to do. There are ...
I thank Dick Eastman for his reference to the Fletcher Christian descendants file created by Paul Lareau. At 1.3 MB and 9339 people and many marriages within the family it is a good stress-test for Behold. Running it identified a bug I have in that I am double-counting descendants in my name index, since I ...
Hmmm. No filled in Behold surveys have been put in my Behold surveys folder in about a month. That should not be. I usually get a few filled out every week. Checking into this, it has to do with the e-mail server changes my ISP made. Now the JMail command needs my new SMTP server name. I missed that because ...
With the new forum format, the link to posting a new topic or replying to the current message do not stick out enough. So its a matter of making up a couple of graphical buttons that can be easily seen. After all, I want to encourage, not discourage posting. I also made a whole other number of formatting ...
Finished my forum's message preview section. It sits at the bottom of the main screen just like the preview in Outlook Express does. But I do extend it the full width of the page as that allows for more viewing area for the message. It basically was an adaptation of the detail page I had before and was not too ...
Today, I got my copy of "Designing Highly Useable Software" by Jeff Cogswell from amazon.ca. I have been keeping atop of what the best ways are to design the user interface for Behold. I even have collected a whole binder of material on User Interface (UI) design and comparisons of how other programs do things ...
Working constantly with VBscript to finish customizing the forum, I found I have become quite familiar with it. Basically, all languages are essentially similar ... except that they are different!
One interesting aspect of ASP with VBScript is how it sends its output to the webserver. For example, the script ...
Now there is the matter of sort order. I've never known what was best for me. Do you want your mail sorted oldest to newest (oldest at the top and newest at the end) or the other way around? I presume people might like it either way. The Outlook Express way is to click on the "Sent" column header and the sort ...
I spent about 15 hours over the last few days fixing up the message list for the forum. The biggest task was to add a highlighted "current" message and the ability to navigate message by message. Previously, the forum code only navigated page-by-page. The difficult part of changing this was that the search ...
To display the message list in the top right of the main forum page, and to make it look like Outlook Express is fairly easy to do. But because I no longer have the scrollbars on the right, a different mechanism than used in OE for navigating the pages of messages is required.
I really need to figure out ...
I'm amazed that my Genealogy Software Links page now turns up first on all the major search engines (google, alltheweb, teoma, hotbot, msn and yahoo) when you search for "genealogy program". If you change it to "genealogy programs", it comes in at 1st, 2nd or 3rd. Searching for "genealogy software" and it ...
Once again, I'm off on a diversion. As I work towards customizing my Forum, I still realize I have a fair bit to do. I've checked out Snitz and some of the other free ASP forums, but I hadn't looked back at MegaBBS since last November. Somehow this time I'm very impressed and it now looks like the best of ...
In order to get the message list for a forum compressed into the top right area of an html page, I cannot show all messages at once. What I thought would be the best way would be to use a scrollable table. Way back in February, I found and saved this article on Creating Scrollable Tables using the overflow ...
Back to work on the Behold Forum. I left off a few weeks ago with the reformatting of the pages. My ideal goal is to set up something that looks and feels like Outlook Express. It needs the Forum List on the left, the message list at the top right, and the message preview on the bottom right. While I'm at it, ...
Aaarggggh! Three weeks and I haven't been able to spend much time on Behold. A few family happenings plus a lot of work for my Heritage Centre have taken their toll on me in that time. Hopefully I've got most of that out of the way and I'll try to get back to at least doing a bit every day on Behold to keep ...
Dick Eastman's article today on "Should All Data on the Web be Verified? A Contrarian View" was right on! I just disagree that you should publish all your data to the web in the first place. See the first part of Dick's article and my comments in response to it. (It is a "Plus" article, so you won't be able to ...
Dick Eastman in his newsletter recommends yet another free RSS new reader. The Blog Express website impressed me and seemed like it was worth a try. So how do you decide which of these to use? Personal preference I guess. I'll keep it around as a 4th way to test how my RSS feed looks (in addition to ...
As I check the Behold discussion forum page-by-page to set it up the way I want, I come to a few places where I have a decision to make about the wording or the setup of the user interface. For that I check to see what other forums use. Snitz is a good free forum written in ASP, and it has a nice list of its ...
So my hosting service posted: "Due to the overwhelming level of SPAM email messages received by our system we have had to temporarily disable the Nobody/Catch All Alias ... NOTE: This change is only a temporary measure. Once our new email system is in place you will be able to enable this feature and benefit ...
Meanwhile ... I've started overhauling the Behold Discussion Forum. Moved the login info into the header of each page to make it painfully obvious as to who is logged in and where to login if you haven't already. Got rid of the white on dark-blue background of some parts of the forum and changed it to black on ...
One thing always leads to another ... and new ideas.
One of the e-newsletters I subscribe to is the Pascal Newsletter which always has great articles and ideas for Delphi programmers. It has been a year since their last issue, and it's nice that they've started it up again.
This issue had a link to an ...
For now my spam problems are over. Preliminary to the improvements my webhost is making to provide enhanced spam filtering, they requested that all users turn off their "Nobody Alias". This feature, when active, accepts all emails addressed to the domain and delivers them to the administrator's email address - ...
The August 2004 issue of PC World listed FeedReader in their "Best Free Software" article. It is another free News Aggregator software like SharpReader with a difference: it is Open Source. What really surprised me when I checked out their site was that it was written in Delphi.
Now this peaked my ...
To Frame, or not to Frame: I have a three choices here. I can either set up a three (maybe even 4 or 5) frame panel for the forum and make the forum look very much like Outlook Express, or I can emulate the whole thing with tables, or I can stick to the single pages for each part of the forum as it is now.
...
This morning, I took the car in for a checkup. During the 20 minute walk back from the shop, I had the luxury of time to think about the Forum improvements I want to make. (Other good times for thinking about Behold include: in the shower in the morning, when waiting in line anywhere, and at 4 in the morning if ...
Before I get back to working on Behold again, I really feel I've got to make those improvements to my Forum like I mentioned on June 24. As I said, I was partially through this. If I can bear down on it, I should be able to get what I want done to it in a couple of weeks.
I have several times in the past ...
A full page ad in the newspaper today for Wizetrade, a stock market analysis program designed for the average person. Stock Market analysis has always been a hobby of mine, so I couldn't help following up on this. The website for wizetrade shows marketing at its highest potential (the marketing here is to sell ...
If you were wondering where I "advertised" this newsfeed: I submitted my feed to Feedster, Syndic8, and Bloglines. Bloglines is very interesting as they offer a free service that includes an online feedreader, ability to easily create your own blog, and a full community for sharing your feeds. For example, ...
As I was testing my Behold Blog (i.e. this page), I found that the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) used to lay out the page caused much of the text to overlap if the browser window was made too small. This was not good, and seems to have been there since I implemented it. I took a look at the CSS and javascript on ...
Last couple of RSS things required. First, add the XML icon onto the top of this blog page and link it to the .xml file. That's what's used to identify a newsfeed to people with news aggregator programs such as SharpReader.
I've even picked an image to go with my RSS file. This image is often displayed in ...
I am now getting close to 2,000 spam a day. I can still handle all that in 5 to 10 minutes with Mailwasher, but 1 day's worth of spam is taking up about 5 MB of my website space. I'm sure other users of my web host must have the same problem, and my host appears to be working on measures to try to alleviate ...
After a fair bit of studying of RSS, I see that the basic XML used for RSS is relatively simple (no pun intended). My best bet is to write a program to scrape my own Blog the way I want to, and create an xml file in RSS format. I'll pick RSS 0.91 since its specs are really all I need. ... After an hour or so, I ...
Two days of strategic planning sessions with my Heritage Centre. This really wears me out and makes it tough to do nighttime development afterwards. Next year, I am sure I can clear myself of this extra work with the Heritage Centre and make much more time for Behold, which will be necessary when I'm getting ...
Feeling a bit bad that it was only a couple of weeks ago that I said I better get back down to Behold, but instead I got into my Spam problem, seeing if I can get an RSS feed going, and fixing up my Behold forum. This is a bit of a diversion, but I've justified that these things are important and necessary, and ...
A week of waiting for myRSS to start scraping and feeding my Blog and nothing has happened. It never scanned my site for its first time and I'm fairly certain I did everything correctly. I e-mailed the webmaster about it but got no response. Looks like I need another solution.
Well, my frustration with the speed of Mailwasher prompted me to check out a few possible alternatives to handling spam. I saw a great review of Spam Inspector which integrates right into your e-mail client, works as a proxy between the server and the e-mail software (so no spam sneak through) and has one of ...
The SharpReader RSS reader is very nice and is very easy to use. It is set up very much like Outlook / Outlook Express and has the standard three pane interface: feed names on the left, item list at the top right, and the item content at the bottom right. The only concern is that I have to open Outlook Express ...
