Update: familysearchlabs.org

If you haven't seen this new testing site the LDS Church has up, you're
missing a real treat.

David Rowell...

Could be - wish the site builders would have let me.

They are testing a 'smart pedigree viewer' feature that may or may not
make the cut, much like projects on web-search Labs come and go. But this
one looks like a real winner based on what I saw tonight.

You need to have a high-speed connection. Go to

David Rowell...

I have one - several megabytes / sec (no not bits)

Smart Pedigree Viewer.

David Rowell...

And I wind up at a (Macromedia?) site that just sits there

If you don't have the latest Flash plugin, v9.0.r16, it will ask you if

David Rowell...

I don't

you want to update it. Click yes. You will then see the search

David Rowell...

doesn't ask just sits there

David Rowell...

Blog won't let me offer feedback either.

You see, according to the genealogy community I've been branded a leper
because I use Ubuntu Linux! Macromedia lets us use version 7 of flash

Dave Hinz...

Oh, FFS. what is this, "feel sorry for myself" week on sgc? Software
gets developed that doesn't work everywhere sometimes. boo farking
hoo. And before you go and assume I'm some M$ zealot, check my headers.

but apparently has no inclination to support Linux with anything newer.

Dave Hinz...

Sounds like a marvellous reason to keep a copy of that other OS around.
That's what boot camp and/or GRUB are for, after all.

Can't the site builders use any graphic technology that is widely
available throughout the world? A technology that is perhaps a bit less
flaky than flash?

BTW. PAF 5.2 runs pretty well under Wine on Linux wish they'd spend just
a little effort to make it run perfectly. The Linux community has
expended substantial effort to make PAF run now if ...

Dave Hinz...

As someone who as been part of the linux community since the kernel 1.2
days, yeah, what else is new. Maybe you should call familysearch and/or

Dr. Brian Leverich...

Newbie. (:

Dave Hinz...

Guilty as charged, m'lud.

Cheers, B. <-- Around since the 0.9x kernels. (Somewhere around here
I still have a SLS distro on about 50 floppies ... )

Dave Hinz...

Sweet. I actually scoffed at Linux before, what, redhat 4.x (the first
time around the numbers...grrr...) because I was like, well what's the
point of Unix on a PC when I have this perfectly good Sun gear right
here?

macromedia and, you know, demand your money back.

Doug McDonald...

I too decry proprietary solutions, and prefer open or
generic ones. But sometimes the generic tools fail, usually
do to inefficiency.

I have recently written a quite nice, though very simple,
TMRCA calculator (Time Since Most Recent Ancestor) for me
and my DNA-testing-lover friends. It is in HTML and
Javascript and works nicely. It is also portable and
respectably fast. At least, it works on recent versions of
IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. It is legal code. It SHOULD
work on any legal browser. But it did not work correctly on
pre-7 IE because of an IE bug that I fixed with a horrible
kludge. (It did generate a correct graph, but there was an
appearance problem.)

But this is a fairly small program. For a larger program,
there is the Clan Donald USA DNA Project site which I wrote.
It generates tables based on searches of our DNA
database, using Javascript. It works fine but is SLOW,
up to 15 seconds on a 733 MHz Pentium III if you display the
whole database. This is 1/3 because Javascript is slow
and 2/3 because HTML tables are bog slow. That's the curse
of interpreted code and object-oriented programming. But
still, it's better for many of our users than using a
server-side solution. That would, using HTML tables,
require sending so much stuff that the download on
a slow line would be far far slower than 15 seconds. Using
image output would likely be slow too, and PDFs would of
course be proprietary, at least a little proprietary.

Doing it in plain C would be blazingly instantaneous ...
it's not a big job. Javascript seems in the realm of 500
times slower than C.

As I said, I've written a genealogy tree-drawer program in
plain C. It is FAST, even for 15,000 people. But to use it,
you would have to run the .exe file on your computer.

Doug McDonald

melsonr...

Get up on the wrong side of the bed, Dave? IMO, this is a real
issue with many sites and appears, unfortunately, to be the direction
familysearch.org is heading. Even granting the majority of computer
abusers do so with some form of windoze, AKA Gates' Universal Computer
Virus, it is a mistake to require a specific application or browser be
installed in order to access even the most basic presentation. For
bells'n'whistles beyond a basic presentation ... well, mebbe so, but
basic access should be architecture/browser/application neutral.

As an aside, I was told by the folks at the familysearchlabs site that
flash 9 will be released for linux sometime around the beginning of the
new year, which may well render some of this discussion moot. I'll add,
too, that the project lead seemed entirely unsympathetic to the idea of
neutrality, which kinda torqued me (kinda, nothing, _really_ torqued me!).
We'll see what eventuates.

singhals...

Back in the dawn of time (G) ... when PAF was a DOS program and WIN was
at 3.1 (not even 3.11 yet), PAF user groups made a HUGE deal out of
moving PAF into the up-and-coming WIN environment, GUI and all. It took
maybe 4 or 5 years, but the UGs finally convinced 'em.

Old Vulcan proverb: be careful what you ask for, you might get it.

Southwestern Ol' Bob

Dave Rowell

screen.

Robert M. Riches Jr....

If you decide to install the Flash player/plugin, take a
good look at the license. It contains a clause that
obligates you to let them "audit" your computer, and it
doesn't say whether the audit would be done over the network
or in person. If somebody from Macromedia shows up at your
door and wants in to "audit" your computer, you agreed to
let him in when you accepted the license.

As much as I am in favor of the efforts of familysearch.org,
it's going to be a very cold day somewhere before I give out
keys to my house.

If you have no idea what might be in there or want to just get a look
at some sample trees, click on one of the images below the search
boxes.

You can send up your own tree as well to try it out using your own
data.