Beta 4 Bug Reports

[sfrrr]

Hard crashes or soft resets? There is a big difference.

If you're getting numerous soft resets (or, I suppose, even if you're not), make sure you create a daily backup of your user dicts and flash cards. Daily. Also, since the one day you do get a hard crash will be the day you did an extra amount of work in PD, and back up part way through and transfer the backup to a separate expansion flash card. As Mike will attest, I speak from long experience.

Sandra

 

[stephanhodges]

Hard crashes or soft resets?

I don't know your definitions, but for my Tapwave Zodiac, the reset screen comes up, but it never resets. Have to press the reset pinhole button on the back. That's my definition of a hard reset, when I have to use a "hardware" button.

Now, I DID have to replace the battery 6 months ago. I had to completely discharge the internal capacitors twice due to installation problems with the new battery, but I'd call that a "Hard Hard" reset - haha.

I've also had several fatal error screen messages, with memory values pop up, etc. Also, the stroke order has just stopped working, and it cannot find at least one of the dictionaries any more...

I'm going to reinstall things to see if that helps..;

 

[ipsi]

I'd call that a soft reset. A hard reset, from what I normally hear, would be something that resets your device to factory settings, removing any and all personal data that may be on it.

 

[stephanhodges]

What do you call it when I get a soft reset (in my terms) then? So far, I've had 3 or 4 of those, where the Pleco program resets, but the machine still runs.

I don't really care what terms are used, as long as Mike understands them and hopefully we're all using the same terms. For me, if the program crashes, but the rest of the machine (PDA) runs, that's soft. If I have to reset the PDA itself, I'd normally call that a hard reset. If it wipes out all the settings in the machine, I'd call that something else. Perhaps a "wipe out" instead of a crash - haha.

It's only to assign a rough level of quality at this point. Important is 1) area of crash and 2) steps to reproduce. I confess, I didn't understand the reason behind saying that "soft" versus "hard" was important yet.

 

[ipsi]

It's only really important to distinguish between errors that need a hard reset (that is, a full device wipe), and errors that don't, mostly because Pleco *should not* be causing errors like that. If you need to hard reset your device due to Pleco 2.0 being strange, that's really bad.

If the rest of the operating still runs, I'd just say the program crashed. That's what I say when the same thing happens on my PC. That, or I'd say it froze if it didn't just die outright. I'm really not sure, to be honest. I don't think it matters too much.

 

[sfrrr]

OK. Now I understand your terminology. Now you might want to understand what everyone else means by soft and hard reset. Ipsi's right. A hard reset sends everything back to factory setting and you lose your registry links. (Therefore, your PDA is effectively erased--including all of your programs and DATA if they're not on an SD or CF card.) A soft reset essentially forces your machine to turn off and then turn on again. Only that. And that is what the reset button (or hole, in some cases) does. If your system freezes, which is what you describe, it could require a soft OR a hard reset, depending on how severe the problem is. Just pushing the reset button on your PDA is a soft reset. If you push the soft reset button many times, with an adequate waiting period between each push, and the PDA doesn't turn itself off and then on again, you may have to resort to a hard reset, which takes a few steps and is very hard to do accidentally.

When you tell Mike that you've had one or more hard resets, his heart jumps into his throat and he thinks he's got some huge flaw in the program and can't release it for fear of ruining many people's PDAs. A soft reset is a sign that he has to look for some incompatibility or some missing piece of code or something like that. Whole different order of magnitude. And we don't want Mike to have a heart attack until he's finished coding in every feature that everyone has asked for. :twisted:

Hope this helps,
Sandra

 

[ldolse]

I pretty much meant what Ipsi said, those are my definitions as well.

Hard crash of Pleco, meaning Pleco crashed and took the operating system with it.
If I just said it crashed that means the OS survived.

Soft reset means I actually needed to break out the stylus and use the indented soft reset button to reboot the device - which is a total pain on the Touch Dual unfortunately, being hidden behind the battery cover.

And yes, hard reset would mean resetting the whole device - I don't expect Pleco would cause me that type of trouble.

 

[sfrrr]

ldolse--I knew what you meant. I was mainly addressing Stephanhodges.

Sandra

 

[haraldalbrecht]

Unusable toolbar

Palm TX: first deleted all files from internal memory, also killed all preferences.

Input delay is totally messed up: whatever I select, such as 3/4s, it takes three or four seconds after the last input after PD starts to search the directory.

Go to preferences, screen Toolbar: check "change btns in landscape mode" and all toolbar buttons are lost and replaced by gray, non-working squares. Only the dictionary toolbar button will show up. The setup will show no buttons set, but changing this results in even more chaos: for each toolbar button configured, a totally different button will show up.

Even more landscape screen mess.

