Friday, October 10, 2003 - Fri, 10 Oct 2003

Three interesting references. (1) Joel Spolsky’s article: “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)“. (2) Eastman’s Genealogy Newsletter mentioned a new book soon to be published titled “Genealogy and Indexing” edited by Kathleen Spaltro. Of specific interest to me is “Noeline Bridge’s chapter on names will quickly become the definitive reference for trying to resolve questions on variants, surname changes, and foreign designations.” So I ordered the book at Amazon.com, to arrive in January. (3) An article in the current Oct/Nov/Dec 2003 issue of Genealogical Computing has a very interesting biography of Bruce Busbee. It is interesting for me as well, to see what makes other genealogy programmers tick. I have a lot of respect for Bruce and his contributions to the genealogical community. He now provides a “wish list” message Board for his new program RootsMagic, something every program should have.