Beta 7 Bug Report Thread

1- Irresponsiveness of input is less when I enable "match Pinyin syllables exactly" -I guess the dictionary doesn't start searching until more letters are entered. (Resetting Palm TX did not solve the problem, don't have anything else except bundled apps)
2- Tap-hold the flashcard icon in the main dictionary window shows a blank box
 
Thanks ipsi for the help. I deleted the flashcard file and started over. It was about the same. With not allowing duplicates but retaining the cats, my 27000 cards were reduced to about 15000 cards. When I try to run them with repetition spacing my Palm Treo 680 resets after about 40 seconds. I presume it's a memory overflow trying to load that many cards. FileZ says I have 53 m free internally.

With Pleco1, with 27000 cards, it takes about 2 seconds to start a flashcard session. With Pleco2 with 15000 cards it crashes after 40 seconds. So two problems, 1) Pleco2 can't deal with a large number of cards, and 2) Pleco2 is many, many times slower at starting a flashcard session. Or, I'm doing something wrong.

If I divide the files up and use smaller numbers of flashcards it seems to work ok. But that's rather inconvenient.

John
 
johnh113 - yeah, there's not much we can do about the slow startups with a list that big; the way the system is currently designed it has to check every flashcard in your database before it starts a session, so with 25000 cards it inevitably takes a while. In a future version it should be possible to optimize for cases when you've got a lot of cards but only a few in the categories you've selected, which would both reduce the memory requirement and speed things up considerably, but that would introduce way too many new bugs to consider it for 2.0, so for now the best way to improve performance is to reduce the number of cards you have.

It shouldn't be behaving this badly, though - we actually used your flashcard file for stress-testing quite a bit here (it was the largest one anyone sent us) and were able to successfully start sessions using all of your cards quite a few times. (on a 680, and they didn't take 40 seconds either) Where did you tell Pleco to store your flashcard databases, in internal memory or on an SD card? Are you sure you successfully deleted the old file before your second import attempt? One thing you could try would be to go to the Search Paths section of Preferences, set it to "Create new user DBs in" PDB instead of internal/external, then delete the old database and try again - it's possible that the PDB storage system might work better than the internal flash one in your particular case. (it's what we were using for most of those tests, anyway - the internal flash one was added later in response to widespread issues among Palm TX users with the PDB system)

estudiando - I think these problems actually have more to do with the greater complexity of PD2 searches (more dictionaries to search, plus more checking / sorting of the search results) than with any change we've made in the way it actually processes input - if the search takes longer then the input block will naturally be more noticeable. It would be extremely difficult for us to get PD2 to respond to pen input while it was in the middle of a search, because of the lack of multithreading on Palm, so it's unlikely we'll be able to do much about that.

One thing we should be able to do that might help a little is to check to see if the pen is down before beginning a search; if it is (i.e., you're in the middle of pressing a key / drawing a character) it can cancel the search and wait for you to finish writing. So that's a change we can do on our end at least. You could also try increasing the delay before search a bit to reduce the likelihood of it searching while you're in the middle of writing something. And of course reducing the number of installed dictionaries would help too, as would turning off the result list sorting (in the Results section of Preferences) and, as you mention, enabling "match Pinyin syllables exactly."

Re your other comment, the blank box with the flashcard icon is coming up because you haven't created any categories yet - once you do those categories should show up in the list.

ldolse - OK, the session categories might explain that then - we'll take a look. I'm seeing the duplicates with @字頭 too, not sure what's going on there (maybe the sort is screwed up in some way). Those reader stylus actions issues definitely might be Palm-specific.

ipsi/sych - with Blazer specifically I think this might just be another memory issue - in this case specifically one concerning Palm OS 5.4's database record caching system, which I know Blazer makes heavy use of for storing web page data / images / etc. Between the memory usage of that, Pleco's own database caching system and the Vorbis codec / audio playback system we could very easily be straining the Treo's memory capacity to the limit. (it would even explain crashes on exit, if the cache had been filled up by Pleco's use of it that could confuse Blazer once it gets back control) ipsi's report of problems looking up unknown words definitely points to this, since searching all of those other dictionaries to check for a match involves loading a lot more data into memory. (the free storage memory the system tells you about has nothing to do with the type of memory Pleco and Blazer are fighting over, which is RAM instead of flash memory and which there's generally a lot less of)

