It’s been a busy week! Last Friday was the company Christmas Party, Saturday the PDXGMC Chirstmas concert, Sunday night we went out on my dad’s boat to see the Christmas ships, Tuesday we made dinner for my dad & stepmom, Wednesday we saw the Lord of the Rings, and this afternoon we had our Christmas celebration with my my mom, grandma, bro and family. Tomorrow we pack and Monday we fly to Mexico to celebrate Christmas with Monica’s family.

Surprisingly, I’ve made really good progress on the gedcom conversion program. There are two things that I miscalculated. First, the gedcom format is even more complex than I realized, and second I’m learning Delphi much faster than I thought I would. I’ve already duplicated the output of the FAW program for Individual records (but mine has -correctly- recorded sources!) I still have a long way to go, but it’s going much much quicker than I thought it would.

I also managed to get the photos of the Christmas ships up here tonight. If I have time tomorrow, I have a special photo gallery to finish and upload.

Tonight I pruned some unrelated individuals from my genealogy database and refreshed the database. In the process, I noticed that the photo galleries were very slow. My ISP had just upgraded server and it appears that there is a problem with the new version of PHP. If you give the getimagesize function an URL instead of a local file reference it chokes. I had to rewrite some parts of the gallery script, but I’m not very happy with the work around. I have a little work to do now in order to clean up and simplify the gallery scripts. It’s not very important so it can wait for a while.

There’s also a problem with the source citations on the new genealogy database pages. I’m currently using a program that converts a gedcom to an access database. From there I simply export the tables as csv files, munge the data a bit, and then load them into the correct tables that I’ve got set up in MySQL. The problem is that the program is not even reading most of the sources into the database, and most of those that do show up are missing the first line.

At this time I don’t have a work around for the problem, because I don’t have access to the source code for the program and the author has not responded to my emails regarding the problem. I’ve been unable to locate another program that does anything even similar so I’ve got no choice now, but to write my own. Last weekend I picked up a copy of Borland Delphi 6 and I’ve begun building something to do what I need. I don’t know how long it will take me, because I don’t know much about the format of the gedcom files or Delphi. It could take quite a while, but it should be a good learning experience.

I’ve put a lot of time into the genealogy pages recently. All of the basic features that I wanted to implement are now complete. I’ve now got a list of enhancements that I will be working on over the next few weeks. In addition to the new database, I’ve added several pages of scanned and transcribed documents from my research files.

I haven’t taken many new photos over the last couple of months, but we’ll be going to Mexico soon so I’m sure I’ll come back with plenty of new pictures to post.