WeSay Development Progress

A couple weeks ago, a potential user approached us wanting to use WeSay to keep a simple dictionary of words he had encountered while language learning. Right away, he wrote back and said he needed the entries in the dictionary view to be sorted. He also asked us to speed up the ability to find.

Obviously we could put sorting off no longer. Although at this point, we have still put off custom sort orders. In the process of working this out, we found we were able to get real-time searching and so have revised the UI.

Now, a suggestion list drops down as soon as the second character is typed and shows the closest words in the dictionary. As the user types, the suggestions change in real time.

Soon we will be making it so the user can select which writing system is displayed in the list and used by the find process.

After two discouraging days of trying to get Mono to work on the OLPC image, I have finally figured out why I was up against such a brick wall. The first problem I had was that the Mono installer for linux only provides bindings for GTK+2.4 and we have been using GTK+2.8. After unsuccessfully trying to use a machine.config file to tell mono that it can use GTK+2.4 in place of 2.8 (which I don’t know that it would have worked but I couldn’t get it to recognize that even), I finally decided to just copy over the 2.8 bindings from my ubuntu install.

Now I thought it would be easy from that but after awhile of getting all that hooked up, I determined that the gtk version on the OLPC must not be old enough and I copied over the ubuntu libs, only to find when I was going to copy them that the OLPC distribution is using GTK+2.10.

Apparently Fedora has a version of Mono that will work with GTK+2.10, so I have now decided I’m either going to have to build my own image Mono as a part of it or wait until Mono supports GTK+2.10.
On a whim, I took up Daniel Olivera’s offer to access his OLPC motherboard and ran some performance benchmarks to see how this compares to our test machine. The benchmarks seem to indicate that our test machine is about 75% as fast as the OLPC. You can read more details about it here. This puts my previous blog about the performance of WeSay on our test machine into better perspective.

Further testing on the memory usage seems to indicate the WeSay+Mono footprint on Linux is not 49MB as we previously thought but 19MB which is more like what we had found on Windows as well.

One of the things that’s been bugging us for the past couple weeks has been performance. Sure it’s fast on our machines but what about our target machine. There is quite a difference there. So I was finally able to get a Linux distribution (Ubuntu 6.06) on an old Dell Latitude CP M233XT (Pentium II 233 128MB Ram). While the amount of ram is the same as our target machine, the clock of the Dell is much slower than the OLPC’s. When I ran WeSay, it was very responsive. It did take around 12 seconds to launch but once it was up, moving around was pretty much instantaneous with a slight hint of a lag occassionally. Needless to say, we are very pleased. The mono+WeSay footprint was around 48M. The system was using 20M of swap.