Saturday, December 3, 2005 - Sat, 3 Dec 2005

I decided to add the selection of text size and character set to the View menu similar to how Internet Explorer has its Text Size and Encoding items. If you look at those items, they have an arrow that leads to the choices that you can select from. The current selection is indicated with a black dot.

I came upon a problem where I could not get Delphi to display the black dot, but would display a checkmark instead. Every bit of info I had says that this should work and the black dot should display. It felt like deja vu because I’m sure I’ve encountered this before. I looked through my old Behold Blog entries but didn’t post anything about this. On Google searches, I found a few postings about others encountering this, but those who offered solutions obviously didn’t understand the problem. And this was never posted as a known bug in Delphi 4. I suspect that when I upgrade to the new version of Delphi, this problem will vanish. For now, the checkmark should be good enough. It is annoying though, to implement something and not be able to get it just right.

On another topic, the Dec 5th issue of Time Magazine had a technology page about online photo services and made me aware of riya.com. They plan to be a photo service with a difference. They let you associate faces with people in a way that their software can then determine which people are in other pictures you upload and Riya can then auto-tag them. Then you can associate all the people in your address book to pictures, and by building up a network of people (e.g. your relatives who are sharing pictures), you’ll be able to browse by who is in the picture and by other ways. See Riya’s Online Tour for more info on this.

From this, I realized the potential usefulness of face-recognition for genealogy software. If you can train software to recognize a person in a photo, and you put pictures of all your known relatives at various ages in for training, then not only should it be able to identify your relatives in any new pictures you add, but it might be able to help you identify which part of your family a set of unknown people come from by telling you who they most closely look like. If there are 2 relatives and 3 of their unrelated friends in an old picture, you might be able to get a 95% match between a few relatives on one side of your family to the 2, but only get a few 85% matches of random relatives to the other 3. Wow!

So I did a bit of browsing to see what’s available in face-recognition software and if there are any tools I might be able to add in the future to Behold. The tools are not that good yet. We’ll have to see how Riya works out when they go live. But I will add face-recognition to my Future Plans list, and I can revisit it then.