[kde-edu]: Parley (KVocTrain) Expiring

Mon Sep 24 00:17:14 CEST 2007

Hi!
Wow, thank y'all for answering!!!
I did not think anyone would care. This proves again that there are quite a 
few people interested in Parley! Great!

Responses like this by Roland are great, users keep them coming!
Otherwise we geeks who are working hard will have to guess what you like, but 
we are not like you, are we?
I love hearing from you, the users, as do the other Edu devs, I'm sure! Tell 
them that their program is fun and what could make it better!!! Now is still 
some time till final freeze for 4.0, speak up :)

Really, the user feedback is very good positive and motivating and much more 
than I thought it would ever be!
If you have ideas, I and others are quite open for them usually. We cannot 
make wonders happen, but who knows?
I'd like to have even more publicity for Parley, as it's "new" (in packaging 
at least). Recomend it to others. If you have ideas or could write a nicer 
description for the web page, which is not my strength I think, nor is it my 
top priority, that would also be very helpful.
Keep your contrib files comming too, we need to have files, to convince people 
to use Parley... which results in more files...

Expiring:
I am happy that I asked and it will not be hard making this feature work in 
the way you described. I almost would have taken it out. Since I rewrote the 
practice selection anyways and it should be flexible enough to support doing 
this, instead I'll keep it and make it work the way it was intended.

The current blocking behavior is to prevent the word from being selected for 
the practice for a certain amount of time.
So the "correct" behavior should be to drop the grade by one and include the 
word in the practice? Dropping the grade by one is quick to implement 
actually and will include the word since it will have enough time out for the 
next lower category.

I have/will completely decouple this from thresholds (word types etc).
Threshold selection will work for all practices equally then. Except word 
types for grammar tests, where the test type overrules that setting.

Also I chatted today with the author of the original Leitner System 
implementation who pointed out some details which will lead to a 
reimplementation of the Leitner System correctly this time (it was never done 
wholeheartedly in KDE 3.5). This should also help improving the learning 
experience for serious learners using the program frequently.

A huge thank you to all you people helping!
Writing code is not everything!
Don't forget about the other Edu apps, speak up!

If you have an idea for the soon to be Parley icon, that would also be very 
good. Idea. We have great artists that will draw the logo, but we need to 
come up with an idea what it should be. It has to be something loosely 
associated with languages/learning and should be recognizable even when 
small.

If you ever tried the printing function, you will probably agree that it... 
well... is hard to use... harder even, if you want something good looking...
If you are an xslt expert, speak up, we need you. We already have someone 
investigating and it seems that a nice way to implement printing would be to 
turn the kvtml file into html or something a browser can display easily and 
let the browser do the printing. This sounds promising, so give us a hand. 
Learning that and experimenting should be fun and not that hard. Contact me, 
as always ;)

Frederik

You can also vote for Parley to make it more popular on:
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=66741

Check out http://edu.kde.org/parley and 
http://blue-gnu.biz/content/parley_new_kvoctrain

Other things Parley:
-KDE4 is comming, no big new features will be implemented but bugs fixed. 
There are very few left (as far as I can tell) but little things keep on 
popping up. The gui still does not make me happy, but it's much improved.
-Declinations will come, but not in kde 4.0 but 4.1
-Images are 4.1 too
-Sound: currently only very basic, should be played, if a soundfile is 
associated with the solution. Should I rather deactivate that for now?

Note on sound: The xine lib which is currently the only backend for Phonon 
(the KDE sound thingy) has some bugs. One is very troubling for Parley I 
think. Xine crashes when playing ogg sound files that are shorter than 2.7 
seconds. That makes many files unusable, for example wiktionary.org ones.
I currently have no idea how to work around this.
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=109655&aid=1606138&group_id=9655
Maybe there is some way to motivate xine people to fix this.

El Sunday 23 September 2007, Roland Schnell escribió:
> Hi all,
>
>
> just some short information about my background:
>
>  I'm reading this list for several weeks because I'm interestet in
>  KVocTrain and I've missed the .dtd-file (This question is already
>  answered for the moment. I just enjoyed reading this list, so I
>  stayed.) I'm using this program for at least four years (for
>  learning lithuanian) and I'm using KDE as my primary desktop since
>  1999.
>  I've got nearly no idea about programming in C or even with qt
>  and I've _never_ tried to understand more than some _easy_
>  configuration scripts. So I think I'm a classical User. (One
>  of those nasty guys who think they were clever.)
>
>
> Back to the topic.
>
> * Frederik Gladhorn:
> > Hi all!
> > If you used KVocTrain before, you might know (eventually) that there is
> > a "feature" called expiring.
> > After discussing it for a while, we didn't have the feeling that this
> > feature is needed.
>
> Well, I would use it, if it worked as I thought it should.
>
> :-)
>
> (I'm using Version 0.8.3, KDE 3.5.5, Debian etch)
>
> > Actually we did not even find out what it is supposed to do to be honest.
>
> I would expect it to work as a counterpart to "blocking":
> (Blocking is against to many queries, expiring is against to few.)
>
> If a word is no more blocked,
> and the user doesn't proof, that he knows this word,
> "expiring" comes into field:
> When the time is "expired", the word will loose it's actual level.
>
> In my opinion (I've never seen this feature work) it should drop one level.
> After that,
> - there should be no blocking, and
> - the "expiring" of the new (lower) level should start at "dropping time".
>
> > Looking at the code, it just ignores some threshold settings.
>
> This made sense to me on the first few. But then I thought, it should
> put up new thresholds, not ignore some old ones.
> Okay, I have no idea about the code behind this program or about any
> code behind such a program.
> (Not, that I would have any chance to understand such code at all.)
>
> :-)
> :
> > Unless there is real opposition or any reason to keep it, say "good bye,
> > my friend" and expiring will be gone.
>
> Hey, calm down! :-)
>
> In my opinion, such an option makes sense, if users are supportet which do
> _not_ use KVocTrain/Parley (nice name, by the way) on a regular shedule.
>
> I'm training my vocabulary when I've got time. There might be two weeks,
> where I'm doing it every day, and than there might be half a year, where
> I'm doing nothing at all.
> (This doesn't make much sense, when you're looking for an effective
> method for learning a language, but there's still measurable progress.)
> After half a year of doing nothing, I can start with those words,
> which are on the lowest level. (With other words: those, which I
> either never knew, or those, which I haven't proofed to know for a
> long(er) time.)
> So, "expiring" makes sense for idle users like me.
>
> > Opinions please.
> > If there are none, I'll remove it on tuesday or so. Very soon anyways.
>
> Okay, I've been in time.
> I just hope I could express my point.
>
>
> To put it into the right context of priorities:
> I'm using KVocTrain without this feature and I'll be using it without
> it in the future as well.
> I would like it to be implemented, but:
> If its implementation is to time consuming, or you've got enough other
> things to do, drop it. I can still use "last query", as a work around.
>
> > (with the code removal chainsaw in hand)
>
> Oh no!
> ;-)
>
>
> Best regards!
>
> Roland

-- 
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