Jason’s Random Thoughts

After using the program for three days, I’ve found quite a few areas that needed work and made the changes with all haste. So far, the initial version of the application has been downloaded a total of 22 times (much more than I had expected for an Alpha release), but that’s all I really know. I do not collect information about who downloads the application or whether it’s being used or not, since it’s really none of my business if the application is free to everyone.

Ah, but I’m getting off track!

QuickStudy 0.0.1.3 is now available for download to all Windows Mobile 5 and 6-based devices and comes with quite a few small updates to the application. Fixes include:

• new Zoom-Level function added to Quiz screen to make reading easier
• new Database Updating software installed for seamless upgrades of all future QuickStudy releases
• faster load time of Quiz information on front page
• faster Quiz Imports
• faster Question/Answer loading in Study screens
• elimination of pesky glitch when pressing “Review” button in Study screen before showing answer
• elimination of (most) character-based errors when importing Quizzes
• better random question engine
• Study screen remembers personal settings

This is pretty much the gist of what I’ve done to the application since I started using it full time on my own PDA two days ago. There’s still lots of little tweaks and whatnot that need to be put into this application, and I’m always open to suggestions.

One small thing that I should mention is that if you’ve installed the first version of the application, you’ll need to eliminate the initial database, then install this version. The database is contained in the benkyo.sdf file found in the root directory of your PDA and, once you delete it, QuickStudy will rebuild it the next time you start the application. This should be the first and only time you’ll ever need to do this, as the next releases will make use of a proper upgrading mechanism.

If theres something you feel is missing from QuickStudy, feel free to contact me at jason[at]j2fi.net, and I’ll be sure to get back to you.

You can download the latest version of QuickStudy here.

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I have a terrible habit when it comes to studying Japanese in that I spend more time looking at my PDA rather than the printed vocabulary sheets that I have. Unfortunately, this has meant that my study is light-years behind where it should be … so it’s time to solve the problem the best way I know how: with software.

A little while ago I had written about some of the problems I’ve had with SuperMemo … the main one being that the company has taken my money and refuses to give me a licence key. So, rather than just bitch and moan about things I can’t control, I decided it was time that I wrote my own version of the application. And here it is: QuickStudy.

A Small Initial Feature List

QuickStudy currently has about 14 hours of coding behind it. It’s something I quickly put together with the goal of building more into it over the next few weeks and months. Currently, the application works on Windows Mobile 5 and 6, and quite possibly Windows Mobile 2003 devices (I haven’t had time to test it, yet). The one thing that I’m not too happy with at the moment is the fact that you need to have the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 software installed. I’ll be eliminating this need in the near future, however, this was the fastest way for me to develop the code.

For the moment the application will do the following:

• Import Quiz Question/Answer data from XML files
• Allow Create/Edit of Quizzes manually
• Randomize Questions
• Allow for Swap of Questions and Answers
• One-Handed Operation (for those standing-on-the-subway trips)
• Allows for over 65,000 Quizzes with 2.1-billion Questions … each (take that every other product on the market!)

There are a few other functions that currently work in the background … but they don’t fully work at the moment, so there’s little point mentioning them. So, on that note, here’s how you install it!

Installation:

Copy the QuickStudy.cab file to your PDA, either by memory card or through ActiveSync

Run the application from the PDA. It will ask if you want to install, please say “yes”.

Running the Application for the First Time:

In the Program Menu, you’ll see QuickStudy somewhere mid-way down. Double-click this file and you’ll be greeted with a message box asking if you’d like to create the initial database. This really shouldn’t be a “Yes/No”, because the application will not run without it … but you have the option to say “No” and close the program if you wish.

Creating the database will take about 15 seconds (depending on the speed of your PDA), and then you’ll be met with a relatively simple blank screen. Open the Import screen by following the pictures, and then select one of the four Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level files. There are over 8,000 words in total, and I’m sure this will have some words that’ll challenge anyone but the very fluent.

Once this is done, you can hit “Done” and load the Quiz to begin your study!