So we'll certainly try these reproduction steps and see what we can find out, but I can't promise it'll be fixed for 2.0. One thing we might be able to do as a partial workaround would be to add a (strictly experimental) checkbox to the Search Paths screen that would let you designate one path as the only one to be searched for files on an IA startup; this would let you confine IA to using just a few dictionaries (and either no audio or only the single-syllable audio files), which would dramatically reduce Pleco's memory requirements and therefore hopefully get it to play along better with Blazer. We could also dramatically shrink the size of Pleco's database cache when it starts up in IA mode - would make things a little bit slower (not during startup but for searches / font rendering) but would reduce the odds of it interfering with Blazer.

radioman - not sure why those compounds searches are taking so much longer now - might be the extra dictionaries, it's supposed to stop after only searching one but there certainly might be some previously-undiscovered bug that's causing it to search all of them. The "Go To Selected Entry" button should actually be disabled when you're accessing Char Info from somewhere other than the main dictionary interface, not sure why that isn't happening.

Dan_78cj5 - sounds like the no-spaces filter is rejecting way too many characters as spaces, should be pretty easy to fix (though I should warn you that we don't officially support Chinese character category names yet, and if you ever move over to Windows Mobile or if we add official support for Chinese character names in the future those names would all get screwed up, so if possible it might be best to stick with English names for now).

garysaville - you're sure these are the Beta 7 audio files, right? And that they installed completely (weren't partially-installed / corrupted)? Is there any information in the crash message, say the name of the component (filesys or something like that) that crashed? Did you delete the old audio files before installing Beta 7?

Mator - the button actions thing is a known bug. Not sure why IA isn't working in the messaging program, perhaps that button is assigned to some other function in it. When you say it hangs when writing a character, do you mean it's hanging in the middle of drawing a stroke, or after you've finished drawing the stroke (and are about to draw another one), or after you've recognized / entered the character into Pleco?
 
Hey Mike,

When you say it hangs when writing a character, do you mean it's hanging in the middle of drawing a stroke, or after you've finished drawing the stroke (and are about to draw another one), or after you've recognized / entered the character into Pleco?
Click to expand...
It is hanging right in the middle of drawing a char as I try to draw a next stroke - have not noticed it hanging while in the middle of an individual stroke, but rather as I go to draw the next stroke of the same char. The stroke will not draw in the HWR box until the hangup is over and it doesn't catch up with what I've already attempted to draw - it's as if I had not attempted to draw the next stroke at all. The cursor at the top of the screen also stops flashing during the hangup. In prefs I have the "HWR auto-rec after:" drop down box set to "Never". No problems after I've finished drawing the individual char with recognizing it or anything.

Your comment below to estudiando about delaying a search until input is completed would be helpful to me as I still notice hanging up while in the middle of inputting pinyin searches.
One thing we should be able to do that might help a little is to check to see if the pen is down before beginning a search; if it is (i.e., you're in the middle of pressing a key / drawing a character) it can cancel the search and wait for you to finish writing. So that's a change we can do on our end at least. You could also try increasing the delay before search a bit to reduce the likelihood of it searching while you're in the middle of writing something.
Click to expand...

Thanks, Mator
 
OK on the disabling of the "go to selected" button ...but... I would well prefer the dysfunctional presentation and having the option of of being able to "go to selected" . I pressed the button because I wanted to go there. If you disable it, well, thats functionality that I would just prefer to keep. My two cents.
 
Reader problem.
HP iPAQ 211 Marvell PXA310
8GB SD card
Pleco b7 installed on SD card (except the 2 required file -installed on the device)

I only seem to be able to open files in the lower heirchaial levels of the SD card. I have some files which I can open in the Reader in a particular folder, but I cannot access that same folder's sub-directories. I thought that maybe it was because the files in that sub-directory were not formatted correctly, but I moved one from the folder that I could already read and it was now not accessible from the lower level.

