Archive for March, 2008

RIA Dev Shed conference this Friday

David March 31st, 2008

SLCFUGThe Salt Lake ColdFusion Users Group (SLCFUG) is sponsoring a Rich Internet Applications (RIA) conference this Friday, April 4, 2008.  If there is still room, you can register here. 

You’ll learn about cutting edge Flex, AIR, and AJAX programming. You’ll be readying for the next phase of web development.

More than just theory, sessions are focused on practical application. Three simultaneously running tracks ensure that whether you’re looking for an introduction or hoping to expand existing skills there will be something for you. In addition, we’ve lengthened the time of each presentation slot to allow our speakers to go into greater depth.

I have been very impressed with the demos for Adobe’s RIA technologies. I was hoping to be able to go, but the timing does work for this year.  If you are curious who is already using these technologies, head over to FamilySearch Labs and check out a few of their prototypes.

Official statement on the future of Personal Ancestral File (PAF)

David March 31st, 2008

Today FamilySearch has released news regarding future support for PAF.  The decision to not expand PAF’s functionality to interface with the new FamilySearch doesn’t come as a surprise to me. The Church isn’t in the business of commercial software. Did you know that the Windows version of PAF was adopted from a previous version of Ancestral Quest? (See Information for Users of PAF) In addition, years ago the Church has opened up the PAF API to commercial developer to create add-on applications, such as PAF Insight.  The new FamilySearch will have public APIs so that these competing commercial products will have access as well as PAF add-on products so that users most comfortable with the existing PAF interface can continue to use it for years to come.

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Technology-assisted genealogy research may have an impact on US Presidential politics

David March 27th, 2008

Despite their ideological differences, genealogists have found that the leading US presidential candidates are tied more closely than previously thought. Barack Obama is a distant to cousin to the current President George W. Bush and the former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchhill. Senator John McCain is related to the current first lady, Laura Bush. Senator Hillary Clinton has ties to entertainers Celine Dion and Madonna. (See CNN, Family ties: Candidates’ ancestry makes for strange bedfellows)

The New England Historic Genealogical Society, founded in 1845, says it is the oldest such organization in the country. Members spent three years tracing the lineage of the candidates. … Most surprisingly, Obama — the man who could become America’s first African-American president — is linked by ancestry to Robert E. Lee, who commanded the armies of the Southern slave-holding states during the American civil war.

You don’t have to be a presidential candidate to be able to look up your ancestry easily. Digital Roots, a BYU Computer Science research foundation, has created Relationship Finder. This tool duplicates the years of research that the NEHGS did for the presidential candidates in only a matter of seconds. For its data it uses the Ancestral File, so if you don’t have family members who have contributed data to this previously, you won’t get many results. [Note: You’ll need the Ancestral File Number (AFN) from as many of your last three or four generations of ancestors as you have available as input for this search. You can look this up at FamilySearch.org.] Give it a try, you’ll be surprised at how many people you are related to!

Footnote more than just another site indexing scanned documents

David March 26th, 2008

FootnoteLindon, Utah based Footnote launched January 2007 and has grown to become a favorite resource for avid genealogists. What makes them different from other sites like Ancestry or WorldVitalRecords is it’s expanded resources beyond traditional records. For example,

Footnote has taken the initiative to digitize all 58,000 names inscribed into the Vietnam War Memorial. It has also correlated them with military personnel records from the National Archives and made this information searchable from within an interactive Flash application.

It is the extra steps that they have taken from public data which we already had access to, but correlating it and indexing it that makes this a unique resource.

Using open standards lets the community redesign your site ;-)

David March 25th, 2008

LibraryThing designA scary thought… letting anonymous users on the internet redesign the look of your web site. But the folks over at LibraryThing are doing that very thing. Well, almost. They are letting user submit proposed designs so that they can be reviewed by the internal development staff.

So far, some two dozen members have contributed CSS stylesheets and one, zanix, produced a highly original design, executed entirely in Photoshop. MarkBarnes, acting on a suggestion from Abby, produced a very attractive design, based on the design of Cork’d, “LibraryThing for wine.” All told, there have been some really interesting ideas, and fetching new color palates. I’m still not sure where to take the design, but it’s given me a lot to think about. (It’s certainly pointed out some structural problems with our mark-up too.)

I don’t know how many active users are over there, but they have collectively submitted over 25 million books to their collective virtual book shelves. This goes to show that when you have built the right kind of community for your site, you can get all kinds of feedback and contribution back to the community.

So what does this mean for you?  If you take the time to design your web site from the ground up using standards based HTML and CSS (even if you just have a blog site), it will pay off many times over when you need to make minor changes to your design.  All of the popular PHP open source projects have taken this to heart, making it easy to create themes associated with their products.  (For example, there are literally hundreds of WordPress themes available to download for free use or purchase.)

You’ve got a year supply of wheat, but is your computer backed up?

David March 25th, 2008

Provident Living LogoThose LDS Church members who have been following the counsel of their Church leaders may very likely have a large supply of wheat and other essentials for use in an emergency or lean times. The scripture, “…if ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.” (D&C 38:30) comes to mind as one that motivates people to actually do something as significant as a year supply of food for their families.

In just the last few weeks, there have been world trends that further validate the value in being prepared.
What’s Driving Up Grocery Prices? (NPR, March 11, 2008)

Buying wheat now takes a lot more ‘bread’ (Deseret News, March 15, 2008)

That said, what about including technology needs in your preparedness list? If you had a gas leak in your house and you had only moments to grab a few irreplaceable items what would you take? I have heard consistently from victims of the hurricane Katrina about all the family photos they lost and can’t replace. What if you knew that all of your important data (including digital family photos) was backed up securely in another location. Wouldn’t that give you a huge peace of mind?