Another unfinished item is my Behold forum. It has been sitting in my "unfinished work" pile since February. Researching RSS has led me to look at other Forums again and evaluate what I want. Also, it is possible to add an RSS feed to my Forum, maybe even every topic group in my forum, and make it as useable ...
Spam is really starting to get nasty. My spam counts have increased from a few hundred a day, to several hundred, to now well over a thousand. My problem is a bit different than most people, as I am accepting all mail to xxxxx@lkessler.com. The new type of spam I am getting is that each spam send also ...
After going through many RSS articles and searching the web, I came across myRSS which will scrape a webpage and set up an RSS feed for it. The basic service is free and I signed up to try it. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see how it handles these updates I've added today to my Blog before I can pass ...
Spent a couple of days looking into how to convert my blog into a feed. There are two types of formats: RSS and Atom. RSS is the original format and is supported by Yahoo, whereas Atom is the newer more powerful format, supported by Google. I could get a content management tool, like Blogger, to maintain my ...
Dick Eastman decided to experiment by making his newsletter available as a Blog. Of course, I've got my Behold blog (which you are now reading) so he perked my interest up again. Back when I first set up this blog (Nov 2002) I experimented with Blogger.com, which has since been taken over by Google, and ...
Joel Spolsky wrote a very interesting article about Microsoft's internal struggles between "Backwards Compatibility" camp and the "reinventing everything" camp. It seems that the reinventing camp is starting to take over. As a result, a lot of new developments will occur in the next few years - some good, ...
It's been a tough month with too many things getting in the way of further development. I've really got to get down now and brute force my way through making sure the organize functions are all working together properly. Let's see how much I can get done in the next few days.
Been struggling the last few weeks, again with the concepts of how to implement the Auto-, Surname-, and Instant-, and ReOrganize buttons. This time my problem is that the user might customize after AutoOrganizing and then want to save this. I was throwing around the idea of saving four versions of the ...
There was a very well-written article about .NET in Karen Kenworthy's newsletter. It looks exciting. It's not for now, and not until the next Windows Operating system supporting .NET and 64 bit processing is out, but its best feature is its machine independence. Eventually, emulators will be written for the ...
Bug fixed. Now its a matter of finishing the History List for Instant Organize. Takes some time to hook everything up. It uses two sets of saved items, one which the internal IDs of what is to be organized, and the other is the names to be displayed in the list. The internal IDs are hidden. When adding or ...
It seems that the OnCaretMove routine is called whenever the RichViewEdit is cleared. I clear it everytime I create a new report, and the call to RVE.GetCurrentItem in my OnCaretMove routine occasionally causes an exception because the RVE is not completely cleared. I can fix this by avoiding my call to ...
Next step is to set up the History List for Instant Organize so that previous Instant Organizes can easily be redone. Setting up the structure for this has a previous example I can borrow from - that being the history list of the Open File dialog.
While doing this, the OnCaretMove bug I thought I solved on ...
Somewhere along the line, I introduced a small bug. The Surname Organize no longer works when the button is pushed. After 5 minutes of debugging, this was an easy one to solve. I inadvertently had moved the SurnameLinks cleanup into the ReportLinks cleanup routine. The surname links were getting cleared out ...
Figured out that Auto, Surname and Reorganize buttons enable/disablement should be done whenever the data is processed. This now can be made to happen in 10 different ways (at 10 different places in Behold). Also, Instant Organize is enabled and disabled differently, because it can be done at any time, as long ...
I worked out a layout for the Icons that looks okay. So now I'll have 4 organize buttons: A for Autoorganize, S for Surname Organize, I for Instant Organize, and R for Reorganize. Have to load them into my Image List, add the Reorganize action and ensure the actions all have similar characteristics, and fix up ...
One bug to fix. It seems that when I clear the Everything report with RichView, it calls its own OnCaretMove routine which then calls my own OnCaretMove routine. My routine gets the current tag from RichView, and this bombs when RichView is empty. So in my OnCaretMove routine, I have to ensure RichView is not ...
Now lets add code to enable Instant Organize to work from the menu or the toolbar the same way it works when right-clicking in the Tree View and in the Everything Report. The Current Line Tag and the names of the people at that tag need to be saved whenever the caret moves in the RichViewEdit or an item is ...
Sergey gave me a simple answer to getting the Richview tag value. Testing it, it seems that if the mouse was moved some places (exactly where I did not spend time to determine), the X and Y values I maintained through the MouseDown and Move functions and then passed to GetItemAtX would not return an item number ...
