David May 20th, 2008
The LDS Church has received great appreciation for its efforts from Hurricane Katrina. President Henry B. Eyring even mentioned a personal phone call from Pres George W. Bush to Gordon B. Hinckley at a recent multi-Stake Conference address, admiring the quick and effective efforts of local church members. But even the best organizations would be amiss if they didn’t take advantage of what they may learn from others.
With thousands of people affected by the Sichuan, China earthquake, Google China staff members rolled up their sleeves and joined other rescue organizations.
At the request of the government, we obtained new satellite images of Sichuan province (Earth KML) to help them better focus their recovery efforts. We developed and launched a “lost loved one” search based on our Custom Search Engine (CSE). To populate the CSE index, hundreds of Googlers worked around the clock looking through published tables, hospital records, news reports, and community sites. We tuned our Chinese news search, video search, image search, blog search, and oneboxes. We also partnered to build community sites, and launched both homepage promotions and a map-based information page. Google China has an extremely dedicated and passionate team and I am deeply honored to work alongside them.
Google has also set up a donation page so that you can donate directly towards recovery efforts. Similarly, donations can be made on the LDS Philanthropies donation page for any of the humanitarian projects around the world or using a donation slip at your local congregation.
David May 16th, 2008
For just a bit of fun on a Friday, take a look at this guy who created jet powered wings (from CNN). He needs the help of a plane to take him to a high enough altitude (rather than taking off from the ground) and he uses a parachute to land. Now that would certainly come in handy for a 72 hour kit! 
kbaker May 16th, 2008
There are many technologies and gadgets I like. But one of the most fascinating to me is Global Positioning. I’m still amazed by the fact that Global Position Systems (GPS) work, and work as well as they do. Maybe its my love of clocks and timepieces, maybe its the thought of receiving messages from a satellite orbiting the earth. Whatever it is, I love GPS.
But what is it good for? There are many, many uses for a GPS and I hope to be able to get into some of them in future posts. But the first thing I did when I bought my GPS was I used it to determine the latitude and longitude of some special places and locations. Using the GPS I recorded the lat/long of the grave sites of my ancestors and added the location data to the genealogical information I already had about them.
Now the lat/long coordinates given by a GPS are on average accurate to about 20 feet. On a good day I’ve gotten the accuracy down to around 8 feet. So armed with the lat/long from my notes and a few digital pictures of the area, any one of my children or grandchildren could easily find the grave site of my great-grandfather. This offers a great way to enable family and friends to find important personal landmarks.
And I don’t believe GPS is going away any time soon. Many industries use GPS as part of their daily operations. Even the new flight control systems in development today will use GPS information as their primary way of knowing where the planes are in the sky.
A GPS is not for everyone. It’s a fun gadget with few uses in your daily routine. But as GPS enabled phones and cameras become commonplace, you will have more opportunities to take advantage of this new type of information.
David May 15th, 2008
To date the FamilySearch Indexing program has registered over 140,000 volunteer indexers. These individuals view batches of scanned census and other historical records and transcribe the handwritten text that they see. These batches take an average of 30 minutes each, depending on the type of document and the difficulty in reading the text.
Between January 1 and May 6, 2008, these volunteers have indexed over 50 million names! During the entire previous year, 95 million names were indexed. These are amazing numbers and a testimony to the power of leveraging the strengths of your community. Keep up the good work! For anyone interested in participating, they continue to look for volunteers at http://www.familysearchindexing.org. The data and images collected through FamilySearch indexing are available on the Record Search Web site at http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch.
David May 14th, 2008
Ars Technica has documented the efforts of various organizations to remove confidential documents from Wikileaks.org, including both the LDS Church and the Church of Scientology. Apparently Wikileaks.org has posted a copy of the LDS Handbook of Instruction, which is not available to general church membership rather only to Bishops and Stake Presidents in the Church.
The Mormons clearly "get" the Internet in some sense (you can chat online with a missionary, for instance), but they appear determined to follow in the footsteps of groups like Bank Julius Baer that have managed to draw widespread attention to confidential documents without managing to have them removed from Wikileaks.
Wikipedia.org entries related to LDS Church doctrine or history are often the target of anti-Mormon commentary, but LDS members and the general public have been good about removing such inaccuracies. Hopefully there will be some options available for similar action with Wikileaks.
David May 13th, 2008
John Finlay, founder of the popular PhpGedview open source web genealogy application, has launched GedLynk, an open source Java based desktop utility to synchronize and merge genealogy data with New FamilySearch (NFS) as well as PhpGedview web sites. It is still in early beta, but it already looks promising. I saw a demonstration of this utility at the NFS API Conference in March 2007, while the GedLynk site has launched this past week (May 8).
