Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

There have not been a great number of problem reports with the beta of Behold so far, but it’s amazing how diverse these problems are. They cover all ends of the spectrum. Some are easy to find and others I don’t know what’s going on yet and require more debugging. Some are easy to fix, and others are very onerous.

I’ve fixed a few already and I’m in the process of fixing about 6 others at the same time.

One involves something that Delphi itself seems to have a problem with. I’ve got a question on StackOverflow for it and one of the resident experts there is helping me out.

Another is a problem with my ElXTree component, and I’ve reported the problem to the LMD people on their newsgroup, and they are helping me with that.

Then I’m debugging some bugs that crash Behold and fixing those. One is simply using the arrow up key to scroll up the window. I had thought I had debugged my Virtualization of the Richview window, but I guess I missed that.

Then there is one that links to the child of a person, but that child is actually the user’s parents. That one is also surprising to me. I checked the GEDCOM thoroughly and it appears to be correct. My linking of this sort has been working correctly for years, and I’m very perplexed by this one. I’ll be interested in seeing the reason.

Then there was someone reporting something in Windows 7 that I can’t reproduce in Vista. So I’ve been loading both Windows 7 and Windows XP into Virtual PC windows so I can reproduce the error and ensure that Behold runs okay under the two systems, without needing multiple computers. (I absolutely love Virtual PC!)

So lots going on here and I’m making good progress. Hopefully in a week I’ll get out a new beta with most of the problems fixed.

Fieke who has been testing the Behold beta was startled yesterday. In the background was running the antivirus program Avast. Avast Antivirus seemed to think there’s a virus in Behold. Avast kept warnings coming and then shut down Behold. Not only that, but the Behold install program was also being reported as to have a virus.

Something is Behold was causing Avast to think that Behold and its install program had a virus, when I knew they didn’t. And that’s why I code sign Behold - to make sure nothing happens to it before it reaches you. Fieke checked and told me that Behold’s signature was okay.

You couldn’t imagine my horror upon hearing that. Having that happen to your program is as bad as Tiger Wood’s little escapade the other day. The damage is irreparable.

I went to Avast’s online scanner and submitted Behold myself. Sure enough, it reported that Behold.exe was infected with Win32:Delf-MZG [Trj].

I immediately shot off an email to Avast. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a prompt response that said:

It was a false alarm of Avast virus database 091203-0. It was fixed in the latest virus database update, please update virus database. We deeply apologize for the problem.

Well that certainly made me feel better. Fieke let me know when Avast next updated its new virus database, the reporting of a virus was fixed. Today I went back to the Avast’s online scanner and sure enough, Behold is now reported as clean.

So after a heart numbing affair, I now find that a search on Google for: win32:delf-mzg [trj] gives a good number of “false positives” with Avast reporting every program from Skype to Spybot to a host of others. Avast had to fix this, because the mistake would ultimately have caused them even more anguish than they did me. Here’s one of the typical reports on this by Andrew Wee just posted today.

This is what programming’s all about. There’s always something new creeping up that you never expect. Avast, me hearties.

Thank you to those who’ve submitted bug reports. There are six completely different bugs that have been reported so far. I’m working on them and will hopefully have fixes for them all in the next few releases.

The beta releases will come out more often than the alpha’s did. I hope to get an update every 1 or 2 weeks until the beta is complete. I’ll announce the updates on this blog.

If you are running Behold and you see on the menu line “New Version Available”, please click on it and update. You’ll find the update quite quick and painless. That way you won’t find any bugs that have already been fixed.