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- 1 - 6. _K_n_o_w_n__P_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__a_n_d__W_o_r_k_a_r_o_u_n_d_s 6.1 _G_e_n_e_r_a_l__p_r_o_b_l_e_m_s For the following known problems with MineSet 2.5, Silicon Graphics' internal tracking numbers are listed in parentheses when relevant. Other problems may occur if the proper sets of patches are not installed with MineSet. For a description of the recommended patches and the problems they fix, see chapter 2 of these release notes. +o If you have installed patch 2087 and installed either patch 2203 or patch 2204 that are included with the MineSet distribution (2203 for IRIX 6.3 and 2204 for IRIX 6.4), you may encounter a series of rqs warning messages from Software Manager. These error messages can be safely ignored. (#572654) +o In IRIX 6.3 and later, the system graphics libraries have an unenforced prerequisite on dmedia_eoe.sw.base. If the graphics tools fail to run, giving an error that libvice.so could not be loaded, this should be installed. Note that the error message will go to the terminal window from which MineSet was launched, and if it was launched from the desktop, it might not be seen at all. (#451195) +o The _M_i_n_e_S_e_t _U_s_e_r'_s _G_u_i_d_e refers to the generic mining application engine "MIndUtil," although in reality there exist two separate applications: the parallel MIndUtil_p and the single-threaded MIndUtil_s. Previous MineSet releases only contained a single- threaded application named "MIndUtil." (See the chapter "Changes and Additions in MineSet 2.5" for additional details.) +o Parallel MIndUtil_p requires more memory than the single threaded MIndUtil_s. A user is much more likely to run out of memory when computing with the parallel MIndUtil_p. Techniques to reduce the memory requirements include sampling and limiting the size of the model (i.e., setting maximum height in the decision tree options). (#592429) +o MIndutil may crash when running out of memory with the following message: Fatal error on server:MIndUtil exited abnormally with signal 10 (Bus Error) core dumped Try to reduce the memory requirements using the - 2 - techniques described previously. (#592406) +o If you drill through any selection which includes a label value in either the Evidence Visualizer or the Decision Table Visualizer, you will get the following Tool Manager error: While loading new history for drill-through, the following errors occurred: - For operation #1, <Filter> error: In string, (near ^): (`label`=="0"^) Incompatible type Note: Label values are selected in these tools by clicking on their names in the RIGHT pane of the visualization. To workaround this problem, change the type of the label column to a string before running the Evidence or Decision Table classifiers. This will not affect the mining process and will eliminate the error. (#582404) +o If you are using the Tool Manager to suggest mappings and then view a decision table, then if you drill through and send the data to the Tool Manager, then the mappings in the the x-axis and y-axis will revert to their previous values. (#582435) +o If the WebFORCE MediaBase server is running as well as MineSet, you may, under rare circumstances, have a resource conflict that results in MineSet tools being unable to run. The error message will not specifically indicate that the conflict is with WebFORCE MediaBase -- it will refer to "Insufficient GL resources." To work around this problem: su /sbin/chkconfig mediad off to direct that the WebFORCE MediaBase server not be activated, and then reboot the system to have that take effect. (#570760) +o In rare circumstances, the Tool Manager's File|Connect_to_Server menu option may be unable to connect to the server machine and will display a "No Socket" error. One reason that this error may occur is if users listed in the server's /etc/passwd file do not have corresponding entries in the /etc/shadow file (that is, if passwd shadowing is not turned on). - 3 - (#526948) +o If a drill-through involves a floating point value, the drill-through expression will include a small margin of error around that floating point value to avoid roundoff error. (For example, instead of searching for x=1.0, it may search for x>=0.99999999999999 && x<=1.00000000000001.) This may result in drill-through returning some data that doesn't exactly match the selection criteria. If this is a problem, use "Edit History" in the Tool Manager to edit the filter criteria. (#508805) +o When entering an expression where a string is assigned a null value, you must use the string "?" rather than a non-quoted question mark (?). Failure to do so will result in a type mismatch. +o In scatterviz, the bounding box selector can get distorted +o In scatterviz, for lift or ROI curves, under 6.2 Irix, use of a bounding box can give a core dump. In 6.3 and 6.4 it may result in a freeze. (#599589) +o In scatterviz, pushing up against the extent of one dimension while dragging, can cause slight drift in the position of the opposite side.