Beta 8(b) and 8(c) / Release Candidate 2 Bug Report Thread

[radioman]

I figure this is not a bug, and not the original intent of the program - but maybe it could be modified under 2.0 beta?? Specifically, I have been working more with sentences and phrases, and overall the process is proving very easy as well as useful. I'll write more about the process under flashcard portion of the forum.

Believe it or not, running the sentence through the voice synth is helpful, even in the "unnatural" state of every syllable being read slowly. I was surprised that the synth function could be applied to the phrases and sentences at all under the flashcard system for custom cards, but it worked. The problem is that if the phrase is over 7 syllables or so, then it stops.

Is there anyway to enlarge the readback capability to 20 or 25 syllables/characters?

 

[johnowenschina]

Since beta 7 until now 8c, I always get a system crash in the following situation:
Flashcard: Free-answer; Show: Pron+Defn+ Audio; Ask For: Headword
Total Flashcards: 2000+
Total Categories: 56
Total Categories Selected for current session: 15
Total Flashcards Selected for current session: 398

When total system freeze occurs: random time and current flashcard number but usually occurs between 45 minutes and 75 minutes of elapsed time of session.
Maybe this is a fault of the Audio files, I will try once more, when I have an hour of freetime, with only Showing: Pron + Defn not Audio
System: WM6.1
PDA: iPAQ 211
Other software: CE-Star Suite installed but not running

 

[mikelove]

stephanhodges - sounds like the full-text search issue beirne was reporting earlier, actually - should be fixed in 2.0.0.

radioman - yep, looks like it's trying to create a card with a null dictionary ID - also found/fixed for the probably-posted-here-as-a-preview-in-a-day-or-so 2.0.0.

mfcb - hmm... well we'll definitely be doing some more stress-testing with audio flashcards for 2.0.1, audio itself we're pretty sure is stable now (we've done tests with 10,000+ audio samples in a row and not had the system crash) but perhaps the interaction between audio and flashcards is causing some issues.

tsibbs - found / fixed for 2.0.0; it's an issue with the "1-char results for 1-char search" option, which at least for now we're just going to disable in user dictionaries. (in built-in dictionaries it still falls back on multi-char entries when it can't find any single-char ones, but user dictionaries don't do that yet)

mfcb again - having read your original post: I think the problem here is that those cards were configured to have a repetition spacing of "0 days" in 1.0; that would translate to a score of 0, which 2.0 scales up to 10 since that's its minimum score.

zoltairwright - not an option yet, though something we can think about for 2.x.

radioman - that would cause some serious memory issues on Palm OS, unfortunately; hypothetically we could certainly design a system that would scale up smoothly even on a low-memory Palm to handle that many samples, but practically speaking it would require pretty much a ground-up rewrite of our audio playback code and I don't know if we're likely to do that before the next major upgrade.

johnowenschina - sounds similar to mfcb's first post - we're definitely going to do some more stress-testing with audio flashcards for 2.0.1.

 

[mfcb]

next problem

i have a category "2008", under this i have categories for each month "200807", "200808", ...
yesterday i created "200811" and moved some of the last cards from "200810" to it, along with adding some new.

when doing my flashcard sessions i was surprised by the fact, that "200811" is NOT automatically included, even the parent "2008" category was selected. the correct behavior would be to automatically select it, because the manual says "If you select a category with other categories grouped under it, those categories will be selected too, so you don't have to manually go in and check the boxes next to all of them"

i agree, that it does not mention newly added categories, but i think it helps a lot. otherwise i need to enter the categories dialog in every profile i have, much room for mistakes...

 

[mfcb]

me again, i dont understand the "Per Day" under the "Cards Learned" entry in the statistics...

first of all, it only shows up, when "All" categories are selected (why?), secondly i interpret the docu for it as number of learned flash cards per day... ("Cards Learned is the number of cards that you've remembered correctly the last three times you've been tested on them; Per Day is the average number of cards that have been added to this group each day since you started using Pleco flashcards.")

now my learned flashcards total at 4000+ cards, i started to use plecodict flashcards around march08 so dividing 4000/300 should give me a value of about 13... but my "Per Day" value shows 3 !?!?

if its not a bug in the calculation, then its at least a weakness of the documentation, as i have no idea what other meaning it could have

 

[johnowenschina]

- sounds similar to mfcb's first post - we're definitely going to do some more stress-testing with audio flashcards for 2.0.1.

