Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

I’m running out of version numbers. I really am. A number like 0.98.9.90 is getting a bit ridiculous. The fact of the matter is I never expected my alpha development would have lasted so long. Just when I thought I was almost there, another bunch of changes I deemed necessary or outside delays would get me. The latest was my switching webhosts, which took a couple of weeks.

But last year, I pledged to fast-track Behold as much as I could. I wanted to get the beta out, and then Version 1.0 out. That was going along well until Embarcadero released Delphi 2009 with Unicode, and I just had to jump for that.

My conversion of Behold to Delphi 2009 is pretty well done, but that led to discovery of really major speed improvements which I am now (except for the aforementioned 2 week delay) in the midst of. But as of tomorrow, it is back to working on these and getting Behold’s beta out as soon as I can.

I know there are a few roadblocks ahead. The Richview optimization will not be easy and will require some ingenuity. But I’ll do what I can. Hopefully I can replicate all the functionality that the 0.98.9.ad-infinitum version has.

The new version just released is exactly the same as the old. It was still a Delphi 4 compiled version. It does not have any of the Delphi 2009 niceties in it yet.

People who have purchased Behold don’t need to upgrade. But if you have just downloaded Behold as a trial, your trial will expire tomorrow, and you’ll have to upgrade if you want to continue trying it.

2008 was a year of big changes for me. In April my mother passed away, and the toughest part of it was resettling my father without her and trying to get him going as independently as possible again.

At work in June one co-worker who worked 15 years with me retired, and in December, my Manager of 20 years retired. There is a good chance next year I may win the manager position and put my stamp on the Department until I retire in 8 years or so.

And then just yesterday (December 31st), our Division became one of the first to move into our spanking-new world-class head office in downtown Winnipeg. The building is still very much a construction zone, but it an exciting move for us all.

On the Behold front, there were also many changes. First, I’m happy to have completed the move of all my websites to a clustered hosting account at Netfirms.ca. It should be able to handle the increased visitation at the Behold website as well as my other sites as the word of Behold starts to spread once Version 1 is released. It should also allow me to restart my Behold newsletter that I had up to a couple of years ago been sending out.

Last year, I also upgraded my development program from Delphi 4 (about 10 years old) to Delphi 2009 which includes Unicode and many other aids to help me develop Behold faster and better. The optimization I have been working on the past few months will be nothing short of phenomenal, and will increase the speed of Behold by orders of magnitude.

But best of all, I really look forward to 2009. It will FINALLY be the year when I release the Beta of Behold, and before the year is over, the official Version 1.

It will be a great and exciting year for me. Happy New Year and all the best to each of you.

As I was getting everything working on my websites, I got an email from someone who had just requested a trial key. It was sent to him but it didn’t work.

I checked and I found that the new site was producing different trial keys than the old site. I couldn’t imagine how that could be. Maybe the date on the new server was different (as I use the date to help determine the key).

I quickly generated the correct key and sent it to him so that he could start using Behold. But I definitely didn’t want that to happen to anyone else, especially someone who purchases Behold, so this had to be fixed pronto.

I debugged it step by step and narrowed it down to a PHP bitwise shift-left and shift-right function. To my surprise the answer was that shift-left and shift-right give different answers depending on whether you are using a 32-bit Operating System or a 64-bit Operating System. I found some appropriate solutions on the web to get the same results on both by ensuring the operations get 32-bit results on both Operating Systems. I’ll have to remember to make the same changes to my code in Behold once Delphi comes out with its 64-bit compiler, probably in a year or so.

This problem was so unexpected, and so was the solution to it. What this means is that IXWebhosting’s shared server I was on was a Windows 32-bit Operating System. But Netfirms Clustered Service I am now on is a Unix 64-bit Operating System. That pleases me since it should result in much improved performance for you when you visit my websites.