Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Eastman Kodak Co., the world's largest photography company, and Sony Corp., the world's second-largest maker of consumer electronics, again topped the J.D. Power and Associates customer satisfaction survey, while Canon Inc. cameras slid in almost all categories.

The lives of most African children are snuffed out before they can even begin to grow. Their futures grow dim with each passing day as Africa’s gardens slip away. Why can’t these precious seeds grow and prosper? Aren’t they just as important as a flower garden or a vegetable garden?

General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan was at a barber shop for a haircut. The barber asked him when he would hold elections. Musharraf was evasive and said, "Later, not right now, the country is not ripe for them."

Almost a whole year had gone by since both Priscilla Black and Monique Bateleur had passed within the gates as first-year students although, in that short space of time, they had had several adventures that most people would never encounter throughout their entire life. After all, not every one had the perplexing experience of encountering extra-terrestrial creatures from somewhere far off in deep space beyond Canis Minor, The Dog Star.

Three hungry crocodiles were lying in the sun. One said, "I wish I could eat a young tender child."

'Buster has found your target and is waiting. You go tomorrow around midnight. Four hours maximum to get the goodies. And don't forget, I'll be right there with you all the way.'

In Stalin's Moscow, a man shouted in public, "The whole world is suffering because of one man!"

Getting a job was as difficult as securing the old one. It was another experience entirely after working as Sales Executive in a bookselling firm and wanting to become an editor for a publishing firm. Actually Claude had a flair for editorials, so he had to experiment first as freelance editor while working as salesman. It was actually difficult to determine whether book editing could be taught (perhaps a B.A honors in editing would have gone a long way) or a matter of talent and experience could help, but Claude had this weird interest and inordinate desire to be called writer and editor

Friday morning we all slept late, exhausted after our long day at Disneyland. I thought that as tired as we were at our youthful age, then Uncle Charles must be practically comatose today! Although I had to use the bathroom, I lay in the bed until I could not stand it a moment longer, afraid that my movements would waken the children, but finally I had no choice, and I quickly tiptoed into the bathroom and closed the door.

In a concentration camp in Siberia during Stalin's reign of terror, a Russian and a Jew were sentenced to death. The commissar told them, "Each of you can have one last wish before you die."

The intensification of mass recruiting for terrorist groups has emerged dramatically recently, and a number of intellectuasl seem very interested in joining those groups for different reasons.Amoung these are engeneers,medical doctors,etc… Let’s look at some concrete cases like the recent UK terror case.An Indian doctor was detained in Australia for questioning in connection with a suspected Al Qaeda plot to detonate car bombs in London and Scotland as he tried to leave the country.

BlackEagle Girls The first grey streaks of dawn were staining the east as the Black Eagle settled outside a ground-floor bedroom window of Monique's new home and the five girls drifted from the old tree house and slipped silently within. Gently Belinda and Narenda guided a nodding Surban to her bed and, after getting her into her night attire, settled her under the covers. In a matter of moments she was breathing deeply, her eyes shut fast, the bag that contained her secret treasure, still clutched firmly to her chest.

I dreamt that I was in the middle of the ocean in a rowboat that was tossing and turning on a rough sea. The wind howled, lightning split the sky, the rain fell in buckets and the tiny boat spun around and around until all of a sudden, just as the waves began to swell higher and higher, the rowboat turned into one of those flat saucers that I had seen towed slowly behind ski-boats with children riding on them.

I have been folding my legs and my hands have been resting on my cheeks, vexed. I thought this rough road could be smooth the moment I tasted love, but I was wrong. I had missed an important point, that the end of one predicament is the beginning of another. I wish my life ended just there, where I smiled. I have no job. I have no money. I want to die now, before the twilight. I don’t know why, but I imagine the world of the departed is better.

In the beginning when there was no time, our land was in total ruin and desolated for full disobedience and condemnation. For the line between the living and the spirit was thing and transparent, but soon rivalry emerged and the contest was bent on destroying man- the most visible, the most articulate.

