e pur si muove

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him. - Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m not sure how much the preceding clouds my opinion of the Singapore Family Tree (SFT) project which LancerLord brought to my attention. SFT was quietly launched into its “pilot phase” at the end of May, as suggested by an article in Article in TODAY.

⟨rant⟩

The website managed to irritate me right from the beginning: the first thing when you click on register, you don’t get immediately to the “Please tell me all your information down to your horoscope sign and bra size” page. Instead you get screenfuls of legal stuff you have to wade through to get to the end and click “I Agree”. Listen up guys, it’s the twenty-first century. Nearly every website (major or minor) that requires registration no longer tries to be in-your-face with all the legal mumbo jumbo that needs to be demystified. [silent tribute] Hasn’t anyone on the payroll heard of user-friendliness? I think many web designers have realized that the design tactic of surreptiously ticking a check box indicating “I have read and agree to the Terms of Service“, with similarly unobtrusive link to the ToS for those people who actually care to realize that the ToS allows them to send you marketing spam.

And the help, which happens to be the homepage for logged-in users as well, is the inane kind which really doesn’t aid very much . I seriously think anyone capable of getting to the point of registering and logging in should be able to figure out that clicking the button called “Home” will “bring user back to the page where it is first displayed after login”. Similarly for “Logout”.

On the other hand, the actual functionality of the website works pretty decently. The “Family Tree Builder Tool”, which is the main point of the website, works pretty decently. Although setting a short timeout (it seems like 5 minutes) for form entry can be potentially aggravating. Imagine poor ah ma who is a hunt-and-peck typist filling in details from a faded wedding certificate, clicking “Submit”, only to be see her last half-hour’s work flushed into the nothingness of /dev/null. That should be easy to fix, though, if they felt like fixing it.

As a basic genealogy tool, the Family Tree Builder seems to work fine. I particularly like the Unicode support, the aliasing feature, and the availability of custom attributes, although at the risk of quibbling, I’m not sure if 10 custom attributes will be enough for some people. But limiting the total space online to 10 MB is not particularly encouraging for people to partake in the massive self digitization/documentation mania that the press release seems to envision. With digital cameras and camcorders somehow finding their way into the list of indispensible items required for bringing up a newborn child, 10 MB wouldn’t last more than a few “Baby’s first steps” video clips.

SFT tries to be more than a genealogy tool, but I’m not sure how successful that will turn out to be. Having a bulletin-board-like service “Family Announcements: This allows user to make use of the system to make/maintain announcements to family members” seems to be redundant here. If a family needs its own bulletin board to keep its house in order, that’s not really much of a family. Having said that, I can see how this may be useful for extended families trying to coordinate Chinese New Year plans, but I think one has to make a conscious effort to actually use the website. I don’t see my family, at least, going, “Hmm, time to go ang pow collecting again, whose house should we go to first? Oh, of course! The obvious place to look is the SFT website! Let me go log in together with 994,238 other Singaporeans all at the same time and find out where we are supposed to squish into Uncle’s car to go to first!”

As if such questionable functionality isn’t enough, the designers happily threw in a function called “Family Value” with the description “This allows user to broadcast a family’s value/motto/principle to all family members” is both funny and sad. I am sure every family desperately needs a mind-control device operated by a government agency. Are they expecting families in Singapore to brush the dust off their coats-of-arms, having being hidden under the family altar for generations with no online place to store them? I am sure the designers were thinking something along the lines of medieval heraldry and impressive-sounding mottos like in vino veritas or something Latiny.¹

I am very disappointed and cannot help but think that the project has pretty much missed the point of having such a resource available online. I was hoping for the triumphant disclosure of a massive digitization project based on material available in the National Archives of Singapore, access to searchable databases from agencies such as the Registar of Marriages, the Registrar of Births and Deaths, census bureaux, or even CPF dependency data. While there are obvious privacy issues to overcome here, making such information accessible would make the website enormously more useful and valuable. The retired Mr. Tan featured in the Today article has admirable diligence in tracing his family history back into the mists of ancient Chinese genealogical records, but not everyone has meticolous family records and the resources to do offline research.

Many times family trees are sketchy at best, and what people need most is not a glorified charting tool, but a sensible interface to public records. Going on the assumption that the people who designed this project were not so thick as to not think of this potential use of computerization, and since the records of the National Archives are not available in the free account, or at least, not during this trial phase, that NHB intends to charge users for subscription to such a service. The implications arising from a government agency charging for access to its records is something I leave as an exercise to the hopefully none-too-depressed reader.

Summary: I find it hard to believe that the website is the result of $300,000 of labor and parts. But at least the basic functionality works, and supports features which I consider integral for the intended market. Had the website offered an interface to public records rather than inane features, it would be much more irresistable. As it is right now, it was fun for about five minutes, although the extent of marketing spam as a result of registration remains to be determined.

⟨/rant⟩

On a lighter note, thinly sliced potato marinated with beef boullion powder results in fantastic potato chips that remind me (with great nostalgia) of Marks and Spencer’s erstwhile beef-flavored crisps. For those of you who want to try this yourself, be sure to discard most of the soup formed from the potatoes being dehydrated by the salt. (It’s really too bad the mad cow scare of the early 1990s forced so many beef-flavored products into extinction. Bovril was the other thing I sorely missed. Luckily for me, I rediscovered it in Canada.)

1. Yes, I am being farcical. I know what I just said.

I cannot help but find this amusing. I cannot think of a friend who at a greater diametrical opposite: