Spell checker... in Lotus Notes 8.5



  • Following is a list of words that our Lotus Notus spell checker found wrong while typing an email. It also find that 'third' is wrong only 50% of the time, not depending on the context. You can retype it to make it right. Good thing I could disable it at all.



    currently development workflow third effort estimations requests I've attached XML those between departments 2nd with configuration while 3th development quite they allow escalation example our could pick resolve cannot resolved until linked internal simpler because don't other setup testing reachable but working VPN reach location admin rights poke around



    It does manage to suggest the following 'fixes' for the errors:

    tiro effers Ijver attachés XXL tahoe beweend departement witz whifte CD quine They allooi escalaties exempel oir court pack remolie kanoot resolveert units linkerd Interpol simplex besausen donut otters set-ups testis regale buts wrokkig VIN ready locatieven ademing richtas poker afrondt



    Lotus Notes - It's better then eating glass!*


      • Depending on the quantities of glass.


  • @Daid said:

    It does manage to suggest the following 'fixes' for the errors:
    tiro effers Ijver attachés XXL tahoe beweend departement witz whifte CD quine They allooi escalaties exempel oir court pack remolie kanoot resolveert units linkerd Interpol simplex besausen donut otters set-ups testis regale buts wrokkig VIN ready locatieven ademing richtas poker afrondt

     

     

    Perhaps you could switch your target spell-checking language from Dutch to English...



  • @Taiyal said:

    Perhaps you could switch your target spell-checking language from Dutch to English...
     

    +1



  • @Daid said:

    3th

    That is an actual error. Should be "3rd".



  • PEBKAC



  • @Taiyal said:

    @Daid said:

    It does manage to suggest the following 'fixes' for the errors:

    tiro effers Ijver attachés XXL tahoe beweend departement witz whifte CD quine They allooi escalaties exempel oir court pack remolie kanoot resolveert units linkerd Interpol simplex besausen donut otters set-ups testis regale buts wrokkig VIN ready locatieven ademing richtas poker afrondt

     

     

    Perhaps you could switch your target spell-checking language from Dutch to English...

    You clearly never seen the configuration dialogs in Lotus... and it manages to see 50% of the english words as correct. I'm just glad I could turn it off and then nothing broke. Last time I tried to change settings I had to reinstall it...



  • @Daid said:

    Following is a list of words that our Lotus Notus spell checker found wrong while typing an email. It also find that 'third' is wrong only 50% of the time, not depending on the context. You can retype it to make it right. Good thing I could disable it at all.

    If they've imported the spell checker from Sametime 7.5.1, you're doing it wrong.

    The correct answer for that would simply be to post all of the words in the email, because, give it enough chances, it'll flag all of them as wrong.

    Yep, that's right: it's possible (or, at least, it was) to make Lotus Notes worse.

    I see that the rest of the posters responding here missed the fact that it flagged one of the words inconsistently...  That indicates it's unlikely to be a misconfiguration, as no spell-checking software should be inconsistent in its work.



  • @tgape said:

    That indicates it's unlikely to be a misconfiguration, as no spell-checking software should be inconsistent in its work.

    *rimshot* Unless it's Lotus Notes that is!

    Also, this.



  • Looks like it dynamically determines the language you're using. MS Word pulls that shit on me all the time. One moment, checking against Ducth (yeah, me too...) libraries, one tech term and BOOM: English automatically selected...

    I figure that's why 'third' is sometimes considered OK, and sometimes not. Damn, I hate it when things fall apart only half of the time. 'Ja, soms doet ie t wel...' Worst kind of support calls.. /rant



  • @steenbergh said:

    I figure that's why 'third' is sometimes considered OK, and sometimes not.

    Better than 3th, anyway.



  • @Daid said:

    Lotus Notes - It's better then eating glass!*

    * - Depending on the quantities of glass.
     

    I'd probably prefer a nice crunchy bowl of shards to using Notes 6.5 ever again.  I remain convinced that the UI is a cruel joke perpetrated by the IBM devs just to see what they could get away with.



  • @Smitty said:

    @Daid said:

    Lotus Notes - It's better then eating glass!*

    * - Depending on the quantities of glass.
     

    I'd probably prefer a nice crunchy bowl of shards to using Notes 6.5 ever again.  I remain convinced that the UI is a cruel joke perpetrated by the IBM devs just to see what they could get away with.

    I've only seen Lotus Notes and I already share your sentiment.


  • @Smitty said:

    I'd probably prefer a nice crunchy bowl of shards to using Notes 6.5 ever again.  I remain convinced that the UI is a cruel joke perpetrated by the IBM devs just to see what they could get away with.
     

    Amen, brother.

    I had to support that piece of shit. We had customers lose data constantly, daily, because of Notes quirks... for example, if you choose to "Edit" an attachment, Notes correctly opens up the editor app and lets you type away and save it... in a temp directory. But the instant you close the email, bam, the temp directory is cleared, and the file's gone forever... I hope you didn't actually edit the attachment you asked to edit, because it's lost now! It wasn't even the system temp directory where there would be some hope of recovering it, it was some retarded Notes temp directory it kept on-the-side.

