Flashcard Statistics

[lmcjipo]

I recently had an issue with my Treo 650 which forced me to do a hard reset of it (warm & soft resets didn't work).

The hard reset obviously wiped out my Treo 650's internal memory restoring it to the factory defaults.

I use an automated SD backup program that backs up the internal memory to my SD memory card. After the hard reset, I ran into issues with the restore from the SD card and was forced to restore my Treo 650 (after performing another hard reset to bring it back to the factory defaults) by hotsynching it with my laptop. Because my Treo 650 was now back at the factory defaults (hard reset), the hotsynch utility detected that it was the same device and restored all my programs and settings which it got via the last successful hotsynch (about 1 day before).

My problem is that I had used the flashcards for a few hours between the time that I last did my successful hotsynch and before I ran into the problem with my Treo 650 which forced me to perform a hard reset. My hard reset problem was in no way related to PlecoDict. I was using another program and all of a sudden my Treo 650 started going into constant reboots where even a soft and warm reset wouldn't help me.

My question is: What file is the flashcard statistics stored in?

The one on my SD memory card (obtained via the automated backup of the internal memory) is more recent than the one that I got by hotsynching the information back onto my Treo 650 since the hotsynch data is a little over 1 day old and the SD memory internal backup is a few hours old.

I would like to overwrite the existing flashcard statistics with the one on the SD memory card (which represents usage of a few extra hours). Which file is this information stored in?

I'm not sure if I'm explaining my problem properly.



Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

The flashard statistics are stored in the same place as the flashcards themselves: "PlecoDict Flashcards.pdb". So assuming you haven't added any new flashcards to the file that was restored by the HotSync, you can simply copy the SD Card file back into your Palm's internal memory and that should restore your flashcard statistics. If you have added new flashcards that aren't on the SD card backup, this would overwrite those new cards, so you would want to export those to a text file and then reimport them after restoring the file from the SD card.

 

[lmcjipo]

Thanks for the answer, Mike.

Are the flashcard statistics updated instantaneously or are they updated at the end of the flashcard session?

The reason that I'm asking is that I run a few background processes/programs on my Treo 650 and one of these programs is somewhat unstable (I won't say which one). When I'm in a flashcard session, sometimes my Treo 650 will reboot (do a soft reset by itself). The problem is not with PlecoDict because when I do a "#*377 <dial>" using my Treo 650's phone applications, it tells me the program (which I already know is somewhat unstable).

Would I be losing the "work" while I'm in my flashcard session when my Treo 650 rebooted? Sometimes I spend an hour or longer and my Treo 650 would reboot because of the unstable background process. I would hate for me to lose my "work" (by "work", I mean losing the statistics gained from that particular session).

If the flashcard statistics are only saved at the end of the session, I'll just have to remember to exit my background applications especially the unstable one before starting my flashcard session.

By the way, the resets are not that frequent but they sometimes occur at random times when I'm running my background processes/applications.

 

[mikelove]

They're updated instantaneously - whenever you advance to a new card, the statistics for the old one are saved out and the updated data is copied to your Treo's nonvolatile flash memory to guard against resets etc. So you wouldn't lose any work when your Treo rebooted.

And that's an annoying type of reset, certainly - unfortunately, the Palm OS really isn't designed to run multiple applications at once and hence there aren't a lot of protections in place to keep one application from bringing down the whole system. Of course Pocket PC is designed to run multiple applications at once and still requires frequent resets, so it's not like things are any better on that.

 

[johnh113]

Dear Mike,

As long as we're talking about flashcard statistics, how about 2 additional statistics.

1. I would like to know what percentage of the cards in my session I got incorrect. You currently report the total number of cards and the number incorrect, how about adding a percentage incorrect statistic so I don't have to do the arithematic in my head.