It happened during the World War at a small village in Dogon, Mali, about fifty kilometers to Timbuktu. Those years, Timbuktu witnessed a boom in salt trade, it was the major export via the river and the desert merchants coming from Niamey and Djibouti have had to reconsider their route, because export was faster using the river than Sahara desert. People came far and wide to trade in salt and millet.

With e-communication, many things become easier. But while it may be easier in terms of e-communication, it may be more dangerous is as well. We have so many cases to mention, such as the negative side effects of International Communication Technology (ICT) and e-communication in particularly, such as theft of personal information.

A wanderer arrived at a river that was too deep to wade through. Since he could not swim, he built a raft and crossed the river on it. He thought the raft was useful, he might need it again some day.

Received recently from Rikkity

Received recently from Rikkity

Management wisdom was not found in some human resources manual or executive self-help book it was all right there in Mr. Gefter's Torah class. And it's still there for all the people to look. These are the things I learned from my teachers in Hebrew school

Alianza, Inc.amp;nbsp;today introduced Alianza for Microsoft Teams, a new and powerful solution that gives service providers a robust cloud PBX voice solution for Microsoft Teams.

4medicaamp;reg;, a leader in healthcare data quality and matching technology, today announced that the 4medica Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) platform is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace.

amp;nbsp;eZee Technosys (eZee), a Yanolja Cloud member company, is proud to be named as the 2023 Expedia Group Elite Connectivity Partner. Expedia's Connectivity Partner Program recognizes top providers for maintaining high-quality connections and helping lodging partners grow their business on the Expedia Group marketplace. This recognition is a testament to eZee's dedication to providing outstanding service and solutions to its customers.

JupiterOne, the leading cyber asset visibility and management company, today announced the release of its second annual State of Cyber Assets Report (SCAR). The report analyzed more than 291amp;nbsp;million assets, findings, and policies to establish the current state of enterprise cloud assets, including cloud and physical environments of devices, networks, apps, data,amp;nbsp;and users.amp;nbsp;

CloudWyze, a homegrown North Carolina internet and managed service provider and GREAT Grant recipient, is expanding service inNash County, N.C. in their continued efforts to close the digital divide.

Today, SAP SE and Google Cloud announced an extensive expansion of their partnership, introducing a comprehensive open data offering designed to simplify data landscapes and unleash the power of business data. The offering enables customers to build an end-to-end data cloud that brings data from across the enterprise landscape using the SAPamp;reg; Datasphere solution together with Google's data cloud, so businesses can view their entire data estates in real time and maximize value from their Google Cloud and SAP software investments.

Gotomyerp, a leading cloud hosting provider for QuickBooks, SAP, Sage Cloud applications, and other third-party ERP (enterprise resource planning) business applications across the United States, Canada, and Mexico is celebrating its 16th year of offering secure and reliable enterprise cloud hosting solutions for businesses with a special offer for new clientele.

Today, SAP SE announced the next step in its long-standing partnership with Microsoft, using the latest in enterprise-ready generative AI innovation to help solve customers' most fundamental business challenges. The companies will collaborate on integrating SAPamp;reg;SuccessFactorsamp;reg; solutions with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot in Viva Learning, as well as Microsoft's AzureOpenAI Service to access powerful language models that analyze and generate natural language. The integrations will enable new experiences designed to improve how organizations attract, retain and skill their people.

I'm back from the wedding in Vancouver. A wedding is like a vacation for a genealogist. Time to catch up on family happenings in a joyous and friendly atmosphere.

On my computer, there's only 250 e-mails to respond to and a week's worth of RSS feeds to read. I've also got 2.5 GB of trip pictures and videos on my camera that I've got to clean up, organize and send to people.

I've had several small bugs reported in the new version of Behold. I should squash them in the next few days.

Noone reported this one, but on a machine with 3 GB of RAM, I found that the memory dials don't work. The Windows routines I used were old ones that used 32 bit integers and couldn't handle values over 2 GB. I think I've fixed that now, but I won't know for sure until I go back to that machine to test it.