    I also loved the meetings that ended before they began. Not only is this possible in Notes, but it somehow creates them *all the time*.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    We had customers lose data constantly, daily, because of Notes quirks... for example, if you choose to "Edit" an attachment, Notes correctly opens up the editor app and lets you type away and save it... in a temp directory. But the instant you close the email, bam, the temp directory is cleared, and the file's gone foreve

    MS Outlook also has functionality that allows you to open an attachment from an email, edit it and save it (back into the email).  When closing the email you asked if you want to save.  Saying 'No' obviously loses the edits you've made.  I realise that the apps have done everything I asked of them but it does make it particularly easy to lose edits.  Or is there a temp file somewhere that can be recovered?

     As an aside, has any worked on a document that is stored on a USB key and had Windows throw up a message asking you to "close the CD door and retry" or similar?  This results in the document you're working on existing only as a ~*.tmp file which is locked and cannot be opened or copied (the original is deleted, presumably to allow the temp file to take its place).  If you close Word and safely removely the drive the temp file gets cleaned up by the OS and you lose, not only the edits, but the entire document.  A way round is to unsafely remove the drive (yank it), put it in a different PC and chop the text out of the temp file into a new doc.

    I've found that this behaviour adds an element of excitement to what can often be a fairly mundane task.



  • @steenbergh said:

    MS Word pulls that shit on me all the time. One moment, checking against Ducth (yeah, me too...) libraries, one tech term and BOOM: English automatically selected...
      

    Trust me, it's no better when your writing is predominately English to begin with. One tiny Latin phrase - just one. "Hey, that's not in my English dictionary!" You're right, it's not. I'll set that word's language to Latin. "No, it's English and it's wrong!" It's Latin. "It's English and it's wrong!". No, it's Latin. "It's English and it's wrong!" I BLOODY WELL KNOW WHAT LANGUAGE IT IS AND IT BLOODY WELL ISN'T ENGLISH!

     

    "Detect Language Automatically", my left buttock.

     



  • @Watson said:

    my left buttock.

    Pardon your Latin!



  • @steenbergh said:

    @Watson said:

    my left buttock.

    Pardon your Latin!

    No, it's English.


  • @steenbergh said:

    MS Word pulls that shit on me all the time. One moment, checking against Ducth (yeah, me too...) libraries, one tech term and BOOM: English automatically selected...
     

    AFAIK, Word stores language on a per-block basis. That means one paragraph can be English, while the next can be Nederlands.

    Many fruitless clicks have been wasted by yours truly in trying to set the language using the status bar thingy. Turns out that Ctrl+A, then select language works properly. I assume there are other ways, but I really don't know jack shit about MS Word, and haven't used it for a year now. My document needs are light, and I use OpenOffice.



  • @RTapeLoadingError said:

    MS Outlook also has functionality that allows you to open an attachment from an email, edit it and save it (back into the email).  When closing the email you asked if you want to save.  Saying 'No' obviously loses the edits you've made.  I realise that the apps have done everything I asked of them but it does make it particularly easy to lose edits.  Or is there a temp file somewhere that can be recovered?
     

    The difference is that Outlook, at least all recent versions, always open the attachment as "read-only". Meaning whatever program you're editing it in either won't let you save changes, or it'll ask for a new filename when you do. That's the correct way to do it. That said, I think it's possible for Outlook to edit the file and keep it in the email-- but they make that "feature" hard to find.

    I guess what it comes down to is when I supported Notes, I got calls about data loss on attachments *all the time*, and now that I support Outlook, I haven't seen a single one. So whatever Outlook's doing, it's much better.

    @RTapeLoadingError said:

    As an aside, has any worked on a document that is stored on a USB key and had Windows throw up a message asking you to "close the CD door and retry" or similar?

    I've never seen that. But I usually copy files to the HD first, since I have a healthy paranoia, and I like to have as many copies as possible of any document I'm working on. Anyway, I'd guess that's just a flaw in that particular USB key.

    But develop the paranoia, believe me the 200k of "wasted" HD space is worth the ass-saving you'll get later on when the USB key dies completely.



  • @RTapeLoadingError said:


    As an aside, has any worked on a document that is stored on a USB key and had Windows throw up a message asking you to "close the CD door and retry" or similar?  This results in the document you're working on existing only as a ~*.tmp file which is locked and cannot be opened or copied (the original is deleted, presumably to allow the temp file to take its place).  If you close Word and safely removely the drive the temp file gets cleaned up by the OS and you lose, not only the edits, but the entire document.  A way round is to unsafely remove the drive (yank it), put it in a different PC and chop the text out of the temp file into a new doc.

