Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Remember the words inscribed in large friendly letters on the cover of the book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

DON’T PANIC

I returned 9 days ago from a two week vacation with my wife and some good friends on a cruise to the southern Caribbean. While away, we had a great time, but every day we heard more and more news of what was happening with the coronavirus back home and worldwide.

On the ship, extra precautions were being taken. Double the amount of cleaning was being done, and purell sanitizer was offered to (and taken by) everyone when entering and leaving all public areas. The sanitizer had been a standard procedure on cruise ships for many years. I joked that this cruise would be one where I gained 20 pounds: 10 from food and 10 from purell. Our cruise completed normally and we had a terrific time. There was no indication that anyone at all had got sick on our cruise.

We flew home from Fort Lauderdale to Toronto to Winnipeg. Surprisingly to us, the airports were full of people as were our flights. None of the airport employees asked us anything related to the coronavirus and gave no indication that there was even a problem. I don’t think we saw 2 dozen people with masks on out of the thousands we saw.

After a cab ride home at midnight, our daughters filled us in on what was happening everywhere. Since we were coming from an international location, my wife and I began our at-least 2 week period of self-isolation to ensure that we are not the ones to pass the virus onto everyone else. We both feel completely fine but that does not matter. Better safe than sorry.

Failure Number 1 – My Phone

On the second day of cruise, I just happened to have my smartphone in the pocket of my bathing suit as I stepped into the ship’s pool. I realized after less than two seconds and immediately jumped out. I turned on the phone and it was water stained but worked. I shook it out as best as I could and left it to dry.

I thought I had got off lucky. I was able to use my phone for the rest of the day. All the data and photos were there. It still took pictures. The screen was water stained but that wasn’t so bad. But then that night, when I plugged it in to recharge, it wouldn’t. The battery had kicked the bucket. Once the battery completely ran out, the phone would work only when plugged in.

Don’t panic!

I had been planning to use my phone to take all my vacation pictures. Obviously that wouldn’t be possible now. I went down to the ship’s photo gallery. They had some cameras for sale but I was so lucky that they had one last one left of the inexpensive variety. I bought the display model of a Nikon Coolpix W100 for $140 plus $45 for a 64 GB SD card. I took over 1000 photos of our vacation over the remainder of our cruise, including some terrific underwater photos since the camera is waterproof.

Before the cruise was over, my phone decided to get into a mode where it wouldn’t start up until I did a data backup to either an SD card (which the phone didn’t support) or a USB drive which I didn’t have with me.

Somehow, with some fiddling, the phone then decided it needed to download an updated operating system so I wrongly let it do that. Bad move! It was obvious that action failed as then the phone would no longer get past the logo screen. 

At home, Saturday at 11 pm, I ordered a new phone for $340 from Amazon. It arrived at my house on Monday afternoon and I’m back in action. The only thing on my old phone were about a month of pictures including the first 3 days of our vacation. If it’s not too expensive, I might try to see if a data recovery company can retrieve the pictures for me. If not, oh well.

Failure Number 2 – My Desktop Computer

I had left my computer running while I was gone. I was hoping for it to do a de novo assembly of my genome from my long read WGS (Whole Genome Sequencing) test.  I had tried this a few months ago, running on Ubuntu under Windows. When I first tried, it had run for 4 days but when I realized it was going to take several days longer I canned it. Knowing I was going to be away for 14 days was the perfect opportunity to let it run. I started it up the day before I left and it was still running fine the next morning when I headed to the airport.

When I got back, I was faced with the blue screen of death. Obviously something happened. “Boot Device Not Found”.

Don’t panic!

I went into the BIOS and it sees my D drive with all my data, but not my C drive. My C drive is a 256 GB SSD (Solid State Drive) which includes the Windows Operating System as well as all my software. My data was all on my D drive (big sigh of relief!) but I also have an up-to-date backup on my network drive from my use of Windows File History running constantly in the background. So I wasn’t worried at all about my data. Programs can be reinstalled. Data without backups are lost forever.

