(no subject)

I just bought a secondhand copy of Mordecai Kaplan's The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (1937 printing), and it was evidently originally sold with uncut pages—the edges of the pages are jagged, as if they've been sliced open with a letter opener. Whoa, how Victorian!

Of organic growth, living with initial decisions, PostScript and when to bite the bullet

Way back in the early 1990s, fed up with a genealogy program whose database kept corrupting (and which also didn't have an option to print family trees parsimoniously), I decided to write my own family tree plotter. ( ... )

Originally, the program was quite small and of limited capability, and I wrote it as one big script in functional programming style, applying none of the software engineering methodologies I used at work, because it didn't really need them. However, the program grew organically (if slowly), until it had become quite hard to follow. When I decided to type up and digitise all my genealogical information in late 2004, so I could wrap it up in a single multimedia presentation to distribute to family members, I decided first to reengineer the program to give it some structure.

So far so good, but to do the job properly would really have involved starting again from scratch and reimplementing the existing functionality—a rather daunting prospect, effort-wise. Instead, I chose to go down the easier route of refactoring the code bit by bit until I was reasonably satisfied with it. The down side to this was certain suboptimal decisions I had taken, that were embedded deep in the program's infrastructure, which I now simply had to continue living with.

( You can probably tell what's coming, can't you... )

A way out came to me after it occurred to me I don't need UTF-8: all of the accented characters on my family tree as it stands can be safely handled with Latin-2. And so, after several hours of googling (during the course of which unexpected running into a utility written by ewx in 1996) I managed to end up with some PostScript (ripped merciless out of the output of ogonkify), which allowed me to do so.

But still, it's a kludge—a workaround—not a solution; and I still can't handle Hebrew characters. One day I'm going to have to solve that problem too. The question is whether I end up doing it by another workaround, or by completely rewriting my PostScript outputting code.

What I'm doing when I'm not writing books on Roman history or boxing...

Wikipedia informs me...

Michael Grant (b. 1947) is the 12th Baron de Longueuil, which is the only French colonial title recognised by the British monarch in their capacity as King or Queen of Canada. A doctor by profession, he lives in Nottingham. He assumed the title upon the death of his father Raymond Grant in Pau, France in 2004. Children: Angela (1974), Rachel (1976), Rebecca (1981) and David-Alexander (1984).

The Barons de Longueuil have not lived in Canada for several generations, having been living in England and France. However, they still own the baronial manor in Canada, although its size has been greatly reduced over the centuries.

Bizarrely, the Michael Grant at grant.org lives in France too. And grant.me.uk is registered to someone in Ashington, in my father's neck of the woods.

All right, I'll stop being egotistical now. :o)

This came out of correspondence with a distance relative, who was telling me how she discovered the dot com domain for her name, Shooman, was taken by a business owned by a large and wealthy Arab family spread across the Middle East. She said her brother received an email from a Mohammed Shooman asking if they were cousins, which afforded them some amusement since they are religious Jews. "I think Mohammed was a bit disappointed." :o) I wonder where an Arab family came upon a German/Jewish surname like that.