    I've found that this behaviour adds an element of excitement to what can often be a fairly mundane task.

     

    I've been told that all solid-state storage devices have some finite number of write operations they can perform before becoming completely incapable of writing anything. I've never actually seen this happen, so I'm not sure what kind of error message Windows would give you when it did, but it might be something to consider.



  • @Someone You Know said:

    I've been told that all solid-state storage devices have some finite number of write operations they can perform before becoming completely incapable of writing anything. I've never actually seen this happen, so I'm not sure what kind of error message Windows would give you when it did, but it might be something to consider.

    They do, but:

    - Actual OS syncs to disk are infrequent

    - The microcontroller usually contains logic to do wear-leveling (to move blocks around on the medium so that no single block gets written to too many times).  There's also usually logic that will flag unwriteable blocks as bad and avoid them seamlessly.

    - The number of writes are usually in the millions.  So you'd have to do a hell of a lot of writing to disk to actually exhaust it.  A HDD will usually die from mechanical failure long before a SDD dies.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    A HDD will usually die from mechanical failure long before a SDD dies.

    But when a HDD dies, you get at least one free frisbee as a consolation prize, assuming you have a screwdriver. I don't know of any solid-state device that can say that.




  • @Lingerance said:

    @steenbergh said:

    @Watson said:

    my left buttock.

    Pardon your Latin!

    No, it's English.
    And it's wrong.


  • @RTapeLoadingError said:

    As an aside, has any worked on a document that is stored on a USB key and had Windows throw up a message asking you to "close the CD door and retry" or similar? 

    Sounds like a U3 WTF to me, given that U3 mounts a "CD drive" when it runs.



  • I'd be using OOo given the option here. I've just reopened the document and found that Word has had a little trouble with the inline equations. The first and last equations in each paragraph have merged into the same equation region – along with everything in between.

    I'd wondered why the document was suddenly shorter by three pages.

     



  •  Oh Word.

     The first time I seriously used that application, was a continuous stream of WTFs. Just two I still remember:

    - I had set the application to make a back-up every 3 minutes, just like I was used on WordPerfect, Emacs, etc. I usually would close the editor when I went for lunch, but one day I didn't and my PC crashed because instead of overwriting the previous backup every 3 minutes, it had created a new file every three minutes and had filled the entire harddisk. The fun was that with a full harddisk you can't save the file, not even on a network disk, and you can't delete "the backups" either as they are in use...

     - Next one was Word creating a backup on a floppy, of a 1.2 Mb file, after that the file contained 2.4 Mb but neither file was readable.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The difference is that Outlook, at least all recent versions, always open the attachment as "read-only".

    That's not the behaviour I see on my work laptop (Vista/Office 2007)...  If I select a mail with an attachment and double click the attachment from the preview pane it does open in read only mode.  If, however, I open the mail and then open the attachment it allows me to make and save changes (i.e. back into the attachment).  These changes are lost if I choose not to save the mail when I close it.

    Re working directly on the memory stick.  This generally happens when I'm updating documentation on a client site.  The best way to do it would be to copy the doc to the PC, work on it, then save it back to the stick.  This does open up the possibility of forgetting the last step and getting back to the office without the document.  



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    - The number of writes are usually in the millions.  So you'd have to do a hell of a lot of writing to disk to actually exhaust it.  A HDD will usually die from mechanical failure long before a SDD dies.

    Yes, but early flash drives only had a limit in the thousands.  Because people think these things are slow to change, many people seem to feel it hasn't changed much yet - maybe it's now OVER 9000!  That's fine for most use, but using it as swap space would eat through that like nothing.

    For example, I have an old 32M stick, that I expect will probably be good for only a few thousand writes.  Since I got it, about 10 years ago, I've probably written to all of the pages on it about 4-5 times now.  At this rate, pretty much all existing HDDs will die from mechanical failure before it dies.



  • @tgape said:

    That's fine for most use, but using it as swap space would eat through that like nothing.

    If you are swapping that much, you have problems.  Maybe not bigger problems than putting your swap space on a 10 year old, 32mb removable flash drive, but still.



  • Back in 2006, German c't magazine tried to deliberately overwrite a flash drive often enough to cause failures. They say they could overwrite one logical address 16 million times; I don't know whether they gave up or succeeded then.



  • @ammoQ said:

    Back in 2006, German c't magazine tried to deliberately overwrite a flash drive often enough to cause failures. They say they could overwrite one logical address 16 million times; I don't know whether they gave up or succeeded then.

     

    Bah. Cliffhangers.



  • One logical address.

    I'm guessing the intention wasn't to test the lifespan of flash memory per se but that of the entire drive – which is more useful from a practical perspective (but how many physical locations were burnt out in the process?).

    To test the memory to destruction either the microcontroller needs to be lobotomised so that there's a fixed 1:1 relationship between logical addresses and physical location, or the entire drive needs to be filled alternately with all ones and all zeros

     


Log in to reply