Well I turned off Audio in my flashcard session (same session as listed below) but it crashed again. I NEVER have been able to make it through these 398 flashcards without it crashing. I was hoping that only displaying the Pron + Defn Without the Audio would fix the problem... but no such luck.

Any other idea?

Since beta 7 until now 8c, I always get a system crash in the following situation:
Flashcard: Free-answer; Show: Pron+Defn+ Audio; Ask For: Headword
Total Flashcards: 2000+
Total Categories: 56
Total Categories Selected for current session: 15
Total Flashcards Selected for current session: 398

When total system freeze occurs: random time and current flashcard number but usually occurs between 45 minutes and 75 minutes of elapsed time of session.
Maybe this is a fault of the Audio files, I will try once more, when I have an hour of freetime, with only Showing: Pron + Defn not Audio
System: WM6.1
PDA: iPAQ 211
Other software: CE-Star Suite installed but not running

johnowenschina

 

[mikelove]

mfcb - on the first problem, are you sure 200811 was not included in the session? There might be a bug that's keeping it from being checked in the category list, but the start-session code goes through and looks for any newly-added categories grouped under the ones you've chosen and makes sure they're included so you should still see cards from 200811 come up.

On the "per day" issue, that might be happening because 1.0 didn't keep track of when you started testing on flashcards (no "first reviewed" date on each card) and hence 2.0 has to go by the date your first 1.0 flashcard was created - this could easily have happened long before you actually started actively using flashcards (say if you accidentally hit the add-to-flash button at some point). Though it looks like you only bought PlecoDict at the start of '08, so maybe not - any chance the clock on your handheld might have been set incorrectly at some point?

johnowenschina - not sure what to make of that, then - if you send me your current flashcard database file (with the profile settings set up as they normally are for this problem session) we can take a look and try to see what's causing this.

 

[mfcb]

so, you mean, that the new "200811" was not selected (checkmarked) but still the cards should be included in the session ?
hmmm, that might be possible. although i think i remember, that i wondered that i did not see any of the new ones and checked, if the category is selected, after i selected it i had more cards to test.

on the second, hehe, now that you remind me, one day my pda went crazy and i had a date some years back... imagine my face, when pleco (1.0) faced me with approx. 3500 cards to test... so that explains it, but how to fix it?

 

[mikelove]

Not sure about that, then... we'll check it again for 2.0.1.

With the review date problem, if you do an Advanced search in Manage Cards for cards that were "first reviewed" before, say, January 1st of '08, then perform a "Reset all stats" batch command on them, that would fix the dates (though at the expense of losing the scores / review data for those cards - hopefully only a few of them would come up).

 

[mfcb]

ok, i tested the category thing, it behaves like mike said. the newly added category does not get a checkmark, but the cards are included in the tests (automagically). basically that means that the parent category overrules the child-categories, and if you want to exclude some child categories from a test, you have to disable the parent, otherwise you always include all childs...

on the other problem i got quite a shock, when i searched for all cards "first review" before 2007-11-01... the result was 6597 cards... it took some time until i recognized, that it included all cards that were NEVER reviewed.. a search for all cards "created" before 2007-11-01 just brought 5 cards, which i resetted, et voila, cards learned per day: 13...

 

[mikelove]

Oh, right, "first reviewed" in the cards that were never reviewed would be zero (translating to 1/1/1970) so those would come up too. Glad the categories are sort-of working correctly, though certainly it would be better to have the checkboxes reflect that.

 

[daniel123]

In beta 6 and 7 I did not had any serious bugs in the way I used pleco. Since a few days I use beta 8c and now the first time after nearly 2 months there is a really serious thing that makes the usage of the flashcards with sound annoying and difficult to use.

Many of my flashcards contain sentences that's why sound plays many words during a session. Now I have many problems with my flashcard session playing sound.

Problem 1) Somtimes the male voice can not play some cards but the female voice can do. It's strange because it just contain same of the cards (it seems to affect always the same cards). After exiting pleco and restarting, the male voice can play them but just for a short time before the same mistake happens.

Problem 2) While I tried to reproduce this bug I had the effect that the whole audio could not played any longer. Even the changing of the volume at the device Icon has no voice. After exiting, the voice of the device came back.

Problem 3) While I tried to reproduce this bug or the bug before, the system freeze during playing audio. I was able to cancel the application via the WM cancelling but I was not able to start pleco again. It just does not start. I needed to make a reboot before I could start it again.