There are "bookmarks" in Behold at every horizontal line, corresponding to every pair of people. I set it up that way when ID numbers had more relevance several versions ago.

But now if you click on a hyperlink to someone, you will go to the first person of the pair, and not necessarily to the person you intended to. Stephen let me know about this in the Behold Discussion Forum.

He's right and this needs reworking. I'm going to set it up so that both people as well as the info for the two of them each get their own bookmark so that links can go to the correct place.

While checking this, I also found a couple of bugs with the forward and backward history which use these bookmarks.

This will take a bit of debugging and some data restructure, but it's worth taking the time now and cleaning up that code.

Fixing the bookmarks was slightly more complicated than I expected.

I had been using the generated ID, eg. FAM-43 as the bookmark. But I saw that was wrong, since those IDs are specific to the run, and reorganizing may lose them or they might point to incorrect places. So I changed this to use the ID from the GEDCOM instead. This way, the bookmarks can be remembered between runs, as long as the GEDCOMs don't change.

But I had to work through each type of bookmark (individual, family, source, place, etc.) one by one to get them working, so its taking time. I'm almost done though, and should be able to wrap this up and move on in a day or two.

Finally! There are now bookmarks for the spouse and the family information. The bookmarks now internally use the GEDCOM ID number rather than the Behold generated number. The hyperlinks and Forward/Backward functions seem to work as they should. The forward/backward locations will deactivate if they cease to exist after the file is reorganized. And the right-mouse clicks select the person at the cursor correctly. That seems to be done and I've fixed a few related bugs along the way. There may be one or two bugs in the new code that I missed, but I'll rigorously test for them during the upcoming beta.

I really didn't want that to take three weeks, but if I work hard, I still may be able to get the beta out by my self-imposed deadline of the end of October, if I'm lucky.

Next: to clean up the error and warning messages in the log file.

Next on my To Do list was to redo the error messages. The idea was that I was going to list each message every time it happened along with the GEDCOM line it happened at.

But what I have already done was nicely organize the messages so that (in most cases) each message is listed only once along with a list of all the places that problem exists. Thinking about this, it actually makes more sense to show a message once with 200 references, rather than to repeat the same message 200 times for each reference.

Since Behold makes an attempt to read and interpret every variation of GEDCOM there is, many people won't care about the problems with the GEDCOMs, and are more interested in the data.

That said, Behold is very good at checking the data. So although the Log file is out of the way, it is valuable. So I will at least try to a better indication of when problems worth fixing have been found.

Sam saw my post from yesterday. He asked: "Why are the reports separate?" He suggested that instead of using the Log File, I display the warning messages in the Everything Report with the related data. For printing, Behold can have a toolbar item to toggle them on and off. He said this would eliminate the need to look at the error log and then search for the error in the main report.

That's a great idea! Basically, I can get rid of the log file completely by including that info in the Everything Report. I never really did like having to create the log file in the first place. But Sam pointed out the obvious that I might never have seen. Thank you, Sam.

Time for a bit of an interlude. There are a few things I found that don't work exactly right. Any hidden items need the sources they contain to be hidden as well. Hidden items must be numbered differently. References to notes are not being displayed. Concatenated lines used for titles of sources and citations are not being processed correctly.

I could fix each of these individually by adding patches to my code. For the hidden items, that code is already in a dozen places and already has gone through several versions of improvements. That all happened while I was still building my final data structure. Doing the patching would take time and would have to be done case by case checking each one along the way. Rather than doing that, it's probably worth my time right now to rework two important parts of Behold.

The first is to rework my input routine so that the Concatenated lines are pre-concatenated. Then I won't have to check for them everywhere. This would involve pre-reading the next line, and that's a little tougher than it sounds because of the way I've "globalized" that routine. It should only take a day or two.

