Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

I’ve always had a penchant for probability. I’ve loved figuring out odds and chances of things. That’s why I took my undergraduate degree in Statistics before I went on into Computer Science.

Today I had the utmost pleasure in going to a lecture at the University of Manitoba by Jeffrey Rosenthal, a visiting professor of probability from Toronto. He is the author of the best seller: “Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities” which I purchased and had signed after the lecture and am looking forward to read.

Jeffrey was extremely interesting and entertaining. He mentioned along the way the Monty Hall problem, you know: three doors, you pick one, they open another. Do you want to switch? I asked Jeffrey afterwards if he had heard about the Monty Fall, Monty Crawl and Monty Small adaptations. Well, to my surprise, he was the one who wrote that.

I had two questions I was going to ask him. The first was about coincidences. When we went to New York, there was a fellow I went to school with as a kid, who now lived in Toronto, who happened to be at the same Broadway Show as us in the same row! What are the chances?

The second question was on improbable events happening in sequence. We had a 15 inch rainfall one day in the Summer about 10 years ago. They said it was a 1 in 400 year event. We had the same 1 in 400 year rainfall 2 weeks later. Then one week later, slightly less but a 1 in 100 year rainfall. What are the chances?

So as Jeffrey was finishing up his talk, he ended with two last points. One about coincidences, and one about clumping of random events. He answered both my questions with his last two points before I could ask them. What are the chances of that?

I made quick progress on reimplementing my Find function, until I ran into a snag. Somehow the Find wasn’t correctly ignoring Behold’s hidden text.

Behold will hide all the tags you’re not interested in. The Show/Hide button will easily make them appear or disappear as you desire. When they are shown, they are shown in a light grey color so that you’ll know you normally want to hide these.

When you search and the hidden tags are shown, you want to search through them. But when they aren’t shown, you don’t want to search in them.

I had to go into the bowels of TRichView to find this and add a few kludges. It took almost all day today. I have one tiny bug left relating to highlighting that found item (it does it correctly 99.9% of the time) and this should be done.

But the test case I built up was somewhat amusing. I needed some text that I knew would alternate between hidden and displayed. Then I thought of the GEDCOM tag: “SEX” which is used to display whether the person is Male or Female. Normally that is obvious, and by default it is turned off so that it doesn’t add an extra line that you usually don’t want to every person in the Everything Report.

The simplest set of commands I could generate to obtain the error I was encountering was to open my test file with hidden items being displayed. Search for “sex” three times. Click the icon to hide the hidden tags. Search for “sex” three more times. Change the search direction to “up” and search once more for “sex”. Voila - Behold crashed.

The bottom line is that I must have searched for “sex” two thousand times today. And most of the time I found it! Sometimes I bombed out.

When discussing the humor of this with my family, my younger daughter said to me that maybe I should call it “gender” instead of “sex”. After all (as most comedians would say), the answer to give to “Sex?” is not male or female, but “yes”.

The official GEDCOM term for the tag is SEX. But there’s no reason why I couldn’t set the default text that is displayed for that tag to “Gender” instead. I believe the two terms are interchangable. Searching for “gender” doesn’t sound as dirty.

I hope this post doesn’t blacklist my site for all the “sex” talk in it. :-)

It doesn’t look like any of these 5 will be easy. But, the Forward/Back keys now appear to be done and (mostly?) working. I say mostly, because I’m sure there are a few bugs still left in some strange cases I have not yet tested. Hopefully, those will come out in the Beta and I’ll squash them all.

I had built a lot of functionality into those forward/back keys over the years of the alpha. But they relied on checkpoints that were in the RichView document. Of course, since I’ve virtualized the document, those checkpoints no longer exist and I’ve had to redo all the coding relating to it.

I spent almost a whole week trying to debug why the menu items weren’t being transferred correctly between the back and forward menus, and that was the toughest task of this process. Other than that, it was just fixing each of 100 details up, one by one.

So now three major things still to reimplement to be able to release the Beta. That means I’ll have to do one a week and have a week to do the pre-release stuff if I want to get it out in November. That’s an ambitious task, but let’s see how it goes.