Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

That’s better. Now making better progress. It took only a week to implement the scrolling, paging and resizing of the new virtual view into the Everything Report. What this means is that even for extremely large files, the you will be able to resize the report very quickly, without the delay that happened in prior versions due to the required reformatting of the entire report.

So I’m really relieved that I’ve got through this. Looking back in my blog, I see I started this back in mid January, so it’s taken over six months to get it working right. As always I never expected it to take this long, but I was advancing into unmarked territory. Several times along the way I wondered if I should continue, but the speed improvement in loading time that was even apparent in small test files implored me of the necessity to go on and complete this.

Next step is to reimplement the level 0 structure based GEDCOM and optimize the lookups with hash functions that I did late last year. But on January 12th, I had to step back because Behold itself had stopped working due to the changes.

This won’t be a problem. I have saved snapshots of all my major changes. So I’ll be able to add this easily again, while making sure that Behold continues working all along. I’ve found that when I’ve had to program something a 2nd time, I always end up with better code (because of the 2nd look) in half the time it originally took. Noone wants to program something a second time, but it’s never that bad when you have to.

Hmm. If I could program something the 2nd time all the time, then I should be able to get everything done in half the time, shouldn’t I?

Disk Eastman just posted a great article in his blog: It’s 2014! Do You Know Where Your Data Is?

In the article, Dick talks about the ways to convert data from one program to another (primarily through GEDCOM), and then talks about what genealogy programs will in business and supported years from now.

My take on this is that most of the current lot of desktop genealogy programs are pretty well the same in using forms-based input and mostly inadequate reports. So maybe you need a program that:

1. Can read everything your old program exported to GEDCOM.
2. Can record everything you wanted to record
3. Can export everything you recorded to GEDCOM for your next program or for someone else’s program.

If the program could also display your data in a useable way, that would be a bonus.

Having the security that your data will not be lost is truly the most important thing. So do this test right now: In your current program, export your data to GEDCOM. Now start a new database and import that GEDCOM. Now export it again. Compare the two GEDCOMs. If they are the same, then at least your program can read everything from its own GEDCOM. That will not guarantee that it is writing all your data to the GEDCOM file, but at least it will tell you if that author of the program is putting some thought into his GEDCOM input and output.

This gets exponentially more difficult for programs when you start talking about Citations and Sources. See what Mark Tucker at Think Genealogy says about this as he compares how Family Tree Maker 2009, Legacy 7 and RootsMagic 4 export their source data.

If you go to an online database to be your primary record, make absolutely sure that it will allow you to dump all your data out again. If it doesn’t have a GEDCOM export, you could be in trouble. An export function promised in the future means you should wait until the future before you consider them. And export your data to GEDCOM and save it on your computer at least once a month. You never know when the service might just close up shop and your data goes bye-bye.

Of course, if you really want your data preserved, don’t forget to manage your paper records well. All those boxes of material you painstakingly collected for many years have been summarized into names and dates in a computer file. The names and dates can be recreated from your records if absolutely necessary. But the names and dates will never replace your records should they get lost.

Hmmm. Forget everything else. Get a digital camera/scanner and go to it.

Finally, last night I successfully got the virtual rendering of the RichView window working. What that means is I now have a “viewport” into what looks like a complete Everything Report, but is really generated only as is needed.

I’ve been working on this for over a month. It took a number of trials of various sorts to get it working. The most difficult of these was maintaining a buffer of a couple of pages before and after the viewport, so that page ups and page downs would work seamlessly.

There’s still a fair bit of work left to convert the other parts of the program that use this virtual view. I’ve listed those in my Future Plans page, and there are 13 tasks left to get to Beta. I’ll really be savoring each and every one of those tasks as I get them done.

I want to be rigorous and do them right, but let’s see if I can get them all done before August is over. Nothing like a challenge!