(#599589) +o The decision table visualizer fails if no columns are mapped to requirements. (#599582) +o For lift and ROI curves, changing the entity shape to a bar will cause a crash. (#599583) +o The graphical tools may run out of colors, especially if there are many colors in a legend. While this will not break the tool, it may degrade the appearance, the legend will not show the colors of the objects, and it may affect other tools. (#421308) +o When trying to connect to Oracle8 running on a Windows NT system, you may receive a "multibyte character conversion error" message from Oracle. You can work around this problem by setting the ORACLE_HOME environment variable to point to a valid 7.3.3 Oracle installation. This is the environment variable for the datamove process, and must be set in the .login or .cshrc of the account from which you execute datamove. (#596543) - 4 - +o In many of the file selection boxes, if you open a file, and then reopen the file selection box, the previously opened file will be highlighted, but will not be in the text field below. Pressing OK at that point will attempt to open the directory containing the file, rather than the file itself. It is necessary to specifically select the file to cause it to be opened. +o If you complement the drill-through in a visual tool with sliders, the drill-through will select everything except that which matches the current slider setting and the current selection. (For example, you might get everything except California in 1986. You will get California in 1987, and Nebraska in 1986.) This is probably not what is desired. To work around this, use Send to Tool Manager, and edit the resulting filter expression. (#503502) +o When the tools display floating point values, they only display them to a few significant decimal places. This is intended to be easier to read, but could result in problems if you need more accurate (higher precision) values. 6.2 _P_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__w_h_e_n__r_u_n_n_i_n_g__u_n_d_e_r__H_u_m_m_i_n_g_b_i_r_d__E_x_c_e_e_d Several problems occur when displaying MineSet to a PC running Hummingbird Exceed. Hummingbird Communications has indicated that these will be fixed in the next release of Exceed. +o Most of the visual tools have a File pulldown menu option to save or print images of themselves. However, in MineSet 2.0 and 2.5, due to a limitation in the implementation, this functionality is only available when displaying on a Silicon Graphics workstation. When displaying to other hardware, use the save or print functions provided by that hardware. For example, when displaying to a PC running Hummingbird Exceed, you can print or save using the pulldown menu in the upper left corner of the main window. (#505297) +o When using the Statistics Visualizer and Cluster Visualizer, sometimes scrolling may leave the window corrupted. A dialog will be posted if you attempt to run the Statistics Visualizer or Cluster Visualizer against Hummingbird warning of this problem. To disable the warning add the lines *minesetWarnHummingbirdStatviz: FALSE *minesetWarnHummingbirdClusterviz: FALSE to your .Xdefaults file. - 5 - Hummingbird Communications has made available patches that will address this problem. These patches will be incorporated into the next release of Exceed and Exceed 3D. Information on the patches and new versions is available from: http://mineset.sgi.com/utils/hummingbird.html (#507476, #589215) 6.3 _K_n_o_w_n _p_r_o_b_l_e_m_s _w_i_t_h _I_n_d_u_c_e_r_s, _C_l_a_s_s_i_f_i_e_r_s, _a_n_d _C_o_l_u_m_n _I_m_p_o_r_t_a_n_c_e +o The MIndUtil options in .mineset-classopt are not part of the session mechanism that Tool Manager supports. If Tool Manager files (.mineset suffix) are transferred between users without passing the .mineset-classopt file, then results may differ. (#502533) 6.4 _K_n_o_w_n__p_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__w_i_t_h__T_r_e_e__V_i_s_u_a_l_i_z_e_r +o If you average data in the aggregation panel of the Tool Manager, and then have the Tree Visualizer average it again, this will result in an average of averages, which is generally not correct. Tool Manager will give a warning if it detects this case. To work around this, don't aggregate in Tool Manager, and let the Tree Visualizer do all of the averaging. (#459734) +o When a second view is opened in place of the first, not all of the virtual memory used by the first view is released. If an error occurs in a configuration file and the file is corrected and reopened, some virtual memory will also be lost. After reopening the file several times or opening several configuration files, it is wise to exit the program and restart it. (#336233) +o If a node has more than 480 children, and the menu listing children is brought up, and a child after the 480th is selected, the Tree Visualizer will fail with a core dump. (#510290) +o For very large hierarchies, navigation and selection may not work correctly near the leaf nodes of the hierarchy. If filtering by depth is enabled in a very large hierarchy, and some nodes have a large number of children, navigation may be difficult. (#417127) +o There is no easy way to set everything to the same color, other than the default grey. The only way to - 6 - force everything to a single color is to explicitly map a column to the color, and enter a single scale value, assigning it to that color. For example, in the configuration file, if _v_a_r were the name of a variable, you could enter color var, scale 0, colors "red"; (#327168) +o On some hardware platforms, the ground and sky are a single solid color rather than shaded between two colors. (#425845) 6.5 _K_n_o_w_n__p_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__w_i_t_h__M_a_p__V_i_s_u_a_l_i_z_e_r +o In the Map Visualizer, if you select an object on the map boundary and then click on the background next to boundary, the map may disappear. To make it reappear, glide the pointer over the map, or select a different object. This problem will be fixed in a future release of MineSet. (#582614) +o If you use dates for the sliders in the Map Visualizer, the display field for the slider may be too small to see the entire date. The display field is limited to 22 characters, while date ranges can be as long as 37 characters. (#528585) +o Every named graphical object keyword in the Hierarchy file must be found in the Gfx File associated with that graphical object's level in the hierarchy. +o When heights and/or colors are derived from values from two-dimensional arrays, the sliders must be declared in the View Map Section in