Also, some files in the accessible directory are not listed for opening in the reader. Maybe this is a code page problem with the text files.

Thanks for the reply Mike:
that's actually a limitation of the WIndows Mobile file open dialog; it only searches a few directories deep. We might eventually implement our own version of that screen that can go deeper / navigate individual directories, but for right now the only fix is to move the files you want to a directory Pleco can search.

But I am still wondering why that some files in the higher level directory are visible in Pleco's Reader and some aren't.
 
Multiple Coice Flashcards Unstable

Hi Mike

Platform: Palm T5
Software: PD2b7
(I've Just Done A Full Install Of All The PD2b7 Files.)

Bug Report: Multiple Coice Flashcards Are Unstable
Test Type: Multiple Choice
Show: Headword
Ask For: Pron + Defn

Card Selection: Repetition Spaced & Freq Adjusted
Play Audio After Reveal: On & Off

I'm Finding that Multiple Choice Test Sessions ALWAYS Crash,
Usually on Card 5 After I select a Pron Option but Before Displaying the Defn Options.
(Sometimes Crashes on Card 4 or 6, But I've Never Got Further)
I Think I got Furthest when I switched Audio Off.

Hope This Helps
The Duelist

BTW: Thanx For The Tuttle Dictionary :D
 
Mator - interesting; haven't had any other reports of this on the 680. Do you have anything else running in the background, like pTunes or another audio player, or an e-mail client set to automatically update regularly? Pleco wouldn't really be doing anything else itself while the handwriting recognition is going on, so it seems likely that there's some other process running here.

With the input comment, that actually wouldn't apply on a 680 since keypresses are registered immediately (it was more for Graffiti handwriting input, which we think it might be possible could get interrupted though we're not even sure about that) - if you're finding that searches start before you finish inputting them, the best way to fix that would be to increase the "Delay before Search" setting in Preferences.

radioman - the problem with keeping "go to selected" is that the software really isn't designed to bring the main dictionary interface forward when it's been pushed to the background, so it could cause crashes and the like. We could bring back the same functionality eventually with a "Popup Selected Entry" option, but even though that seems easy, we're absolutely positively not adding any new features now (particularly after the mess we made out of several of the new Beta 7 ones), even really really tiny ones, so it wouldn't happen until a post-2.0 release.

johnowenschina - that's actually a limitation of the WIndows Mobile file open dialog; it only searches a few directories deep. We might eventually implement our own version of that screen that can go deeper / navigate individual directories, but for right now the only fix is to move the files you want to a directory Pleco can search.

The Duelist - did this happen before Beta 7? Could you send me the latest version of your flashcard file? About how many cards are included in these sessions?

We made a small change in the database storage system on Palm in Beta 7 that we thought would improve matters but might not have - basically, temporary files are now stored wherever your regular flashcard / user DB / etc databases are stored, whereas before they'd always be put in internal memory. So for anyone having more flashcard issues in B7 than they did in B6, a workaround you can try is to go into the Search Paths Preferences screen and configure it to store cards as PDBs instead of in Internal - that won't move your existing files, but it'll make sure those temporary files are created in internal memory, which might improve stability if the previous switch caused problems with it.
 
Yeah, that would make sense. I played around with it a bit earlier, and I could look up a word, get the Oxford definition (I have the order as OX -> TL -> ABC -> GF), and I can then switch to TL (I'm assuming that's because it's smaller), but it reset trying to switch to ABC. ABC being the largest C -> E, this doesn't surprise me.

Also, a note on my memory usage - Reset Doctor lists my cache as being about 17MB just after a reset, but I see it go as low as 5MB or so after pTunes and Pleco start eating into it.

