User C-E dictionary adventures

[sfrrr]

Mike--you don't want to deal with this any more than I do, so let's procrastinate. I'm just telling you now before I forget any relevant details.

I deleted my three rogue (and corrupted) c-e user dictionaries. PD 1.03 created a new one as expected. I entered three items--one a two-character word, the other two were sentences oof the smallish-mediumish variety. Log off and do other things on the Axim, boot up PD...oops, no time. Later, boot up PD again and only one of my three entries exists (the longest and most recent sentences) and I have three invalid lines. Two of the Invalids are blank, but one is a page of gibberish, mostly hanzi, that looks like a reclaimation of all of my previous flashcards--my name is there a few times, as are gobs of partial or whole vocabulary words.

Deleted it. PD made a new one, and I entered one two-syllable word, just for drill.

Maybe it's the sentences. Maybe PD doesn't like sentences, although when it wants to corrupt something, it doesn't seem to play favorites. Most interesting to me is the gibberish. Where did it find my previous words?

Also, yesterday, without warning, my flashcard file reverted to a month previous. That is, I lost a month's worth of flashcards. Have no idea what I did, but even restoring one of my backups, done on March 6, didn't help, which I consider really weird.

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

Yikes, that's pretty bad. Though I continue to be puzzled by the fact that no one else has reported problems like this... as I've suggested before, this might have something to do with the huge number of third-party programs you're running on your Pocket PC. Or maybe you're just cursed.

Luckily, though, we've now gotten SQLite working beautifully on Palm OS, which means that we can officially adopt it as our new database system on both Palm and PPC in Pleco 2.0, which means that as soon as a preview of that is released (hopefully within a few months) these database problems should be gone for good. (and the new database should certainly be part of the free portion of the 2.0 upgrade)

 

[Anonymous]

Mike--Like everyone else, I'm drooling all over the furniture, dreaming of PD 2.x. I'm sure you're right about the third party apps. I use two gigs worth of installed apps (a few betas and several programs that didn't need to be reinstalled when I did the hard resets--they work without the registry, I guess.

At this point, I don't want to fiddle with it either. As long as it works, I'm happy. Not sure how I feel about starting another user dict, though. :roll:

Sandra

 

[sfrrr]

Another corrupted user DB. This one I practically watched happen.

I installed a beta of another program. After testing it for a while, I managed to reproduce one of its known bugs--one that freezes the PPC. Took me several--and I do mean several--soft resets to get everything (or anything) back but it seemed to have confused my Axim x51v because some of the apps weren't skinned (as they had been before the reset fest). A couple of more soft resets got me back to the setup I had had before the freeze. (Also, I had a backup that was only a few hours old, so I wasn't overly concerned.)

However, when I went into PD, the first thing I did was to try to add an ABC dictionary entry to my flashcards, but the plus button disappeared when I tapped it and nothing could get PD to save that flashcard. Then I went into my User dict to check out a previous entry and all I got was a list of Invalids. (Does this mean that somehow a header on the file has been changed or corrupted? If so, can I change it back?) I had only, maybe, ten entries in my user dict because, despite appearances, I do learn from history.

Also, I have a complete PD backup, less than 24 hours old, so I can restore whatever I choose. Oh, please finish PD 2 soon. I need the new DB structure/format/technology. This user db thing is taking way too much of my time.

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

Sorry to hear about this, but again it seems to be more of a problem with your Pocket PC setup than simply with PlecoDict. There's a big difference between running beta software on a regular PC (which is big, stable, and at least on Win2K/XP/Vista makes it very difficult for one program to screw up another one) and running it on a Pocket PC. It's hard enough to get a program working reliably at all on Pocket PC, getting it working so reliably that it will continue working correctly even when other programs are crashing around it is darn near impossible.

PD 2.0 should make the database files (almost) impossible to corrupt, along with making it easier to back them up automatically (through our ActiveSync conduit) and making the software in general less likely to crash, but if you really want it to work reliably you need to be more careful about what you install on your Pocket PC. Actually, as a PPC "power user" you might be an excellent candidate for one of the new UMPCs when they come out - it seems likely that a lot of heavy PDA users will switch to those going forward.

 

[Anonymous]

Oh, I guarantee you that I'll get a few into my hot little hands when they are ready for prime time. But what I carry with me all the time? I'll have to see how the market shakes out. Right now, I'm extremely partial to carrying my portable computing in a cargo pants or jacket pocket.

Sandra