Okay. So it doesn't work right in the MouseButtonDown or in the MouseButtonUp routine. Let's try moving the code to the OnPopup code and see if it works there. It seems that OnPopup is executed inbetween MouseButtonDown and MouseButtonUp. One complexity is that OnPopup does not pass the X and Y of the screen, ...
In order to be able to identify both the person and his/her spouse that the cursor is pointing at, I needed to add a reference to the Spouse in the generated report. Then I created a ProcessIndiSpouse routine to do assign the spouse, and placed calls to this routine when generating the report structure.
The ...
Something came over me and I decided to track down some memory leaks that have been in the program for quite some time. The program only leaks about 836 bytes, and these are usually tough to find. Using Memory Sleuth, I can track where the memory is allocated in my low level routine, but determining the logic ...
Clicking the right mouse button in the Everything Report now sometimes quickly pops up a second menu over the first. It shouldn't do that. I saw a similar problem to this quite a while ago so this seems easy to fix. My mouse menu setup code for Instant Organize had to be moved from the MouseButtonUp routine ...
I created two routines: SetLineTag and GetLineTag to store and retrieve the individual tag identifiers. Since the tags are initially created by working through every item in the report in sequential order, many tags in a row will be assigned the same identifier, so I optimized the code in SetLineTag to account ...
I have been actively working on Behold for the last month, but have neglected to post to my Blog. I got stuck in a bit of a rut. The Instant Organize worked fine as I had implemented it in the Name Index and in the Tree View. But it did not work properly when I tried implementing it in the Everything Report. ...
I got an e-mail from someone letting me know that there is a site with a FAQ for the GenBox program that I should add to my Genealogy Software Links page. Taking a look at the FAQ and renewing my curiosity about GenBox, I see the program has made several advances. I remember the program from 10 years ago when ...
Adding the Instant Organize function into the Everything Report was a little bit more complicated than in the Name Index or the Tree View. In the other two, the Report ID for the desired person is directly available. In the Everything Report, it is not necessarily available with the other information about the ...
This week, I got a bit sidetracked. I again looked at my Behold Forum that I have set up, and really really would like it not to be threaded but to look much more like Newsgroups do in Outlook Express. I follow the TRichview newsgroups on a daily basis and it is so easy to catch up on the new messages because ...
Set up an InstantOrganize procedure that will put given IndiIDs into the Family List and then Process them to produce a new Everything Report. I got this to work nicely with the right-click popup menu in the Name Index. Then I developed a procedure to look up all IndiIDs associated with a user-assigned person ...
A few false starts this week on implementing the Instant Organize function. But tonight I made some progress. First step was to set up the right-mouse pop-up menus. I hadn't done that before and finally got it going. Needed to do it in three places: at the Tree View, the Everything Report, and the Name ...
It's amazing how much coding is required just for a little change like this. Once I got into it, I realized I didn't want to create SetDefault routines, but just properly update the IDs whenever the defaults were changed. You never get it just right the first time and after a bit of testing and correction, ...
Now to make the SetDefaultGEDCOMIDs and SetDefaultFamilyIDs routines. Plus the code to call them whenever the default lengths are changed. I won't get into it, but there are lots of small details to take care of to do this just right.
The way to update the default IDs is to change any IDs that have not been modified by the user. To do this, the original default would have to be saved for each ID so that the ID can easily be checked to see if it was changed by the user. Added the hidden variables in the tree to support this.
A few bugs to fix: The "Save As" was no longer working. This turned out to be because of the changes made to use the Registry. Once I set it to not use the Registry in the Save As routine, it worked again.
The user-defined IDs were being truncated to the Default ID length. This was being done by mistake ...
I decided to set up the RM and EE not to get reset whenever an Organize button is pressed. It just seems too confusing to have one button push change two other buttons. It will be easier to explain, but may cause one extra step for the user at times. Shouldn't be too bad, though.
Also got the RM and EE ...
Again, a little trickier than I thought. When first starting Behold, defaults must come from the last used values in the Registry. But after processing a file, then the settings at the time of Processing (saved to a MemoryStream) must be retrieved. This ends up being a bit messy, but I think its now working.
I finally finished the changes to convert to use the Registry for the last Organize settings as I outlined on Dec 24. Getting this working was difficult, but necessary, and I had to start over a few times as I was having trouble generalizing it.
But as I write this, I realize that multiple instances of ...
You are currently browsing Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog archives
for the year 2004.
Archives