I actually get the occasional dropped stroke as well - more frequently when using pTunes, but every now and then when I'm not. Something similar happened in 1.0, but it was slightly more annoying, as it would catch up, but it wouldn't register the first penDown event, and would thus draw two strokes starting at different points, but ending at the same point. Meant I'd have to hit undo first, then draw it again. Or something along those lines.

It's kinda annoying, but I think I'm going to have to choose between listening to music or using Pleco, as my poor 680 can't handle both particularly well. Actually, pTunes works fine - it's Pleco that gets the shaft, which I'm assuming is pTunes hacking in at a lower level or something... Also, the pronounciations in Pleco are basically useless while pTunes is running, probably due to pTunes taking all the CPU power.
 
Yeah, having two different audio decoders running at the same time definitely isn't a recipe for good sound quality. Some cache management tweaking definitely might help, though, 2.0 actually doesn't need to use significantly more memory than 1.0 did for basic dictionary searches but it does by default because we wanted to make things faster (and figured that since we're now OS5-only most Palms could take it).

Not sure about these drawing delays, but I still have to think it's something Treo-networking-related - there'd have to be something else running in the background that could cause those delays, and thus far all of the reports of it seem to be from Treo people.

johnh113 - new solution to your problem: turn all categories off in the "Categories" screen instead of turning them on. This will actually still search for all of your cards, but since there's no category filter involved it'll be a lot lot faster - testing with your file just now we saw a 40-second delay + crash with all categories on, but a 10-second delay + happy flashcard system with all categories off. We've had "check for all categories on and don't do a category search if that's the case" in our to-do list for a while now but haven't actually implemented it yet.
 
mike, regarding IA in Blazer, I've just tried removing all the audio files, and all dictionaries except Oxford EC & CE, in order to reduce IA's memory usage. I also cleared my Blazer cache (not that it was very big) After all this, I *still* get a crash when looking up words with IA.

An interesting thing I found is that after I did this, my usual test before - looking up "中文" - caused a crash on the first two times... but then when I went into Pleco, looked up that word, then went back to Blazer and tried it with IA, it worked. I tried a similar approach with another word ("国际") - that is, to look up the word first in Pleco and then in IA - but it didn't seem to have the same effect. At the moment for me, IA in Blazer will only look up the word "中文", any other Chinese word/string causes a crash.

IA in Blazer was working fine in 1x and previous betas, so it seems to me that something has been introduced in B7 that causes the crash.
 
Treos by default have something running in the background - it's called the phone :). I wonder if it would help if the phone was turned off? Also, CJKOS registers itself to receive 'hede' events, I think. I understand having a large number of programs registered for them is not a terribly good idea, so could that not be helping either? I'm also tempted to blame CJKOS for 'eating' power button presses. Can take several presses sometimes to get my device to turn off...

Jesus, CJKOS takes up a huge amount of cache - turned it on and went from 17.8MB down to 11.5MB of cache. That's unlikely to be helping much either.
 
Brief note on the crash-on-flashcard-exit thing - definitely memory. Entered/Exited Pleco until ResetDoctor listed the cache as just over 2MB, then started/stopped flashcard sessions until it crashed. Had CJKOS in the background, and ChatterEmail, but not pTunes.
 
The Duelist said:
Hi Mike

Platform: Palm T5
Software: PD2b7
(I've Just Done A Full Install Of All The PD2b7 Files.)

Bug Report: Multiple Coice Flashcards Are Unstable
Test Type: Multiple Choice
Show: Headword
Ask For: Pron + Defn

Card Selection: Repetition Spaced & Freq Adjusted
Play Audio After Reveal: On & Off

I'm Finding that Multiple Choice Test Sessions ALWAYS Crash,
Usually on Card 5 After I select a Pron Option but Before Displaying the Defn Options.
(Sometimes Crashes on Card 4 or 6, But I've Never Got Further)
I Think I got Furthest when I switched Audio Off.