Just last week, I was chatting with my sister. The hard drive on her PC crashed and she lost over two years worth of digital photos. Yeah, she didn’t lose her whole house in a fire or flood, but emotionally she lost a piece of her identity and the special memories she shared with her spouse and children. I’m not going to go into all of the reasons or methods for backing up your computer data, but here are a few straightforward options to consider.

  • Keep data organized on your hard drive and burn a CD or DVD of critical content regularly. Take an older copy of this disc to the house of a friend or family member for safekeeping. (Having copies of your confidential data floating around isn’t the most secure option.)
  • Purchase an external hard drive. There are a number of backup software utilities available that will automatically create a backup of all files in the event of a hardware failure. (This won’t help if you have a natural disaster)
  • MozyUse an internet based backup service such as Mozy (free version). The software you download from this service will automatically backup your critical files to their servers in a secure encrypted format. (This option seems to have few down sides.)

There isn’t a one size fits all solution for including data recovery in your emergency preparedness plan, but there isn’t a standard solution for your food storage needs either. Let me know in the comments if you have found any other data backup strategies that have worked for you.

Don’t be afraid. If you chat with the missionaries online you’re still in control.

David March 22nd, 2008

LDS logoIt is amazing what good a language like Java can do in the hands of the right people. I am acquainted with the Java developers who created the mormon.org site, but even the best software is a hollow shell without a great design and content.

When I lived in Oregon a few years ago, I had friends who when they found out that I was a Mormon, treated me differently… as if I had contracted some bizarre disease that was contagious if they got too close to me. These are the kind of people that wouldn’t answer the door if the missionaries rang their doorbell. But if they are curious enough about what makes us tick, they will want to find out more. That is where the information found at mormon.org is so powerful. From the safety of their own internet connection, they can hear the pure testimony of others like them who have found some glorious truths in the Mormon faith. Did you know that they can even chat online with missionaries? It isn’t available 24 hours a day since it is staffed with missionaries from the Provo, Utah Missionary Training Center, but they can chat from 7am to 10:30pm Mountain Standard Time.

FamilySearch offers online training for consultants and leaders

David March 22nd, 2008

FamilySearch logoAs a family history consultant, this morning I attended a training class offered by the Salt Lake Family History Center on the new FamilySearch (NFS) site. Rather than offering a complete site training, this was more of an introduction to the site features and the training resources that are available.

To access the available training as a family history consultant or priesthood leader, each person must register at the appropriate site. General church membership will have to wait until NFS is available in their temple district. The general public will have to wait until NFS 1.0 is released (delivery date hasn’t been announced). Note that to register, you will need your membership number, confirmation date, and unit number.

You will be notified within a few days once your registration has been validated, and you will have access to role-specific training at https://lds.netdimensions.com. Within 90 days of the NFS being made available in your area, you will be notified via email to register and begin additional training at http://new.familysearch.org.

LDS Church archives to become the Google Books of genealogical records

David March 21st, 2008

FamilySearch logoLast night I attended the Utah Java Users Group (UJUG) meeting and heard a presentation by senior developers and leadership from the LDS Church FamilySearch Digital Pipeline teams. I believe that it is certainly worth mentioning.

To give you a little background…

If you haven’t had a chance to see how the Google Books indexing project is coming along, take a look. They are taking scanners into university libraries across the US and scanning and indexing the full text. Not all of this is searchable online because of copyright issues but nevertheless huge number of books are now available because the copyright is out of date or because the publisher has granted Google rights to make them available.

The LDS Church has been scanning historical documents since the 1930s onto microfilm and microfiche and stored them at the Granite Mountain Vault for safekeeping. Now they are digitizing these scanned records as well as digitizing other records as they become available.

FamilySearch Indexing

With the newest scanning technology, they anticipate being able to completely scan all documents in the vault in 8 to 10 years. With terabytes of digitized images of censuses, birth / marriage / death certificates, and other records, the next step is to index this data. The technology for automatic indexing of handwritten documents is still not ready for production use but when you have an army of 130,000+ volunteers, you can utilize the strengths of technology to present the necessary information quickly and use the strengths of individuals to identify handwritten text. Doing so, they have been able to index up to 500,000 names per day. This includes double entry (two separate extractors) and arbitration if the data doesn’t match perfectly.

The Granite Mountain Vault isn’t the only digital data that is being processed by this program. Several US states have donated their records to the Family History Department to scan and preserve their data. The LDS Church is under negotiations with other public entities to extend the records that will be available. If you want to participate in this program, go to http://familysearchindexing.org. Don’t worry, they won’t run out of work for you to do any time soon!

FamilySearch Record Search

Although this isn’t open for public beta yet (summer 2008) all of the records that these volunteers are indexing are already available at http://search.labs.familysearch.org. They have developed Rich Internet Applications (RIA) utilizing a RESTful Web Services framework running on Java and open source technologies. They are building a highly scalable, parallel architecture to handle 100 requests per second (currently handling 80/sec). The presenter, Rob Edwards, said that in early negotiations with a 3rd party development company who supports eBay Japan (their architecture handles 3 requests per second) walked away from negotiations because they didn’t believe that their technology would handle so many more transactions.

They didn’t say this, but in a competitive work environment I’m sure that many companies are trying to recruit developers from these teams because they have been able to solve problems top companies are currently facing. Did I say that they are hiring?

Devoured a good book lately?

David March 20th, 2008

Have you “devoured” a good book lately? What about performing an autopsy on one? Yeah, dissecting one to learn all you can about it. I have some technical reference books that I should probably be reading more than  I currently do, but this takes it to another level. Take a look at what artist Brian Dettmer has done.  (Disclaimer: this is not for the faint of heart librarians among us)

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