I spent the rest of Saturday seeing if I can get that C drive recognized. No luck. My conclusion is that my SSD simply failed which can happen. I had a great computer but it was about 8 years old. The SSD drive was a separate purchase that I installed when I bought it to speed up startup and all operations and programs. My computer was as dead as a doorknob,

Saturday night, along with the phone I purchased at Amazon, I also purchased a new desktop at Amazon. Might as well get a slight upgrade while I’m at it.  From my current HP Envy 700-209, a 4-core 4th generation i7 with 12 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD and 2 TB hard drive, I decided on a refurbished/renewed HP Z420 Xeon Workstation with 32 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD and a 2 TB hard drive for $990. It comes with 64-bit Windows 10 installed on the SSD drive. I’ve always had excellent luck with refurbished computers. The supplying company makes doubly sure that they are working well before you get them and the price savings are significant.

On Tuesday, the computer was shipped from Austin Texas to Nashville Tennessee. It went through Canada customs Thursday morning arriving here in Winnipeg at 9 a.m. and at my house just before noon.

First step, hook it up and a problem: My monitors have different cables than its video card needs. I ordered the less expensive video card with it, an NVIDEA Quadro K600. It did not come with the cables. I’m not a gamer so I don’t need a high-powered card, I made sure it could handle two monitors but I didn’t think about the cables. As it turns out, comparing my old NVIDEA GeForce GTX 645 card, I see my old card is a better card. So first step, switch my old card into my new computer.

Now start it up, update the video driver, and get all the windows updates. (The latter took about a half a dozen checks for updates and 3 hours of time)

Next turn it off and remove my 2 TB drive from my old computer to an empty slot in my new computer and connect it up. That will give me a D drive and an E drive, each with 2 TB which should last me for a while.

That was good enough for Thursday. Friday and Saturday, I spent configuring Windows the way I like it and updating all my software, including:

1. Set myself up as the user with my Microsoft account.
2. Change my user files to point to where they are on my old D drive.
3. Set my new E drive to be my OneDrive files and my workplace for analysis of my huge (100 GB plus) genome data files.
4. Reinstall the Microsoft Office suite from my Office 365 subscription.
5. Set my system short dates and long dates the way I like them:
   2020-03-22 and Sun Mar 22, 2020
   
6. Set up my mail with Outlook. Connect it to my previous .pst file (15 GB) containing all my important sent and received emails back to 2002.
7. Reinstall and set up MailWasher Pro to pre-scan my mail for spam.
8. Reinstall Diskeeper. If you don’t use this program, I highly recommend it. It defragments your drives in the background, speeds up your computer and reduces the chance of crashes. Here’s my stats for the past two days:
   
9. Reindex all my files and email messages with Windows indexer:
   
10. Change my screen and sleep settings to “never” turn off.
11. Get my printer and scanner working and reinstall scanner software.
12. Reinstall Snagit, the screen capture program I use.
13. Reinstall UltraEdit, the text editor I use.
14. Reinstall BeyondCompare, the file comparison utility I use. I also use it for FTPing any changes I make to my websites to my webhost Netfirms.
15. Reinstall TopStyle 5, the program I use for editing my websites. (Sadly no longer supported, but it still works fine for me)
16. Reinstall IIS (Internet Information Server) and PHP/MySQL on my computer so that I can test my website changes locally.
17. Reinstall Chrome and Firefox so that I can test my sites in other browsers.
18. Delete all games that came with Windows.
19. File Explorer: Change settings to always show file extensions. For 20 years, Windows has had this default wrong.
20. Set up Your Phone, so I can easily transfer info to my desktop.
21. Set up File History to continuously back up my files in the background, so if this ever happens again, I’ll still be able to recover.
    