After the reboot Problem (1) occured after a few minutes.

In this status the flashcard sound system for me is really limited for use. I did not test the 2.0.0 release but if you did not change the flashcard audio I do not think that it would change anything. Maybe it could help going back to beta 7c. But maybe the problem refers to my new cards and would affect 7c as well. I can send you my flashcard database if it would help.

I hope you can fix this before starting with the iphone version otherwise it would be a great pity.

Daniel

 

[mikelove]

If you send me your flashcard file we can take a look at this for 2.0.1, though as I've said many times before the flashcard system really isn't designed to deal with sentences, and particularly not with audio in them, so if this is the sort of thing that requires a total redesign to fix we may not be able to do much about it for a while. Hopefully though it'll turn out to be relatively straightforward.

 

[mfcb]

daniel123's problems 1 and 2 describe exactly the audio problem i stated before... i already also had the feeling, that the male voice starts the hickup at the same cards, but i was not that sure, that i had the guts to note that down... and its simple 2 character words in my case... (though i remember them to be read character by character). next time i will note them down, its just a few words, but i did not have a hickup yet, since the last reboot, but that might be due to the review cycle...

 

[mikelove]

Strange that it would happen with just two-syllable words; might be something with the syllable-by-syllable mode in general, then.

 

[mfcb]

Strange that it would happen with just two-syllable words; might be something with the syllable-by-syllable mode in general, then.

Just had another audio problem again, and i think this time you should be able to identify the problem, as its very general now.

My initial impression, that it happened only to syllable-by-syllable mode is wrong, as it started with an 3 syllable-card (潜水艇）。 the 艇 is simply cut off. the next card was 寻找 and in that case the 找 is cut off partly. in fact all multi-syllable words are now truncated at the end, one syllable cards are still normal. the syllable-by-syllable card 三角关系 truncated the 角 (its a third tone, therefore needs more time). also with words, where the first syllable takes more time to say (like 装备） the second syllable is truncated completely.

it looks like there is a problem with the time-span how long the audio is switched on, and under circumstances the timespan will be reduced to 0 (that is when the the syllable-by-syllable mode goes to mute). looks to me like a memory corruption, as daniel123 reported complete crashes after some time...

hope my description helps to remove this nasty bug...

edit: the only positive side-effect is that a1 (啊） is now said more natural by the male voice, not like aaaaaaaaaa1

 

[daniel123]

If you send me your flashcard file we can take a look at this for 2.0.1, though as I've said many times before the flashcard system really isn't designed to deal with sentences, and particularly not with audio in them, so if this is the sort of thing that requires a total redesign to fix we may not be able to do much about it for a while. Hopefully though it'll turn out to be relatively straightforward.

Now have some more experiences with those audio problems. I would say any of them occurs after 5 or 10 minutes of working with flashcard and audio. It makes it really painfull to work with.

I tried to go back to beta7d where I am sure that this problem did not happen but it was impossible because it says now I should use a more recent version.
Probably because of the registry entries of the newer version.

I guess this problem does not only affect sentences but also flashcards with normal words and characters but then it takes longer time to happen. So it is not the problem of people who want to use sentences but a serious problem of the application that occured during the changes from beta7 to beta8. I also guess that when more people use the new release they will run into the same problem.

It's really annoying that I cannot go back to beta7. Maybe you can make this possible for those people who want to use audio and flashcards until you have time to fix it.

Daniel

 

[ldolse]

If you just change the date on your handheld it will probably let you run B7 to test that.

 

[mikelove]

mfcb/daniel123 - I've emailed both of you an experimental fix for this audio bug, let me know if it makes a difference.

 

[mfcb]

as the audio problem seems to be solved (more than 500 flashcards without any hickup) i found another issue :wink:

sometimes (mostly when there are only a few cards) the session is started, lets say with 6 cards, but at 4/6 its over...
it stops like there are no more cards to be tested. i have this sometimes in repetition spaced (but only when i am done with the big bulk of cards for the day and new cards come in, lets say with score 200, so they have been reviewed 2 days ago at the same time), and almost always with my frequency based tests when the number of cards drops below 20 (which is my standard number in these tests). there it is reproducibly until the cards drop to zero, always 2, sometimes only 1 card too much indicated for the tests (i do frequency tests only for cards with score 0 to 199， so the number of cards decreases, hehe)...

its not a major problem, but as i had that one just now again, i remembered to mention it...