Without using a NFS utility, a person has limited options for adding data to New FamilySearch. These include manually adding each individual record using the forms on the web site itself, searching for existing or duplicate data which represent the same individual, or uploading a GEDCOM file with this data included. By synchronizing data using an NFS utility, the selected record in your personal data file will be compared with the data available at NFS. New online information available can be downloaded and while missing online data can be uploaded to NFS. Utilities which can synchronize entire files of data will not be available for some time.
The following individuals and organizations are currently listed as Web Service Affiliates with New FamilySearch, suggesting that they are actively working on products or services which will interface with NFS: FamilyPursuit, Generation Maps, Incline Software (Ancestral Quest), Bungee Labs, Bruce Rogers (Kin2Me), Millennia (Legacy Family Tree), Progeny Software, RootsMagic, US FamilyTree, Ohana Software, World Vital Records / Family Link, One Great Family, nGenisis, LLC, RedBugz Software, Living Genealogy, R.C. Martin, Peter Ivie, US Family Tree, Universital, and Walter Sorenson.
I haven’t heard if any of these companies or individuals are also releasing beta versions of their software, so please post a reply to this post if you happen to know about any beta software that is available which supports the New FamilySearch.
David May 9th, 2008
From Jimmy Zimmerman, FamilySearch Developer Support, comes the relaunch of the FamilySearch DevNet site http://devnet.familysearch.org. This site will be used by developers who intend to use the FamilySearch API to create web sites and software. These APIs permit 3rd party tools to search, update, and insert records in the new FamilySearch database.
The content has been reorganized, which should help you find content faster.
FAQs are beginning to populate, so you can find answers to common questions on that tab.
The Events tab now has a page "All Recorded Presentations" which will link to all of the public, recorded presentations. Now you can access all recordings from one place without having to dig through past events.
The Downloads tab has an area for third-party software. Project owners will be given rights to manage their own page for their project. If you have a project that you would like to have posted here, please email devnet@familysearch.org.
We are putting an end to the life of the Basic Client. We will provide how-to articles for using tools like Poster. We may still post the source to the Basic Client on the site, but we will no longer be supporting it.
If you experience any problems with the new site, or find any broken links, please email devnet@familysearch.org.
I have been using PhpGedView for my family genealogy site, which should have new FamilySearch integration with the next major release of the software. I haven’t been using these APIs yet myself, but I am interested in doing so.
David May 7th, 2008
After looking into the story about the Catholic church’s concerns about LDS baptism a bit more, it sounds to me like the Catholic church doesn’t really understand the LDS doctrine of baptism and hasn’t taken the time to research or ask about it. From Catholic World News,
The Catholic Church objects to the Mormon practice of "rebaptism" for two reasons: first because baptism is permanent, and cannot be repeated; second because the "baptism" practiced by Mormons is invalid, since the faithful are not baptized "in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit."
The Catholic officials quoted here haven’t looked at the exact wording of the LDS baptismal ordinance from D&C 20:73
Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
OK… we have "Holy Ghost" here instead of "Holy Spirit"… but looking the actually wording of the Catholic baptismal prayer from the Catholic Encyclopedia we get…
I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
Hmmm… if we are concerned with actual wording, the Catholic news source doesn’t even know exact Catholic doctrine, much less LDS doctrine.
David May 5th, 2008
What may be a blow to LDS Church efforts to digitize and index historical records, the Vatican has sent a letter to diocese around the world to not share parish records with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. From the Deseret News (May 4),
… the Vatican had "grave reservations" about the LDS Church’s practice of posthumous baptisms by proxy, a practice in which the names of the deceased are baptized into the LDS faith so that they may be united in the afterlife with LDS families, if they so choose.
The LDS Church has not made a statement yet regarding this issue.
Church spokesman Mike Otterson said the church may have more to say on the subject later in the week and that LDS officials had not yet made contact with Vatican representatives about the issue.
After having several instances where Jewish individuals have escalated concerns regarding LDS baptism of Jewish holocaust victims (see Deseret News, Dec 19 2006), this could also impact the Church’s relations with other organized religions.
David May 1st, 2008
I have been impressed with how much Adobe has been utilizing the open source methodology as of the last few years. Just a year ago they released the Flex source code as open source. To encourage porting Flash content to mobile devices, Adobe has started Open Screen Project in partnership with media companies ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC.
The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by allowing the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.
Specifically, this work will include:
- Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
- Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
- Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free
Of course video content is not the only functionality that will benefit from this arrangement. FamilySearch Labs have several applications which utilize Flash. Won’t it be nice to use your mobile device to look up scanned census records or browse your family tree using a player designed specifically for your it?