Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Its been a while since my last post so I wanted to let you know I’m still here. I’ve been working quite hard to finish off Version 1.1.1 which will be much, much, much better than 1.1. Hopefully not more than a couple of weeks left (but I know I’ve said that before). I’ve removed piles of code and ...

I’ve been bothered with the worry that I may have taken Behold in the wrong direction. My original goals I believe were solid. Display the user’s information clearly and concisely in one report so that everything’s available and nicely cross referenced in the indexes. Behold was doing this task well and ...

Installing a database into Behold is a major endeavour that I am doing carefully. It is, in many ways, not unlike the work that has been going on at a house I have been passing by for the past couple of months. This is a beautiful home, about 100 years old, that supposedly was used for a movie set many years ...

This post is total plagiarism of an article just written today by Matt Sherman on the StackExchange Blog titled “Why are there so many programming languages?”  The article struck me as also being totally true when applied to genealogy software, so I am reproducing it here and just changing a few ...

One of my concerns about switching from in-memory data structures to an on-disk database has been with regards to speed. Memory is faster than disk. Writing to disk will slow things down. But it better not slow things down too much. For normal-sized genealogy files (say up to 10,000 people), everything should ...

I noticed a problem in the Behold Forum last night where a post was not always showing up. Last night I attempted to fix it with somewhat disastrous results. Unbeknownst to me, I crashed both the Forum and Blog last night at 11:45 p.m. and it took me a few hours today to bring them back up today. I still ...

Most of the new concepts and tools for programming didn’t exist when I graduated from University with a Masters of Computer Science in 1980. The programming languages I worked with were FORTRAN, APL, PL/I and even Assembler. I picked up Pascal on the job and that led me to Turbo Pascal for personal use and ...

… But I don’t know what it’s going to be like when I get there. My adventure towards editing in Version 2 of Behold is a bit like the New Horizon’s mission to Pluto. They set off 9 years ago and knew where they were going. They knew how they’d get there. They even knew what they were going to do when ...

There are several considerations as I structure the disk-based database for Behold. I want it to be capable of loading genealogy data from any source, I want it to be flexible, but most importantly I need it to handle the in-memory structures already in Behold. Let’s go through these considerations: Data ...

Yes, I do now have a 64-bit executable of Behold that works exactly the same as the 32-bit version. But I’m not going to release it yet. What I found out in my testing was that it was slower than the 32-bit version and used more memory. So for most people, there’s no real reason to make it available ...