2. This one is harder. I would like to know whether my repetition spacings are optimal. If they are optimal, then I would expect to see a decrease in the percentage wrong at each higher rank. That is, for Rank One I often see 50% incorrect responses when I first go through the new cards. However, by the time I get to Rank Ten or Rank Eleven, I would expect that the percentage of incorrect responses to be very low, approaching zero. I would finally expect, if the repetition spacing is optimal, a monotonically decreasing percentage. In order to know if this is indeed happening, I would like to see the percentage incorrect, cummulatively since the last time I adjusted my repetition spacing, for each rank respectively.

John

 

[mikelove]

1) Good idea - this was skipped in 1.0 due to some constraints in the Palm OS dialog box system (basically, you can have a maximum of 3 custom sections in a premade dialog, so the correct/incorrect/total were all we were allowed to insert) but we're already planning to overhaul this in 2.0.

(most of the work we've done on 2.0 so far has been low-level engine code, which is why I'm still taking about interface enhancements as planned rather than as a done deal - if someone asked for a new text search feature I'd probably have to reply that that part of PlecoDict had already been finalized for 2.0)

2) This might be trickier - I agree it would be useful, but it would require us to store some extra statistical data independent of individual cards and that would necessitate a whole extra system for storing statistics. If we can come up with enough other reasons to do this then we still might, but I'd say it's at best 50-50 for 2.0.

 

[lmcjipo]

And that's an annoying type of reset, certainly - unfortunately, the Palm OS really isn't designed to run multiple applications at once and hence there aren't a lot of protections in place to keep one application from bringing down the whole system. Of course Pocket PC is designed to run multiple applications at once and still requires frequent resets, so it's not like things are any better on that.

Yes. This random reset happens on my Treo 650 just like it happened on my old Treo 600 and the "#*377 <dial>" almost always identifies the buggy program that I have running in the background.

The only thing more annoying when I get a random reset due to what the "#*377 <dial>" as being "A crash occured on x-x-xx at xx:xx while running "<unknown application>": Fatal Exception". This is more annoying since I have no idea of what can be causing this so I can't exit the "buggy" program.

I'm not sure if this happened on my old Treo 600 but it does happen occasionally on my Treo 650 since I didn't discover the "#*377 <dial>" until recently. I discovered it the last few weeks that I still had my Treo 600 and I never encountered the <unknown application> during that time.

This is not related to PlecoDict and might be out of your domain but do you have any ideas about the above where all I'm given is <unknown application> for the application name?

 

[mikelove]

Thought about this and I really don't have any good ideas - the "unknown application" could be almost anything, in fact it could easily be PlecoDict, all that means is that the OS didn't get a chance to record the application that crashed before it reset (or was working in a mode such that it wasn't sure which application was running). So about all I can suggest is that you try the standard diagnostic procedure of uninstalling everything and gradually reinstalling one application at a time until the problem reappears.

 

[lmcjipo]

They're updated instantaneously - whenever you advance to a new card, the statistics for the old one are saved out and the updated data is copied to your Treo's nonvolatile flash memory to guard against resets etc. So you wouldn't lose any work when your Treo rebooted.

I'm not sure if this is the case. I was working on my flashcards today and all of a sudden, I received a soft reset.

When I first started my flashcard session in the day, I had to go through approximately 175 flashcards. After going through about 70 flashcards, my Treo reset for no apparent reason. Based on my flashcard settings, the number of flashcards that I would have needed to go through the next time I started the flashcard session (within 24 hours) should have decreased from 175 flashcards to a number between 175 flashcards and 105 flashcards (based on the number of flashcards that I got correct). However, to my surprise, I had to go through 175 flashcards again. I believe that the only time that the number of flashcards that I have to go through within 24 hours decreases is if I exit my flashcard session properly.

When this happened and I had to go through 175 flashcards again, I decided to exit the flashcard session occasionally (after going through about 50 flashcards). This allowed me to save my flashcard session properly in case my Treo reset again.

This leads me to believe that the flashcards are not saved instantaneously when I advance to the next card.

 

[mikelove]

That's very odd... the software does a database sync after every answer, or at least it's supposed to. Might be some sort of a quirk with NVFS... I'll make a note to do some extra testing on this with 2.0. Thanks for the follow-up.