I’ll have some better documentation for this in a few days, as I get the feeling I’m rambling horribly.

So, on that note, I hope there are some people out there that will find QuickStudy to be a useful education tool! If you have any problems with it whatsoever (remember that it’s an Alpha release), don’t hesitate to contact me at: jason[at]j2fi.net.

Download QuickStudy

Final Notes:

In order to use this application you will need a device running Windows Mobile 5 or 6, and has the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5 installed. 10 MB of storage space is suggested, but the application requires only 380 KB for installation and the minimal database. In order to view the Japanese characters encoded in the XML file (and which get imported into the database), your PDA will need to support Japanese Characters. You can get a great application to do this from CE-Star.

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Unless you happen to be some sort of linguistic genius, a talented musician, or some unfair combination of the two, chances are you will have trouble learning a new language and the little nuances required for accent-free pronunciation. I’m lucky enough to have my very Japanese wife to help me with pronunciation, but there’s something far more difficult that stands between me and Japanese competency: vocabulary.

Studying a foreign vocabulary has been difficult for me since college, as my brain tends to ignore things it cannot immediately use, catalog and compare (this doesn’t explain my encyclopedic knowledge of Simpson’s, Futurama, or Family Guy). That said, I have had some great success using flash cards to retain information. This is how I finally mastered the hirigana and katakana character sets, and it’s been quite useful in mastering the basic Japanese words one might hear at home. There is one problem with using flash cards, though: they’re difficult to transport.

This is where SuperMemo fills the need. For the low price of $19.90 USD, you can purchase a full licence for the application granting the ability to use databases with more than 30 items. There’s just one problem, though: there’s no point buying a licence. But I’ll give more details about this later.

Who or What is SuperMemo?

SuperMemo is a small application that can run on a pretty wide range of platforms such as Windows, Mac, Symbian (used on mobile phones) and Windows Mobile. It works with a database we either download or construct, and functions similar to a flash card system, but with an important difference: it remembers the questions we have troubles with.

Using an algorithm devised by Apple’s Steve Wozniak, SuperMemo will compile a list of the words we have trouble with the most and present them at specific intervals that have been proven to be the best times to review. Within the space of a few weeks, hundreds of words could be assimilated and put to use in our conversations. I’ve been using it in the unregistered form for just over two months and have found it to be quite useful when drilling new vocab.

So why am I suggesting that people not buy the full version? It turns out the people that used to perform all the administrative duties for the developers have all disappeared.

A Month of Nothing

I bought a license for SuperMemo on July 2nd this year through the Yahoo! Market Store linked on their site. The money was immediately deducted from my PayPal account and a confirmation was sent to my email address telling me that the purchase went through and I would receive an activation code within a few business days. Two days passed and I heard nothing, so I sent a quick email stating the receipt number, my iPaq’s info, and politely asking for a registration code. 10 days later I received a reply from someone asking for the very same info I had sent on the previous email. To make matters worse, they were replying to the email I had sent which already included the information they sought.

So WTF?

Deciding it was easier to just resubmit the info, I replied with the data and waited. And waited. And waited some more. After another 10 day silence I submitted a claim with PayPal to get my money back. To heck with SuperMemo and the poorly maintained organization that spawned it. I can understand if the application is no longer being actively maintained, and I can understand if people are on vacation. But how hard is it to set up an auto-responder or to remove an item from a Yahoo! Store?

The lack of communication and excessive wait time is unacceptable for the purchase of a digital product.

Waiting on PayPal

I’ve decided to give the company 7 days to respond to my demand for refund before escalating the matter with PayPal, and this leaves little time for the company to answer. I’m no longer interested in obtaining a licence key for my iPaq, even though I could put the application to good use. Instead, I’d much rather get a refund and go back to studying Japanese with my PDA-optimized Excel macro. It’s not as mathematically pretty as SuperMemo, but it gets the job done.

Have you used SuperMemo to study a subject? Was registration just as slow?

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When it comes to portable devices, their usefulness boils down to just a few little things: ease of use, expandability, and battery life. This last one is especially important if you intend to use the little machine more than the average person.