the order they are used in the array declaration in the Input Section. That is, if the data is in array xyz[keyA][keyB], then the "slider keyA;" statement must precede the "slider keyB;" statement. +o Heights and/or colors which are derived from array values are computed using the precise data values from the input data file. As the slider(s) move between these precise data points, the heights and/or colors are computed using values that are linear interpolations between these known data values, and hence the resulting graphics is only a "best guess" of what the true intermediate data values might be. This also applies to the Splat Visualizer and Scatter Visualizer. - 7 - +o The above comments hold true for any array expressions which are derived from array input data. This means that if an array C[] is defined as arrays A[]/B[], then the value of C[] will match this expression at the precise datapoints, but not necessarily at the intermediate interpolated points. +o The Gfx File /_u_s_r/_l_i_b/_M_i_n_e_S_e_t/_m_a_p_v_i_z/_g_f_x__f_i_l_e_s/_u_s_a._z_i_p_c_o_d_e._g_f_x purports to contain U.S. zipcode graphics, but there are flaws in its contents: many zipcodes are missing, which means that data which refers to a missing zipcode will produce a generic rectangle off to the right of the rest of the zipcodes in the main display window; zipcode graphical objects are merely suggestive, rather than precisely accurate in size and shape. Zipcodes are represented by equally sized rectangles which are roughly centered on the geographical center of the true zipcode area. The "zip100" aggregations (consisting of zipcode groups which share the first three digits) are larger rectangles which are also generally centered at the aggregated geographical center of the constituent zipcodes. 6.6 _K_n_o_w_n__p_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__w_i_t_h__S_p_l_a_t__V_i_s_u_a_l_i_z_e_r +o In the Splat Visualizer tools, the draggable disks that appear along axes whenever the pick dragger is present are not constrained to the range of the axes. (#537439) 6.7 _K_n_o_w_n__p_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__w_i_t_h__S_c_a_t_t_e_r__V_i_s_u_a_l_i_z_e_r +o For the cube and diamond shapes, entity sizes are based on absolute values. This makes it impossible to interpret the sizes unambiguously if the variable mapped to size includes both negative and positive data values. You can work around this by using the bar entity shape. +o It is possible for entities to overlap, or for one entity to be contained within another (and thus hidden from view). If the entities are the same size, this can lead to visual artifacts, such as an entity being drawn in two different colors. To minimize this problem, use the diamond entity shape. (#350733) +o Highlighting entities in large datasets can be slow. When this happens, you can filter to a subset of the data to improve the speed. - 8 - +o The level of detail settings do not apply to the orthographic camera. For example, if you use the perspective camera, zoom in on some labels, and then switch the orthographic camera, then after that the visibility of the labels does not change regardless of whether you zoom in or out. (#349506) +o Highlighting does not always work when 3D perspective is off. +o Display attributes (size, color, position) which are derived from array values are computed using the precise data values from the input data file. As the animation moves between these precise data points, the display attributes are computed using values that are linear interpolations between these known data values, and hence the resulting graphics is only a "best guess" of what the true intermediate data values might be. +o The above comments hold true for any array expressions which are derived from array input data. This means that if an array C[] is defined as arrays A[]/B[], then the value of C[] will match this expression at the precise datapoints, but not necessarily at the intermediate interpolated points. 6.8 _K_n_o_w_n__P_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__w_i_t_h__t_h_e__D_a_t_a__M_o_v_e_r +o The Tool Manager and Data Mover do not make any efforts to coordinate their writes to disk. Since they usually run on different machines, this is not generally an issue. However, if the Tool Manager and Data Mover are run on the same host, and the Tool Manager connects to the Data Mover's file_cache directory, then Tool Manager and Data Mover will often overwrite each other's files. The usual symptom of this is files being truncated to a few thousand bytes during file uploads and downloads. Similar problems can occur even if the client and server are on different machines, but share disks via NFS mounts. The workaround for this problem is never to run the Tool Manager from the server file_cache directory or any of its subdirectories. +o The Tool Manager starts up the client-server connection to datamove using the rexec(3N) library function. This means that if a system's configuration does not allow rexec, MineSet will not work. This is most likely to be the case in high-security environments. - 9 - +o If a user's initialization files (.cshrc, .profile, etc.) on the server machine cause output to be sent to the terminal whenever the user starts a new shell, then the initial connection from the Tool Manager to datamove may not work. The Tool Manager contains logic to skip over such extraneous output, but it is not foolproof. +o Even if the Tool Manager is killed with a control-C, the Data Mover will continue processing the current query or mining command until it finishes. (#426664) +o Since the Data Mover locks the files directory in order to prevent conflicts and incorrect results, a hung datamove process will prevent further access to the server by that user. The MineSet Tool Manager will offer to kill such processes. +o The algorithm used by the Data Mover to perform aggregation clusters, rather than sorts, the output records. The output order of the records is not meaningful. 