Oh well, beta4 is a step ... back. I'm really thinking about deleting it and installing beta3 again. While beta4 runs, it is barely usable due to the many screen and usability problems. Sigh.

 

[mikelove]

ipsi - I suppose the extra buttons in the hwr palette to switch to radical/keyboard mode would be annoying if you're not ever planning to use those on the main screen - we'll see if we can find space in the Preferences screen to add an option to get rid of them. We think we've fixed the line breaking problem now, it actually was punctuation-related; wasn't treating full-width punctuation marks like Chinese characters for line-breaking purposes. Fixed a couple of bookmark-jumping bugs now too, though we're still doing some testing.

Hardware navigation button support is still being worked on and what's in there now is temporary and not tied to preferences. Document reader hardware button support is definitely coming too. There are a few memory leaks still floating around so that certainly could explain the crashes. 15 bookmarks seemed like a reasonable number - any more than that and scrolling through the list gets a bit impractical anyway, though I'm sure within a few weeks of 2.0 coming out there'll be people asking for a hierarchical bookmark organization system.

stephanhodges - not sure why the keyfile data would have been lost; in general I'd suggest exiting Pleco immediately after unlocking it to make sure all of that keyfile data is committed to storage memory. Toolbar spacing is now adjusted by setting the number of buttons; this was effectively what would happen before anyway, since the extra space that wasn't enough for a whole button would be distributed between the buttons. There's no font size toggle button in 2.0 though we've gotten a few requests to bring it back and might see if we can on Palm at least. Not sure about this crash, definitely still need to do some work on the stability front.

ldolse - interesting that it happens in both places, for various reasons the code in each is actually mostly independent until it hands off the audio data to the Vorbis codec for playback. (whch suggests that that's the first place we should look for a bug)

On the collective soft/hard reset discussion - let's stick with the standard Palm terminology of soft = memory intact, hard = memory wipe; stephanhodges' distinction between the program crashing and the entire machine crashing is interesting on some platforms (like WM) but is largely meaningless on Palm since the same bug can cause one type one time and another type another time; almost any crash has a strong likelihood of requiring a system reset.

sfrrr - yes, hard resets are scary and I'm a little too young to be shopping for a cardiologist at this point.

haraldalbrecht - we actually just fixed a bug that could cause that exact problem with input delay before releasing Beta 4; it seems to be OK on my Treo at least but perhaps there's some way it didn't take on the TX. Anyway, if you set input delay to 0 that should at least make it semi-usable. No idea what's going on with the button setup screen - if you turn off the separate landscape mode feature doesn't that at least get it pretty close to Beta 3 as far as screen layout?

 

[ipsi]

Cool. Good to hear . I'll still check some files without tabs and see what happens, but that's sounding hopeful .

I'd like a heirachical bookmark system, though that could be a pain . Haven't had any crashes recently, so it's probably something hard to find.

15's not a bad number, though I'd prefer 120 (1 for each chapter in HLM/SGYY/etc). . I'd also love to be able to mark up a text file with bookmarks, even if there's no other formatting.

 

[haraldalbrecht]

Setting the "delay before search" to "none" kills the extremely long delay, but this mode is barely useable for me, as now PD immediately searches after writing each letter, thus causing long delays and making my next letter jotted down on the display getting lost. This is on a Palm TX. This situation is really bad so I consider going back to beta3.

Not enabling the landscape option does, as you say, the trick for the moment. However, setting the toolbar to 12 buttons and then assigning functions to the three additional buttons left me with still a gray button, which does nothing. At least the original buttons were not killed. Then trying to correct and choosing other functionalities, two buttons become gray, the third button I set is reset to "None". Configuration seems to be gaming and guessing: what will happen this time? Seems that the last button setting will overwrite the previous one, and the last one will be reset. Has someone ever tested this functionality on Palm after programming it into the software? :roll:

There are more screen problems: tapping into the text input field after a search and no cursor visible. This makes corrections impossible. :|

Sorry, but beta4 is really disappointing from my very personal point of view: functionality that worked to some extend in beta3 is now borked. While I didn't experience any hard crashes, such as resets, for me on the TX the beta4 is barely useable, compared to beta2 and beta3.

**EDIT**: well, adding the character info button to the toolbar, selecting a character, then using the button causes a warm reset. So much for beta4.

However, the reader has improved quite a bit in useability -- albeit I rarely need it.

 

[mikelove]

ipsi - the PlecoDoc converter (which probably won't be forthcoming until 2.0 is done) will let you mark up a document with our hierarchical navigation system without having to fiddle around with any other formatting, so that should be a good alternative to a more comprehensive bookmark system.

haraldalbrecht - sorry that you're finding this so frustrating. I'm not sure why you seem to be having more problems than most people here - some of these (like the cursor not appearing) are problems that I believe were also in Beta 3, and others like the toolbar issues you're having don't seem to have come up in our testing. But it sounds like you might be better off waiting for the finished release - there's a reason we have all of those warnings about beta versions. If we wanted to thoroughly test every feature before each beta, we could, but this would take up lots of time that would be better spent moving us towards a finished version - the two things are not the same, since often changing one area will introduce new bugs in another one.