    (and occasionally it saves me when I need to get a previous copy of a file)
22. Reinstall Family Tree Builder so I can continue working on my local copy of my MyHeritage family tree. I hope Behold will one day replace FTB as the program I use once I add editing and if MyHeritage allows me to connect to their database. I also have a host of other genealogy software programs that I’ve purchased so that I can evaluate how they work. I’ll reinstall them when I have a need for them again. These include: RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker, Legacy, PAF and many others.
23. My final goal for the rest of today and tomorrow is to reinstall my Delphi development environment so that I can get back to work on Behold. This includes installation of three 3rd party packages and is not the easiest procedure in the world. Also Dr. Explain for creating my help files and Inno Setup for creating installation programs. I’ll also have to make sure my Code Signing certificate was not on my C drive. If so, I’ll have to reinstall it.
24. Any other programs I had purchased, I’ll install as I find I need them, e.g. Xenu which I use as a link checker, or PDF-XChange Editor which I use for editing or creating PDF files, or Power Director for editing videos. I’ll reinstall the Windows Susbsystem for Linux and Ubuntu when I get back to analyzing my genome.
25. One program I’m going to stop using and not reinstall is Windows Photo Gallery. Windows stopped supporting it a few years ago, but it was the most fantastic program for identifying and tagging faces in photos.  I know the replacement, Microsoft Photos, does not have the face identification, but hopefully it will be good enough for all else that I need. Maybe I’ll have to eventually add that functionality to Behold if I can get my myriad of other things to do with it done first.

Every computer needs a good enema from time to time. You don’t like it to be forced on you, but like cleaning up your files or your entire office or your whole residence, you’ll be better off for it.

How would you cope if both your phone and computer failed at the same time?

Just don’t panic!

—
Followup: After a few weeks of fiddling, I was able to get my old phone started again while plugged in, and was able to transfer my one month of photos from it to my computer via USB. So in the end, nothing important was lost.

#Delphi25 #Delphi25th – I came across an email I sent to a friend of mine on February 6, 1997 (at 1:17 AM). I’ll just give it here without commentary, but it should amuse and bring back recollections of people who were early PC users.
 

—

You should find this message to be a little different. I am sending it using Microsoft Mail & News through my Concentric Network connection, rather than than using my Blue Wave mail reader through my Muddy Waters connection. This gets around my problem of not being able to attach files, as you had tried for me. In a future E-mails, I can attach pictures for you. I presume you can read GIFs, or would you prefer JPG or TIF?

I will still be keeping my MWCS account until the end of 1997, but I am switching over more and more to my Concentric account. I am still not entirely happy with Windows-based Newsreaders yet, and find Blue Wave much more convenient for reading newsgroups. Hopefully, by the end of the year I will have this sorted out.

I bit the bullet, and switched over to Windows 95 at home. I first had to upgrade my machine. I bought 16 MB more memory (to give me 24 MB) for $99 at Supervalue (of all places!) and bought a 2 GB hard drive for $360 (also at Supervalue!) less a $30 US mail-in rebate on the Hard Drive and a $30 sweatshirt thrown in due to a Supervalue coupon when over $200 is spent. My 260 MB drive that I bought 3 1/2 years ago already had Stacker on it to make it 600 MB, and I only had 80 MB free. I wanted to get rid of Stacker before going to Windows 95.

It only took me 3 1/2 hours to install the RAM and the Hard Drive myself at home! It wasn’t without problems, but the operation was a success. I had hooked up my old and new Drives as master and slave and everything worked. The next night, I took another 3 1/2 hours to transfer everything from my old drive to my new one, removing the old drive, and getting the system working from the new drive - again not without problems, but completed that evening. I am very proud of myself! The next evening, it took about an hour to get Windows 95 installed, and to customize it to the way I liked.

This hardware upgrade should be good for another couple of years. I only have the power supply, base, keyboard, mouse, and monitor as original parts. All the rest has been since upgraded.

Windows 95 - Well I actually like 90% of it better than Windows 3.1, and am only finicky about 10% of it. I know, I know, buy a Mac you will say. Well I hope you are prepared to buy a new operating system every six months like Jobs says you’ll have to. I still agree Macs are a good system, but there is much more software available for PCs, Macs are 40% more expensive, and they still use that horrible character font that they used in the early 80’s - yecch!