6.9 _K_n_o_w_n__P_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__w_i_t_h__t_h_e__T_o_o_l__M_a_n_a_g_e_r +o The Tool Manager does not support drag and drop. If you try to drag and drop items from dialog boxes, fatal errors will sometimes result. +o When creating your own ".schema" files, there are a number of reserved names in the file syntax. To avoid conflict with these names, enclose the column names in backward single quotes, i.e., `column name`. +o Drill-through behaves differently when a client data file has been mapped directly to a visual tool with no transformations. The history used for drill-through is stored in the client schema file, thus drill-through on a visualization of that file will show the history that created that file. As a result, if you map a client file directly to a visual tool and then drill-through, the results may be quite different than if you, for example, removed a column, then mapped it to the visual tool and did drill-through. +o Also during the "Show Original Data" process, when specifying a login and password for a new server, if you change the server name to that of the server currently in use by the Tool Manager, it will ask if you want to kill the other datamove process. Killing it will cause Tool Manager to lose its main connection, - 10 - voiding the current transformation history. +o Also during the "Show Original Data" process, the Tool Manager may ask you for the server/DBMS login and password each time. +o If you try to run a visual tool that is not installed on your system, you get the message: "Cannot find the tool <null>". +o Tool Manager cannot support database tables whose columns require quoting (e.g., those columns with spaces or special characters in their names). +o When working with client files as the data source, the file name is shown in the top panel. If the file has a long name or path, the name may be cut off. Increase the window size to see more of the name. +o Visualization tool files sometimes contain absolute path names when referring to their schema/data files, making it impossible to copy them to new machines. +o In certain dialog boxes, when entering integer numeric values, if you enter a number larger than 2^31 (slightly more than 2 billion), the number you typed will be replaced by a random value. There are no cases where such a large number would be appropriate, however. +o When creating classifiers using the Classifiers mining panel, the name of the classifier created has the same prefix as the current session. Thus, if your current session is called "cars.mineset", a decision tree classifier will be called "cars-dt.class", and an evidence classifier will be called "cars-evi.class". If you create a classifier, apply the classifier to the current table, and create the classifier again, then the original classifier is overwritten. The new classifier requires columns not present in the original table, thus operations produce the error message: InstanceReader::construct_assim_map: attributes in original schema were unaccounted for. +o In the Change Types dialog, if you select several columns with different types, the type menu only shows the type of the first column. If you wish to change all selected columns to that type, you must reselect the menu item to effect the change. The list of columns is updated to reflect the change. - 11 - +o Intensive random clicking and dragging in the Apply Classifier dialog box can occasionally cause the Tool Manager to core dump. +o Manually modifying a .schema file may introduce errors and, rarely, may cause the Tool Manager to core dump when loading a .mineset file that refers to a flawed .schema file. +o The Remove Column button requires a column to be selected in the Current Columns list. It is normally grayed out when no columns are selected, but rarely it is active even when no columns are selected. Pressing it at this time has no effect. +o The Binning dialog's panel for automatic binning allows you to specify 0 as the number of bins to create. Instead of disallowing this invalid number, the Tool Manager instead silently invokes the "Automatically choose number of bins" mode. +o The Tool Manager sometimes incorrectly thinks you have made changes that would require the current session file to be saved. 6.10 _K_n_o_w_n__P_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__w_i_t_h__m_i_n_e_s_e_t___b_a_t_c_h +o The mineset_batch program sometimes reports incorrect names for the visualization files created as the result of running the .mineset file. +o The mineset_batch program will not run correctly on a history whose destination is the Statistics Visualizer tool. +o If the passwords are entered via the command line arguments, the arguments will be briefly visible to any user running ps(1). Mineset_batch will remove them from its argument list as quickly as possible, but there is a brief period of time during which they will be visible and thus may cause a security violation. If this is of concern, the passwords should instead be read from standard input. 6.11 _K_n_o_w_n__P_r_o_b_l_e_m_s__w_i_t_h__P_r_i_n_t_i_n_g_. +o MineSet's printing routines assume a US letter size. The default letter sizes of other countries may not print properly. This problem will be fixed in a future release of MineSet; in the meantime, try to use US letter sized paper (8.5 inches by 11 inches) if - 12 - possible. (#589723) +o Image files sent to printer may get mistaken for VRML 2.0 data file if CosmoWorld is installed. To fix this comment out the following line "CONVERT CosmoWorlds1.0Data AsciiTextFile COST 500" in "/usr/lib/filetype/install/cosmo_worlds.ftr"