In the case of my HP iPaq 211, I use the little computer for just over four hours a day, every day. On a particularly slow day at work, I can easily use the digital assistant for more than 6 hours. Suffice to say, this makes battery life a primary concern whenever I’m walking out the door of my apartment. The first question that runs through my mind, right after confirming that the computer is in my pocket, is “how full is the battery?” followed immediately by “did I download my RSS feeds and email?”

For the last few months, I’ve been fortunate enough to get approximately five and a half hours of life from the battery if I’m using it mainly in Word, Excel, Egress, email, and Embink. If I’m watching the latest episode of Daily Show, Colbert Report, or something else that was re-encoded for the limits of the handheld PC, then I can expect to get just over four hours of operation. I had thought this was all I could expect from the standard factory battery but, thanks to a relatively new update on HP’s software site, I can get another hour or two out of the existing hardware.

A Welcome Software Update

HP released an update to their iPaq power management software this past May to resolve two rather important issues. The first is the ability to insert an extended capacity battery and actually charge it to 100% (which was something that wasn’t possible before this update), and the second is to get the most out of the factory slim battery. While getting a 100% charge on extended batteries is certainly important (it would be had I dropped the extra coin on such a battery), I don’t have easy access to one of these to test just how well the software update resolves the issue. That said, I do have a factory battery installed which I know has an average lifespan of five hours.

The result? Seven hours of simple usage, five with WiFi on and active, and five when watching DivX movies.

Not bad, if I say so myself. This free software update just extended the life of my battery by upwards of 90 minutes.

Watch Out For Your Storage

Before I go too much farther, I should mention that there is a known issue regarding the use of SecureDigital and CompactFlash cards that do not support “Power Down Mode”. While it’s not a huge issue, it’s certainly something you’ll want to keep in mind if you want to squeeze every bit of power out of your battery in actual usage, rather than idle power drain.

No-name brand SD and CF cards have been known to drain anywhere from 8-15% of battery power during a six-hour off-period. There have been lots of forums reporting this issue all over the web, and I’ve noticed it myself when I’m just too busy to use the PDA during one of my rare full-day rushes. I use a 2 GB Patriot SD card and often find a 12% power drop between the hours of 12:30 PM and 9:30 PM if I do not use the machine. The PDA is not set to automatically come on during this time and, unless I foolishly have the WiFi or Bluetooth module activated when the unit is shut off, it will not wake itself up for any reason.

Since I’m not one to just accept a 12% power loss while the iPaq sits quietly in my pocket, I did a little research and found that if every program is completely shut down before getting down to work, I will lose about 9% of power rather than the 12% I had been accustomed to seeing. Considering how the only data stored on the SD card is a backup of my current on-device data, a few videos, a few dozen mp3’s, and about 200 eBooks, this surprised me. What could be causing a 9% power drain if only 3% is consumed by active programs that may not necessarily read data off the SD card?

Taking it a little further, I decided to remove the SD card before starting my day at work and ensure that all applications were shut down. Being the geek that I am, I had cut out a place in my Compact Flash plug big enough to hold two SD cards should the need arise. I have no CompactFlash devices anymore, and I often carry two SD cards. One has PDA-specific data, while the other has … umm … data that I’m not likely to share. So, after 9 hours of zero usage and no flash cards being installed, how much battery did I lose?

Negative two percent. Yep. I went from 83% to 85% in 9 hours while it was off.

Clearly this is due to several factors. Because the device wasn’t on for so long, it was able to cool off in the chilly 25 degree office. On top of this, I had been using the machine for over an hour before shutting it down. This would have caused quite a bit of power drain and may have led to a slightly pessimistic power read by the software at 12:30. Either way, the message is clear: my SD cards do not support low power modes, or shut down when instructed.