 

[hleperlier]

I have installed and paid for 21st, Guifa and C&T dictionaries. Unfortunately, I am having problems activating them on a Palm TX




ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary
NWP English-Chinese Pinyin Dictionary
Oxford Concise English & Chinese Dictionary
Hanwang Handwriting Recognizer
Audio Pronunciation System
Stroke Order Diagrams
21st Century English-Chinese Dictionary
Standard Dictionary of Modern Chinese
Cheng & Tsui English-Chinese Lexicon of Business Terms

Machine ID: (info removed)


I have not managed to get the purchased dictionaries to stop being in DEMO mode. At one point the 21st century did seem to work with the keyfile I got by email although the orders page on the Palm TX said it was in demo mode. Then I downloaded the keyfile from the beta 2.0 my orders (above quoted in this email) and since it is in demo mode, although opening Pleco 2.0 beta4 I got the message saying the purchased dictionaries were unlocked but could not be found. They are installed: verified by FileZ and mounting the memory card in the Finder in MacOS (I am using 10.4.7 for sync because Missing Sync does not work. I did get the correct Machine ID as instructed for the Beta version and I can see it is different from the Machine ID I got purchasing the Pleco 1. :|
When I installed the keyfile from my orders page, I do not get the PD unlock app anymore

One more thing (I have other bugs reports but until I get this problem fixed, they can wait, I presume) is that the rough instrutions specify that the pleco.dict must be installed in the internal memory but there is no such file for Pleco 2 beta4. I guessed (correctly?) that it is the pleco engine. It is installed in the internal.

Thank you for your help

 

[ipsi]

I'm a little confused. Exactly which ID did you specify when you purchased Pleco 2.0? The one Pleco 2.0 gives you? And I assume the other dictionaries work? And you are using the unlock file you got from the 2.0 orders page? If so, then that's a bit strange. Also, there's no Pleco Unlock application anymore. It should just unlock it straight away.

The machine ID is different from Pleco 1.3 because Pleco 1.3 used your Hotsynch ID, whereas this uses the actual ID number of the machine, as far as I'm aware.

Yes, it meant Pleco Engine. I'm not sure why Mike hasn't updated that yet.

 

[hleperlier]

I did use the new machine ID as in the instructions and in the order page I have on Pleco's site, it is a different number from the one I had. I am not sure what you mean by the machine ID anymore. There were instructions " Choose Ordering from the Help menu in the 2.0 beta to get the required Machine ID code".

I sent an email to support with the details. Also, there was an earlier post where one user got the same warning: that the dictionaries could not be found.
Maybe I should repeat the procedure to get another keyfile?

thanks

 

[ldolse]

About the audio crashes posted ealier - the Vorbis codec does sound like a likely culprit - I was thinking maybe it was the often bad WM storage card handling that was doing it - does the vorbis codec use it's own code to access the storage card, or is it using the same code you use for the other DB's?

Anyway, I'll try reproducing it a couple more times since it seems to be a new issue.

 

[hleperlier]

I have reinstalled the keyfile dowloaded (keyfile.pdb) from the beta2 page, it's 8k in size, while the one I got from the email wasa pdunlock.prc. The 29st dict got unlocked but not the Guifa, So reinstalled the Guifa (all of them on the card in the Palm/Launcher directory). Now the 21st, Guifa and C&T don't work. I reinstalled the keyfile and Pleco 2.0 is telling me all is unlocked but that it can't find the dictionaries.

Could it be something to do with the file names?

Henry

 

[beirne]

This isn't in the list of desired bug reports, but it keeps me from using beta 4 enough to see how it works. If I have Plecodict set to look up a word in the English dictionaries and then try to look up a word, I keep finding cases where it interprets the entered text as Chinese and switches over and won't go back. An example is the word "fatal". It does OK with "fat", but when I hit the 2nd "a" it changes to Chinese. When I then hit the "l" it ends up on the word 发. If I tap on the character on the upper right to switch back to 英, it displays 英 briefly but goes back to 中. Similar behavior also happens with the word "jinx".

I have a Palm TX and all of the dictionaries.

 

[ipsi]

The cause for that is that Pleco currently auto-switches language when it sees valid pinyin, and fatal starts with valid pinyin, as does jinx. I think Mike suggested turning off the auto-detect language feature for now.

EDIT: hleperlier: I'm not sure what's going on for you. You're going to need to wait for Mike to answer your question. Normally he'd have done so by now, but he's on holiday, so it might take a bit longer.