In the meantime, I have kept myself very, very, very, very, very, very,
very, very busy. I have been working hard on many different fronts, after work playing hard with the kids until their bedtimes (usually closer to 10 p.m. than to 8), most often working on the Computer from 10 to 11 to 12 to (yikes) 1 or 2 sometimes - Got my web pages up (http://www.concentric.net/~Ikessler); have responded to about 50 e-mail messages and inquiries about it; designed a tender proposal for the photographic work for our Cemetery Photography Project
(http://www.concentric.net/~Ikessler/cemphoto.shtml); and I’ve started learning how to use Borland Delphi to develop my BEHOLD program (http://www.concentric.net/Ikessler/behold.shtml)

Whew! I’m getting tired just thinking about all this!

Take care.  Louis

The Delphi programming language is having its #Delphi25 #Delphi25th birthday on Friday Feb 14, 2020. I’ve been using Delphi for about 23 years since 1997 when Delphi 2 was released.

Delphi is an amazing language. I use it now for Behold and Double Match Triangulator, and I’ve made use of it for a number of personal projects along the way as well.

It’s appropriate on this day that I write about Delphi and how I use it and what I like about it.

Pre-Delphi

I should provide a bit of background to give context to my adoption of Delphi as my programming language of choice.

As I entered high school (grade 10), my super-smart friend and neighbor Orest who lived two doors over and was two grades ahead of me recommended I follow his lead and get into programming at school. The high schools in Winnipeg at that time (1971) had access to a Control Data Corporation mainframe, and provided access to it from each school via a cardreader and a printer. You would feed your computer cards into the cardreader. In the room was one (maybe two) keypunches, likely KP-26 or maybe KP-29.

The computer language Orest used at the time and the school was teaching was FORTRAN, a Waterloo University version called FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and WATFIV. What an amazing thing. You type up a sequence of instructions on computer cards, feed them through the card reader, and a few minutes later your results are printed on classic fanfold computer output.

For three years of high school, my best friend Carl and I spent a lot of time in that small computer room together. I remember a few of the programs I wrote.

1. There was the hockey simulation following the rules of a hockey game we invented using cards from a Uno Card Game. We simulated a full World Hockey Association season of the 12 teams each playing 78 games giving each team a different strategy. 11 of my friends would each have a team and look for the daily results and standings.
2. For a special school event, my friend Carl and I wrote a dating program. We got everyone in school (about 300) and all the teachers (about 30) to fill out a multiple choice survey of about 10 questions about themselves, and the same questions for what they wanted in a date. During our school event, people would come to the computer room, and Carl and I would run them against the database and give them their top 5 dates with hilarious results.
3. I played touch football with a number of friends once or twice a week during the summer. I recorded all the stats on the back of a computer card in between plays, and I then would punch the results onto computer cards and wrote a program that would give total all the passing stats, receiving stats, interceptions and fumble recoveries by player, giving the leaders and record holders in each category. Everyone loved seeing the stats and played harder and better because of it.
4. I wrote a program to play chess. Carl wrote one as well. We had a championship match – chess program vs chess program that got us in our city’s newspaper.

At University, I took statistics but also included many computer science courses. While there, I continued work on my chess program in my spare time and the University of Manitoba sponsored me as a contestant in the North American Computer Chess Championships in Seattle, Washington in 1977 and in Washington, D.C. in 1978. Games were played with modems, and connected dumb terminals to the mainframes back at our Universities. Read all about my computer chess exploits here: http://www.lkessler.com/brutefor.shtml

After getting my degree in statistics, I went for my Masters in Computer Science. Now we finally no longer needed computer cards, but had terminals we could enter our data on. There was a Script language for developing text documents, and I used it to build my family tree, with hierarchical numbering, table of contents and an index of names. It printed out to several hundred pages on fanfold paper. I still have that somewhere.

I started working full time at Manitoba Hydro as a programmer/analysis rewriting  and making enhancements to programs for Tower Analysis (building electric transmission towers) and Tower Spotting (optimizing the placing of the towers). These were huge FORTRAN programs containing tens of thousands of lines of what we called spaghetti code.

Then I was part of a 3 year project to develop MOSES (Model for Screening Expansion Scenarios) which we wrote in the language PL/I. That was followed by another 3 year project from 1986 to 1988 where our team wrote HERMES (Hydro Electric Reservoir Management Evaluation System) which we also said stood for Having Empty Reservoirs Makes Engineers Sad. I learned that one of the most important parts of any program is coming up with a good name for it. I also learned how to three-ball juggle.