The second and more important task is to get my five different types of GEDCOM objects that I'm handling combined into just two, and have both of them use a similar data structure, thus merging the separate functions into single ones that will work in all cases. This will "formalize" my implementation of what I call Behold's "Extended GEDCOM" data structure. There are two structures involved: Records and Links. Each can have subordinate data. Records can contain Links. Links always point to Records and can contain other Links. When a Link contains subordinate data, it becomes a citation. Now that may all sound confusing to you, and you need not worry about it, but the exact structure has been eluding me up to last night. It took a bike ride, a 2 a.m. awakening, and a shower for me to finally figure it out.

The nice thing about doing this now is that the beta coming up will be perfect to ensure this improved implementation is all bug free. Nothing on the outside will change because of it. The Everything Report will look the same except some bugs will be fixed. The code will be simplified and generalized, hopefully becoming somewhat faster because of improved data structures. But future changes will be much easier, and Behold will be better prepared for the reading in of data directly from other programs, and later for GEDCOM output and editing.

If all goes well, this all could be done within a week or two. Then back to the show.

The retooling the two parts of Behold was tricky, but its going well.

Moving the CONC tag to the input stage led to a few other simplifications. My large test file of 33,000 people that I use for timings takes about 35 seconds. This improvement actually cut a half a second off that.

But changing the storage of each record's data lines from a linked list into a single long string had me worried. You can't get much faster than a linked list, but I already needed citations in a string and didn't want to continue to process data lines in two separate ways. I was relieved when it only added about a second of time on, or only about 3%. But it did reduce the RAM requirement by about 30MB down to 650MB for that file, or about 5%.

For most programmers, the recommendation is to always use more memory if you can save time. But Behold is a bit different in this regard. For very large GEDCOM files, it is often the memory that is Behold's limitation, so anything I can reduce from that is worth it.

Over the weekend, hopefully I'll finish this as I merge the display algorithms together and eliminate many inconsistencies and bugs during the process.

I surprised myself. After a few more fixes in attempting to merge the display algorithms, I realized that my Friday arguments weren't beneficial enough to go through that right now. So I left the input improvements and backed out of my data structure changes. Now back towards getting done what's needed to get to beta.

On the Internet, the competition for family networking and build-your-trees online sites is getting crazy. New sites are popping up every day. Almost all are free and "secure" and have the goal of linking everyone in the world into one big tree.

So how do you pick between: AGES-online, Amiglia, AprilTree, Distributed Family Tree Project, FamiliaOnline, Famillion, FamilyInHistory, FamilyLink, Family Pursuit, FamilyRelatives, FamilyTrackers, Family Tree Drillet, FamilyTree (for Facebook), Family Tree Guide, Findmypast, Genealogia, Genebase, Genes Reunited, Geni, GNTP, JotSpot, LostCousins, My Great Big Family, MyTrees Online, OneFamilyTree, One Great Family, Online Family Tree, PedigreeSoft, SharedTree, TreeX, TribalPages, WeRelate and Zooof? Then there's the 3 more I just found out about and added today: Famiva, Genoom and Kincafe to my Online Genealogy Programs section of my Genealogy Software Links page. Have I missed any?

If there's money to be made in this, then someone will step in and start to buy a few out and the others will fold. Maybe the general public and younger audiences like social networking. But I'm not sure if true family genealogists really want what they're offering. Go back to my March 25, 2007 post for my previous thoughts on this.

Dick Eastman yesterday wrote an interesting article titled "PAF on a stick". You have to be a Plus subscriber to see the whole article, but basically Dick was talking about using a Jump/USB/Pen drive (it has many names) to carry, not only your genealogy data, but also your genealogy program around with you.

The problem with putting a program on a those portable drives is that since Windows 98, Microsoft has encouraged programmers to change from using INI files to store program settings to using the Windows Registry. They wanted to allow different users to login to the same machine and each would have their own settings. So almost all programs, Behold included, have adopted the use of the Registry as Microsoft has wanted.

