In the Works - Fri, 3 Jun 2011

A bit of a status update. Three things came along that I have been handling prior to the finishing up and release of version 1.0 of Behold.

First, my code signing certificate for Behold came up to its three year term and I had to renew. If only it were that simple. Paying the money was easy enough. Then the messages come. Got to send in a driver’s license, a phone bill (to prove my phone number) and another utility bill (for further confirmation as to who I am). Then they have to have someone call me and I have to give them the verification number over the phone. Hmmm. Am I a criminal applying for a job as a police officer? Okay. I tell them to call between 6 p.m. and 12 midnight in my time zone. They call me, at 9 in the morning. I’m not home. They get my daughter. Sent them another email. Told them they called at the wrong time. They try again and again call in the morning when I’m not home. After several support tickets going back and forth, I try to be perfectly clear about the time. They call me the next day … at 6 in the morning. I’m asleep. But I answer the phone and get the deed done, waking up my entire family in the process. I go back to sleep at 6:10 for a half an hour more sleep, but my family couldn’t. At least that’s over with.

Second on the agenda is that my webhost Netfirms said they’d be migrating my site. Netfirms was acquired by a bigger fish: Endurance International. The servers are moving from Toronto to EI’s servers that are probably in Burlington Massachusetts I believe. Looks like my sites will be leaving Canada again - sigh. At any rate, the migration started a couple of days ago. I’ve opted for the Automated migration. I’ll let them try to do it and then I’ll fix anything they don’t. I’ll just let them do the gruntwork for now and move my sites and databases and change any settings and constructs in the web pages and javascript that they know are necessary. I’m curious to see how well they’ll do. I have some nasty stuff for them to wade through. The site won’t switch over until everything works, and since I’ve got a complete working copy of all my websites and databases on my home computer, I’m not at all worried about how it will turn out in the end - just how long it takes. And I don’t want to release version 1.0 until this is complete, just to be safe.

Meanwhile, MyHosting was the first webhost I started with 12 years ago and I left 4 years ago for IXWebhosting prior to coming to Netfirms a year later. The ironic thing is I left MyHosting because they took away the “unlimited” plan I had and put on bandwidth and space limitations that were too restrictive for me. Just a few weeks ago, I found out they are now offering their unlimited plans again. They blew it. I asked if they could grandfather my plan, and they said no. They lost me. Too bad.

The third thing that came up was while I was writing up the final documentation for Behold. I discovered that editing the text in the Organize pages had several problems. Unicode didn’t paste into it. Cut and Copy shortcuts didn’t work in it. Highlighting the current line works strangely, and I wanted the enter key and the down (and up) arrows to work to finish editing and take you to the next line and put you in edit mode. Doing so would make it fast and simple to update all the tags and report options. This will make creating translation files for another language a breeze, and it’s something I want to start getting users to do. I’m about 3/4 the way through this now. I may decide to release one last beta with that change prior to Version 1.0 to allow users to start helping create these files. I’d do this myself, if I could speak languages other than English, Pascal, APL, FORTRAN, etc. I don’t think too many of you want your genealogy file with tags written in APL.

So, three slight bumps in the road. None-the-less, it’s all coming along and I can see a 1.0 light at the end of the tunnel.