The HERMES program was written in Pascal. That was a new language for me but I learned it quite thoroughly over the course of the project. I believe I purchased my first personal computer, a 286 PC 12 Mhz for home sometime around 1990. When I did, FORTRAN was still available but very expensive. So instead I purchased Borland’s Turbo Pascal.  I started programming what would one day become my genealogy program Behold.

My Start with Delphi and Evolution Thereof

I like to joke that I’m not an early adopter and that’s why I didn’t buy into Delphi when it came out in 1995, but did buy Delphi 2 in 1997. Delphi was basically still the Pascal language. But what Delphi added over Turbo Pascal was primarily two things:  the addition of Object- Oriented Programming (OOP), and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Those were enough that I had to go “back to school” so to speak, and I loaded up on getting my hands on any Delphi Books that I could. They’re still on my shelf now.

I purchased Delphi 2 on May 14, 1997 for $188.04 plus $15 shipping & handling.

I didn’t upgrade every year. It was expensive. But I only upgraded when I felt there was some important improvement or new features I needed.

I upgraded to Delphi 4 in June 1998 for $249.95 plus $15 s/h. At this time, Borland had changed its name to Inprise. By 2001, they abandoned that name and went back to Borland.

I was able to use Delphi 4 for quite some time. Finally there was a feature I absolutely needed and that was Unicode which came in Delphi 2009.  I was allowed to upgrade my version of Delphi 4 and I did that and upgraded to Delphi 2009 in Sept 2008 for $374.

Embarcadero purchased Delphi from Borland in 2008. In 2011, I upgraded to Delphi XE2 for $399 which included a free upgrade to Delphi XE3.

I upgraded to Delphi XE7 in 2015 for $592. And I upgraded to Delphi 10.1 in 2016 for $824.40.

The upgrades were starting to get expensive so in 2017 I started subscribing to Delphi maintenance for $337 per year.

Third Party Packages

Delphi includes a lot of what you want, but not everything. I needed a few packages from third parties who built components for Delphi. For Behold I used two:

TRichView by Sergei Tkachenko. TRichView is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) full featured document editor that forms the main viewing (soon to be editing/viewing) window of my program Behold that I call “The Everything Report”. Behold is listed among the many Applications that have been made with TRichView.

I purchased TRichView in 2000 when it was still version 1.3.  Now it’s 7.2. Back then the cost was $35, and it was a lifetime license that Sergey grandfathered in for his early customers. He has continued to develop the program and has not charged me another nickel for any upgrades. I did, however, pay $264 to Sergey in 2004 for some custom code he developed that I needed. I liked that lifetime license policy so much that it inspired me to do so as well for my Behold and Double Match Triangulator customers who all get free upgrades for life when they purchase a license. Sergey no longer offers lifetime licenses. His current price for TRichview is $330, but he also offers other products that work with it. That’s at 20 years of Delphi development for Sergey.

LMD Innovative’s ElPack is the other package I use for Behold. This is a package of over 200 components that extend the functionality of the VCL controls that Delphi has. The main purpose I purchased this was for their ElXTree which allows custom creation of TreeViews and grids:

I first purchased ElPack in 2000 from the company EldoS (Eugene Mayevski) who originally developed it.  The cost was $68. About 6 months after I purchased it, I noticed a free product available called Virtual Treeview written by Mike Lischke, but I was already using and happy with ElPack so I continued to use it. I considered switching to Virtual Treeview several years later, but my use of ElPack was already so deeply embedded into Behold, that it wasn’t worth the effort.

I did have to pay for upgrades to ElPack, so I upgraded only when there was a reason to. Usually it was because I got a new version of Delphi and the old version wouldn’t install. Also, my third party packages were also a reason I didn’t upgrade Delphi so often, because I couldn’t really upgrade until both TRichView and ElPack had versions that worked with the new version of Delphi, which could take up to a year after the Delphi version release.