But the latest craze is to use these pen drives to take your software and data with you. This allows you to run your program with your data on a library computer, a friend's computer, a school computer or anywhere else, without the need to install the program or use or modify that computer's Registry (which sometimes is even locked out from you). The new tech term is "portable application".

Behold would be a great application for this. First it is simple and has just one .EXE file, one help file, and does not need its own DLL (system) files. Wouldn't it be great to take Behold and your data with you and use it anywhere? You'll be able to use it to display your data, wherever you are. When version 2.0 comes, you'll be able to edit your data too, wherever you are!

All it would require is being able to read/write it's Registry info from/to a special file instead of the Registry. I can get Behold to detect if the file is there to use that file, and if not, to use the Registry. Then I'll add a menu/toolbar item in Behold to export Behold to a pen drive (i.e. as a portable application).

All of this would not be that difficult for me to do. I might be able to squeeze it in before for the beta version. I think that would be the cat's meow.

For years I've only put the date as the title of each of my blog entries. A bit boring, wouldn't you say? The date doesn't do much to help figure out what the post is about. So from now on I've decided to put something to better identify each Blog post.

Here's a site I never saw before. Put up by Intel, it's called "Cool Software" at: http://coolsw.intel.com. If you search there for "genealogy", there are two entries, one for Geni, and one for MyHeritage.

The last thing to do before I issue the next release is to eliminate the log file and move the messages that were reported in the log file into the File Information section of the Everything Report.

In doing so, I am revisiting all the error and warning messages that Behold produced. I'm rewriting them and making their text customizable (so different languages can be supported) and making them selectable (so they can be turned off if you don't want them).

I see that I can classify them into two types: Possible GEDCOM problems and possible data errors.

GEDCOM standards have changed over time, and every program outputs its data into GEDCOM in slightly different forms, often not conforming to the latest GEDCOM standard. I've made Behold to be very forgiving so that it reads everything possible. But when Behold reads files that may be GEDCOM but seem to have something wrong with them, Behold will report these to let you know. Maybe the file was truncated or maybe the character set was wrong. But Behold will still read as much data as possible from the file and try to continue processing. Often you can just ignore these GEDCOM errors knowing that Behold will read everything it can.

But you will want to look at the problems reported as possible data errors. These will tell you where you might need to fix your data. For example, there might be duplicate IDs, multiple husbands, missing links or undefined sources. To fix these, you'll need to go into your genealogy program that created the GEDCOM and update your data. When version 2 of Behold is out, you'll be able to fix your data right in Behold.

The messages up to now were are real hodge-podge. I added them as I developed. They are inconsistent in form and style. So I am now turning each into one of the two types: GEDCOM problems and data problems, improving their default text and getting them to work in a consistent way. There are over 50 of these messages, and I'm going through them one by one. This should take a couple of days and then the new release will be out.

I had a customized 2 GB USB pen made for me. It arrived today, complete with the "image" I developed to put on it.

Since Behold will very soon become a portable app, this is a cute way of promoting that ability, and I've now added that pic to Behold's home page beside the Portable Application item.

My daughter pointed out that it would have been better if I left the word "drive" off, because "Tree" rhymes nicely with "USB".

Maybe the next thing I'll make up is a pregnancy shirt embossed with: "Behold, I am expanding my family tree".

So first I was told that Behold was not detecting the new version when you "Check Online for New Version".

What had happened was I went from version 0.98.9d to 0.98.9.5. I changed from the letter suffix to the point number for Vista compatibility.

Version 0.98.9d detects the new version okay, but 0.98.9c, b, or a do not. Those three previous versions checked to see that the running program's version is LESS than the online version. But that's a problem because "." is greater than "a" or "b" or "c" in a computer string comparison. I changed the check in the 0.98.9d version that it be UNEQUAL rather than LESS than. So it's not a problem if you previously had upgraded to 0.98.9d.