Hope This Helps
The Duelist

BTW: Thanx For The Tuttle Dictionary :D
Click to expand...
mikelove said:
The Duelist - did this happen before Beta 7? Could you send me the latest version of your flashcard file? About how many cards are included in these sessions?
Click to expand...
Hi Mike

The Issue with the Multiple-Choice Sessions was Also Happening in Beta6
(Sorry I Didn't Log The Problem Earlier, I Thought Someone Else Would Have Noticed It.)

The Flashcard File Is Still Pretty Much The One That You Extracted For Me.
I Haven't Added Anything To It, I've Only Organised It Into Categories.
Just Using It To Beta Test Really.
(I Can Try To Dump It From PD2 If You Like.)

I'm Only Including About 112 Cards In The Sessions, (Not Really A Huge Number).

The Duelist
 
ipsi & mike, I tried reducing my installed dictionaries to only Tuttle, and this seems to result in IA working again in Blazer.

I also tried installing only Oxford CE & nothing else. In this configuration, IA crashes when looking up anything I've tried, apart my favourite word "中文", which seems to work pretty reliably now with Oxford (see my earlier post).

I tried turning off both the phone and CJKOS & rebooting, but it didn't seem to have any effect (nb, in this configuration obviously I couldn't see any Chinese text, so I selected the resulting "extended latin"-like characters instead, where the Chinese characters would otherwise have been. "中文" worked fine; the next thing I tried did not.
 
With only Tuttle installed, it looks like looking up words not present in Tuttle can crash IA in Blazer.

The following words worked: 标准、北京、总统、官员、英国、日本、调查、中国、新闻、卫生。
After looking up all of these in succession, I tried "书记", and got a soft reset. "书记" doesn't have an entry in Tuttle. The others do.
 
As far as I can tell, the "Add Flashcard" category selector still doesn't work as well as version 1, and is broken, if I understand how it is supposed to work.

After selecting a category and saving a word, my understanding is that if you decide to save a 2nd word, that you could simply tap on the "+" key and it would be added to the same category as previous. I.E. selecting a category should be "sticky".

Also, going along with that (again if I recall correctly), the currently selected category shows as bold-ed in version 1. In version 2, there is never a bold-ed category, as far as I can tell, not even the one I designate as a default.

My normal mode is looking up words for a single class / book and I am taking far longer than with version 1 to tap-hold-select the right category for each word...
 
sych / ipsi - I think we've made some progress on the Blazer issue; turns out there were two huge DBCache leaks, one of them Palm's fault and one of them ours, and we've now fixed both of them. Along with the bug that was causing crashes with audio playback. We reproduced the IA lookup crashes successfully in Blazer (thanks for sending such detailed instructions), then tried them again with our fixes applied and they went away. So hopefully the system will be better-behaved in Beta 8. (wasn't actually anything new that we'd done in Beta 7, but it was the sort of thing that could easily be affected by an unrelated code change, so it may just be that something in Beta 7 brought it out when it hadn't been there before) (might even help with ipsi's pTunes issues, though I guess those are moot if the Treo Pro is on its way)

The Duelist - only 112 cards? Hmm... have you changed any other flashcard profile settings from their defaults? In the Modes section of Advanced settings, are the multi-choice choices coming from All Cards, Session Cats, or Custom Cats?

stephanhodges - it works the same way it did in version 1, actually. Even in version 1, tapping on the + key would always add the card to the default list specified in the Manage Lists screen, rather than the category you'd just selected. (so in version 1 as in version 2 the highlight was meaningless) And the default list wasn't bolded except in the Manage Lists screen. Whether or not that's the way things should work is something we can consider for future releases, but it isn't less usable than in version 1.
 
Good to hear :D. My Treo Pro won't be here for another two weeks, at best, so I'll continue testing the next betas on Palm. More to the point, if I'm having a problem, chances are good there's someone else *somewhere* out there who's having them too, and who can't afford to buy a new device.
 
ipsi, I'm a bit of a pTunes user myself, and whilst I consider it a bit "risky" to use pTunes and IA at the same time, I don't really have any overall problem with it. What specific issues have you got? I'll see if I can reproduce them. (perhaps you can point me to a previous post).
 
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