In 2003, LMD Innovative acquired ElPack from EldoS and continued developing it. LMD’s current price for ElPack is $190. They have a partnership with TRichView and give me 20% off for being a TRichView customer. I tend to upgrade ElPack every two years or so.

TMS Software’s FlexCel Studio was a package I purchased for Double Match Triangulator (DMT) to provide native Excel report and file generation, without requiring use of Excel automation and not even requiring Excel on your computer. I use it to produce the Excel files that DMT puts its results into. The capabilities of this component actually amaze me. It can do anything you can think of doing in Excel and more.

I first purchased FlexCel in August 2017 for $157.

Additional Tools I Used to Work With Delphi

Developing programs with Delphi requires additional tools from time to time. Here’s some of the tools that were useful in my Delphi Development:

In 2009, I purchased for $129 a program called EurekaLog, which integrated with Delphi and worked to find and help locate memory leaks in my program Behold. The program helped me determine how my code was causing leaks, so after a few years and all leaks eradicated and better programming to avoid future leaks, I really didn’t have a great need to keep using the program.

In 2010 when I was tuning Behold for efficiency, I purchased a line by line profiler from Automated QA called AQTime that worked by itself or with Delphi. This was a very expensive program at $599, but I was able able to speed up Behold 100 times by finding inefficient algorithms and sections of code that I could improve, so it was worth the price. The program has since been acquired by SmartBear and still sells for $599. I no longer have a version of this program that works with the latest version of Delphi. Delphi does provide a lite version of AQTime for free, but that does not include its fantastic line-by-line profiler. I’m no longer in need of super-optimizing my low-level code because that rarely changes. When I need to ensure a section of code is not too slow, I now put timers around the section and that often tells me what I need to know.

Dr. Explain is the program I chose for writing the help files for my programs. I first purchased it in 2007 for $182, upgraded in 2014 for $100. The current price of an advanced license is $390.

And my installation program of choice for Behold and DMT is the free Inno Setup Compiler from jrsoftware. I purchase Comodo Code Signing certificates for about $70 a year.

Personal Uses of Delphi

Other than the two programs Behold and DMT that I am developing and selling licenses for, I also have used Delphi over the years to build some programs for my own use. These include:

• A database search program I build for my local Heritage Centre so they could easily query their Microsoft Access databsse which had listings and details of over 60,000 items. Originally written in Turbo Pascal and later converted to Delphi. (1996)
• A program to build some of my link web pages for me such as my Computer Chess Links page. (1997)
• A program to screen stocks for me to find stocks that I was interested in purchasing. (1997)
• A program to run through all possible picks and determine what selections my competitors picked in our local newspaper’s hockey, football and stock market contests (1997). (Aside:  I have won more than $20,000 in such contests using this type of analysis to help me gain an advantage.)
• A page counter for early versions of my websites. (2001)
• A program to help win at the puzzle called Destructo, where you’re trying to break through a wall. (2001)
• A program that produces the RSS feeds for this blog on this website (2004).
• A program to analyze the log files from my websites, especially to find pages that link into my sites.(2005)
• A program to help play sudoku.  (2005)
• A program to download stock market data and do technical analysis for me. (2008)
• A program to analyze 100 GB raw data files from whole genome DNA tests. (2019)

One thing I never have done is resurrected my chess program. For a while I considered it, but I knew it would be a lot of work and I didn’t want to take my time away from my genealogy software. In the past couple of years, deep learning and Alpha Zero has made all other programs irrelevant.

What’s Next with Delphi

I am very pleased that Embarcadero has continued to support and improve Delphi and that my Third party packages continue to roll. Hopefully that will continue for the foreseeable future.

The stability I’ve had over the past 24 years being able to use Delphi has been fantastic. The development environment is great. I love how fast it compiles, how fast the code runs, and how easy it is to debug.

Here’s 24 Years of Delphi and 25 Years of Excellence and here’s Going Forward.

On my speaker topics page, I like saying that “Louis is fluent in five languages: English, Delphi/Pascal, HTML, GEDCOM and DNA.”

Well now I better post this page and get to bed, because I have to be up in 9 hours for the Happy Birthday Delphi 25 celebrations