The bottom line here is that if you still have the 0.98.9a, b or c versions, you will not be able to use the "Check Online for New Version" to upgrade. Instead, you'll have to go to the Behold download page, click on the "Click Here to Download" and say "Run". That will run the new install file and put the newest 0.98.9.5 version on your machine. You won't have to re-register.

The second problem was that Behold stopped working in Windows 98. I didn't realize that I still had a user using Windows 98, but I do. It ended up being a memory call that I purposely changed so that more than 2 GB could be reported. Unfortunately that call causes an error in Windows 98.

So I found a way to make the correct call depending on the Operating System. Google searches do wonders. It found the method to do this in a forum, and it didn't matter that the forum was in German.

So if you are still running in Windows 98, let me know, and I'll give you a link to the fix you need.

It took about 20 hours of my time to go through 6 years of my correspondence with my 6 discovered relatives on my Focsaner side from Romania, and custom build a GEDCOM file using Behold as my guiding tool.

This was a great dry run of what entering data in Behold will be like, except that I couldn't enter the data directly into the Everything Report, but typed it into a GEDCOM instead. The painful part was manually entering the ID numbers and the parent/child spouse/family GEDCOM links, but Behold's problem list helped me easily fix my incorrect entries.

I am now certain that data entry in Behold will be amazing. I entered data on 117 people and I was diligent in included 173 sources for that data. (The way I decided to organize my sources is the story for a future blog post.) I estimate this would have taken me only about 5 hours if Behold version 2.0 was available.

I'll let you see the result at: www.lkessler.com/focsaner.htm. Our group and our researcher in Romania will all be using this page as our reference point for the information we have, and I'll update it as we gather more info.

I also found a half-dozen little things not working in the html output (e.g. some links, sorting, etc) that I will be able to fix, and then I'll work on the display of pictures, using that page as the test case.

So I'm killing two birds with one stone: furthering development of Behold while also making some genealogical progress on one of my family lines. This couldn't be more exciting!

I may be a good programmer and good at designing standard user interfaces. But I'm definitely NOT a designer of nice looking websites. Many people have commented, not so positively, on my selection of colors and style for both my personal site at www.lkessler.com and my Behold pages.

Through a close connection I have, the owner of Elite Designs prepared a teaser for me of what Behold's site could and should look like. That was a no-brainer, and I had to take the plunge. We are close to having the final design and have a few wrinkles left to work out.

So take a look at www.beholdgenealogy.com for the new look. I'd love to hear your comments and suggestions about it.

It will take a few weeks to complete everything, since I'm switching the blog over to Wordpress, the forum over to Simple Machines, and I'm moving the whole website from Myhosting to IXwebhosting.

Regarding Myhosting, I'm very disappointed with them. I joined them 8 years ago, and signed up with them because of an unlimited bandwidth plan to allow for future growth with no worries. Those sorts of plans became rarer, and 4 years ago they eliminated theirs, but did honor my plan ... up to last month. The new limits are so restrictive that if I only get 5 times the traffic I now have, I'll exceed my allowance. I put up with some of their other limitations, but other webhosts now offer more than they do. I have had an account with IXWebhosting for a couple of years, and I'm quite confident they'll be what I need for the forseeable future. But, it's never pleasant to switch.

Google Groups might be a viable alternative to using a Forum software on my site for Behold Genealogy user discussions. There are several good reasons I see:

1. Gives you all the features of Google Groups.
2. If you already use Google Groups for other newsgroups, it makes it very convenient for you.
3. Allows you to get messages via e-mail and post via e-mail.
4. Has an RSS feed if you want it.
5. Will be indexed and searchable by Google, so others can find out about Behold.
6. Very little maintenance required by me.

I got the idea from Firebug, a Firefox addin that uses it quite successfully. See at: http://groups.google.com/group/firebug

So I'd like your opinion. Do you think I should use this for Behold's User Forum, or should I stick to my own installed Forum software on my Behold website?

So if you want, feel free to go to the Google Group I quickly created at: http://groups.google.com/group/behold-genealogy and let me know what you think.