saganist: Zyzzyva development starting back up

Michael Thelen (

saganist) wrote,
@ 2007-02-23 15:43:00

Current mood:	sleepy
Current music:	The Cranberries - Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
Entry tags:	zyzzyva

Zyzzyva development starting back up
I've decided it's time to start doing some Zyzzyva development again. I'll probably take it easy until after Dallas, but at least I'll be doing some work. I don't know why... I should probably be sleeping instead. But it feels good to be productive, and I have some personal Zyzzyva itches that need to be scratched. Last night, for example, I implemented the Shift feature for cardbox questions (I've called it Delay in the past). Rather than a total reboot and reschedule, which reschedules high-cardbox words for months in the future, I can now simply "shift" all questions forward or backward in time until my backlog is at a manageable size. I'm thinking of this as a "good reset button", whereas the current Reschedule function is sort of a "bad reset button". I used it last night to magically take my cardbox backlog from 10,000 down to 1,000. I've been a little too busy to study in the past week.

I'm also planning to put in some basic functionality for seeing what's in the cardbox, very soon. I knew when I released 1.0.0 that this was a major missing piece, and many people have asked about it since then. It's embarrassing to say that in order to examine what's in your cardboxes, you have to get an SQLite client and query the database directly using SQL. Nobody should have to do that. It even bugs the heck out of me that I have to do it, and I completely understand the process. I've been waving my hands for long enough. It's time to solve the problem.

So I'm thinking the next release will probably be mostly a cardbox enhancement release. I'd like to make the whole system much friendlier and more customizable. The other major feature request I've been getting is for the ability to print word lists directly from Zyzzyva. Frankly, I have no idea how to do this, and I've been avoiding it for that reason. But it might be time to bite that bullet, too. I could use that feature myself, and that is usually the major factor in determining what gets implemented anyway. I wouldn't expect this release to be completed for at least another month or two, but at least this way I'll have people bugging me to keep working on it. :-)

If you have more suggestions, please feel free to post them here, or to explore the Zyzzyva bug database and add them there if your idea is not already listed.

(Post a new comment)

	crosstables 2007-02-24 01:07 am UTC (link)
	I just added an "enhancement" report and assigned it to myself. Don't hold your breath. :-) (Reply to this)

	suggestions david_b_lewis 2007-02-24 01:58 am UTC (link)
	I sent you a few by email, I guess during the time you were kicking ass in Phoenix. PS: see QPrinter and QPrinterEngine. As it is, I like generating the text files, which I then post-process to add alphagrams and randomizations. (Reply to this)

	getofftheoven 2007-02-24 04:38 am UTC (link)
	About everything I had thought of before is on the list, except (and maybe I'm overlooking it) the # signs for words that are good in SOWPODS (soon to be Collins) but not good here... (Reply to this)(Thread)

	olaugh 2007-02-24 08:42 am UTC (link)
	I like # words to be color-coded too. In Letterbox, my non-TWL words and hooks are red. (Reply to this)(Parent)

saganist
2007-02-26 10:15 pm UTC (link)

Oh yeah, thank you for reminding me. I often want to look up SOWPODS stuff, but it's too much pain to reset my lexicon preference and restart Zyzzyva, so I generally poke around in the SOWPODS text file directly. Yuck. I'd much rather be able to say something like "In Lexicon: OWL2, Not In Lexicon: OSWI" or something, as well as the customizable suffixes like #, %, etc. Hopefully that will make it in this release, though I can never promise anything. :-)

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	kheldarthedwarf 2007-02-24 05:27 am UTC (link)
	I know what you mean about the itch. I've been feeling the same about some of my non-work programming projects. It's odd. You'd think this soon after a major deadline at work we wouldn't have any interest in doing more coding... It must be that we're just desperate to write code for something other than... that! (Reply to this)(Thread)

	crosstables 2007-02-24 05:47 am UTC (link)
	Busman's holiday. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	saganist 2007-02-24 06:05 am UTC (link)
	Yep, I think that's definitely one of the motivating factors! I do love to program, and I even found that working like crazy on the work project was actually enjoyable. But I've been neglecting my own projects for too long. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	extempore 2007-02-24 02:10 pm UTC (link)
	I doubt anyone spends more time in zyzzyva than I do, so you know I always get gigglish when I hear about new features. Too bad we didn't get to play in phoenix. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	redaragorn 2007-02-24 04:33 pm UTC (link)
	I donno, dude. I think I could rival u in Zyzzyva hours logged. I'm excited to hear about the resumption of development, too, though. When are you gonna get my graphs into Zyzzyva? ;-P (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	extempore 2007-02-25 12:01 am UTC (link)
	Unless you've been doing 40+ hours a week (more like 60-70 for the last couple months) since it was released, I doubt it. Of course I have no job so it's not really a fair competition. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	saganist 2007-02-25 12:18 am UTC (link)
	Yes! Will you be in Dallas? cross-tables says you will be, so we should try to get in some games while we're there. (Reply to this)(Parent)

ofplayer
2007-02-25 12:12 am UTC (link)

Well I only looked briefly so I'm not sure they aren't already in the system, but...

