Thursday, February 20, 2003 - Thu, 20 Feb 2003

A whole bunch of sort-of-related-to Behold type things diverted my attention in the last few days.

Discovered DiagramStudio at www.gadwin.com which looks like a very powerful diagramming tool. It may be a possibility for when I finally add charting into Behold (Version 3!?), and even if not, it looks great for ideas.

I had never been to Rafal Prinke’s great page called Varieties of Genealogical Experiences before, even though I’ve followed his intelligent comments in the GEDCOM mailing list for many years and have shared some threads with him there. It leads to many places of a Genealogical nature, and of most interest to me is his mention of Event GEDCOM that was developed in 1994 for the program Roots IV (which is now long-gone). I had seen it many years ago, but had forgotten about it for some time now. No one uses that variety of GEDCOM anymore, but many still vouch for its merits. I tracked down a copy of the original definition and started reviewing it. It should not be too difficult to also support it in Behold, since my input of GEDCOM is quite generalized. Adding support for that Event GEDCOM really has no practical use now for input purposes, but to be able to output it again would definitely give Behold capabilities not available elsewhere. The way I’ve set up Behold, I should be able to support all flavors of GEDCOM, including GEDCOM 6.0 and the various XML versions. Why do it? Mainly so that the extra power will be there to record easily what you want and be able to change from format to format without any data loss. This is in the plans.

A Borland developer’s survey I filled out alerted me to a Programming Methodology known as: “Program Driven Development”. I had never heard about that before, but it is definitely what I do. Searched a few websites all about it and found some very interesting articles. Basically, each feature should be whittled down to be small enough to implement in 2 weeks or less. I set up to track my progress in exactly that way on my main Behold page. I am on the right track.

By the way, the people who put together the Borland survey had a sense of humor. After asking how many hours a week I spend programming, the next question was: “How many hours do you sleep per day? (choose one) under 6, 6-8, over 8, I never sleep”. Question 22 was “Would you stand on a street corner or at a major event holding a sign to spread the name of Borland? (choose one) Yes Maybe No”. And question 23 was: “How much do you love Borland? (choose one) 1000% 200% 100% 50% 0%”.