But Wait, There’s More

To make things just a little more interesting, I decided to install one of my really old SanDisk 256 MB SD cards to fully test out whether this power drain was the fault of non-power-downable flash memory. This particular card was purchased with my Palm m505 back in 2002, and currently occupies the “back up memory” position for my digital camera (also known as in-the-case-and-behind-the-batteries-just-incase-I-take-so-many-pictures-that-I-fill-every-SD-card-I-carry). How much power did this ancient card drain during a 9 hour off-cycle while sitting patiently in my shirt pocket?

Zero percent. The system showed 86% that day at 12:30, and showed 86% again at 9:30 when I finally got on the train home.

Interesting….

The good news is that the power drain is much less of a concern with the updated power management software made available by HP, but it’s still something less desirable than I’d like to see. Perhaps I’ll consider getting one of the recommended SD cards on HP’s site but, for the moment, I don’t think my piddly internet earnings could buy me an SD card at any of the local retailers here in Japan. Despite the massive price drops all over the world, flash is still priced at 2002 prices in this country.

Have you noticed any power drains with your portable device? Any ideas to the root cause?

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A few weeks ago I had tested a possible solution to display Japanese characters on my Worldwide English-version of Windows Mobile 6. Although it didn’t quite work the way I wanted, it provided a little hope for the future, as it’s rather important for me to display the three character sets (four, if you include Romaji — the standard alphabet) used in the Japanese language. So it came as a pleasant surprise when I learned about another option for displaying, and entering, Japanese on my HP iPaq 211.

The program is called CE-Star, and it’s put out by the people at Mobem. It’s certainly not free, but they do offer a limited trial of their language packages. What’s interesting is that CE-Star can be used to add support for the Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese languages on a variety of platforms. After using just the Japanese component for three weeks, I can sum up the experience with just one word: smooth.

Japanese Character Display

Being able to clearly see something as complex and intricate as the Kanji character system is incredibly important if I expect to use the small computer as a learning tool. Luckily, CE-Star has no trouble working nicely with ClearType. On top of this, it’s incredibly fast.

I’ve been using this application for just over a month now and, in that time, it’s been working like a charm (aside from the little issue I had a week back). Sites look great in their native fonts and, best of all, I can actually read Japanese emails that are sent from work or Reiko on the PDA.

Japanese Character Entry

This is one area I’m not too impressed with, however, it’s not something that most would complain about. When it comes to data input on mobile devices, I’m all for handwriting recognition or something akin to Graffiti (a.k.a. Block Recognizer on Windows Mobile devices). Little keyboards are ugly, imprecice, and scream inefficiency at every turn. Sure, some may be pretty quick with the tiny keys and pen, but who ever heard of using a pen on a keyboard?

That said, CE-Star uses a standard on-screen Querty keyboard to receive input and shows both the hirigana as well as the possible katakana/kanji spellings that can be used. What I’m not too impressed by, though, is the poor accuracy of kanji characters when spelling various words.

Kanji is not my strong point, but I am getting a bit better at reading the complex writing system. My cell phone is pretty good at determining what characters I need, so it’s a bit of a disappointment when I see 搗き交ぜる offered when trying to spell 着きます. That said, I shouldn’t be too reliant on a computer’s kanji suggestions if I can’t properly read them.

Advantages Over Competition

• buttons still work
• minimal effect on system performance

Disadvantages?

• some menu items to JP (Regional Settings)
• WiFi manager in JP (Regional Settings)
• 15 day trial version will make email, SMS, and (potentially) Excel unusable on the PDA after expiration

Overall?

CE-Star is a great addition to any PDA that needs to display or regularly enter non-Roman characters. For $42 USD, I’ve been able to add much more functionality to my Windows Mobile device which, in turn, makes the little computer a great tool in my quest for better Japanese speaking and reading ability. There is a cheaper option available for $28 USD, and this will certainly do more than enough for 90% of us who need Japanese, Chinese or Vietnamese language support on our mobile devices. Heck, thanks to this small application, it’s now possible to use and update Super Memo, as well as write notes and simple articles, in Japanese.

I’ll write more about SuperMemo and its uses in the near future.

Have you used CE-Star on any of your mobile devices?

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