1. An import feature. Let's say for example I'm doing the 6s. I already have a list in Lexpert about 3000 words of the 6s that give me trouble. It was done by going through every single 6 and cutting it down manually. Now getting it from Lexpert to text is one thing, and that can be done, but importing that from Text to a Zyzzyva list is another thing, something I haven't figured out how to do yet. An import feature would really help.

2. Manual box separation. It would be really nice if I can go through the 7s and just manually put whatever word in whatever box that I want. If I have 10 boxes I wish I could click for myself and say "Cardbox 1, cardbox 10, cardbox 4" etc. This would help innumberably for the 7s, 8s, and 9s I think.

3. Remove common words from one list to another list is helpful as well. If I have a list that I've compiled, say, of all the 8s with a 4 point tile that I missed, it would be nice to easily be able to create a list of all the 8s with a 4 point tile, remove the list of the words I missed and leave a list of all the words that I found.

Like I said, I'm lazy. I only spent about 20 minutes looking for these three things, and I didn't find any of them. Zyzzyva might have all of these things already.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	designjunky 2007-02-25 07:01 am UTC (link)
	You can import a word list by using the "in word list" search part and loading your text file from there. (Reply to this)(Parent)

saganist
2007-02-26 10:12 pm UTC (link)

<lj user="designjunky" answered #1... for #2, you can hit Ctrl-5 while taking a cardbox quiz. "Ctrl-5" stands for "hold down the control key, and hit any number from 0 to 9." The current question will then be manually assigned to the cardbox corresponding to the number you hit. Ctrl-1 will put it in cardbox 1, Ctrl-2 for cardbox 2, etc. Ctrl-0 will put the question in cardbox 10. To put it in cardbox 0, click the Mark as Missed button. For #3, I think Zyzzyva needs much better word list handling in general. There's really no way to take a customized list and edit it in any way you want, but there should be. I'll put that higher on my priority list... it may make it into this release, maybe not, but it will be a higher priority than it has been. Thanks for the suggestions!

(Reply to this)(Parent)

millcake16
2007-02-26 06:34 pm UTC (link)

I had suggested this by e-mail a while ago, but I don't think it's made it yet. For the look program, there should be these Simpsons sound bytes for the Word Judge program:

Acceptable: "It is acceptable"
Unacceptable: "Aw geez, that's GOTTA be phony!"

Acceptable source
Unacceptable source

Might be distracting to the rest of the players, but you can always adjust the volume, right?

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	saganist 2007-02-26 10:09 pm UTC (link)
	Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me! Do you happen to have audio clips for those, or know where I could find some? I searched around for about five minutes one time and didn't find anything, so I gave up, but I love the idea. If it goes in, I'd make it a user preference that is turned off by default. :-) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	millcake16 2007-02-27 04:35 pm UTC (link)
	I'm sure I have those episodes on tape, but unfortunately I don't have any sort of sound byte converter gadget. I know I should by now. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	Mwa ha ha! chaithedog 2007-02-27 07:13 am UTC (link)
	That'd make a sweet easter egg. For the word Zyzzyva, the Acceptable sound byte. For, say, 'LexPert,' or maybe your name if you want to play it safe, the Unacceptable sound byte. Or maybe not. I just looove easter eggs-- in fact, back in my programming days, I composed a very dull program which consisted of nothing but easter eggs... (Reply to this)(Parent)

oinomel71
2007-03-02 02:22 pm UTC (link)

If you have more suggestions, please feel free to post them here

At present, all words added to the Cardbox come up for review immediately. Something I've done manually via MS Access and SQLite is to arrange for several thousand new racks to be put in Cardbox 0 - but with their first appearance scheduled at regular intervals throughout 2007. This could be any user-defined timescale, of course, and it's desirable to specify the order in which the new racks will show up.

It basically means that Zyzzyva's steadily expanding my study program to my long-term requirements without me really even noticing or having to think about it. I'm finding it useful.

(Reply to this)

Mini Sitemap:

Username:		Create an Account Forgot your login? Login w/ OpenID
Password:
	Remember Me
	English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…