Berkhof Collection ... resources not downloaded

Yesterday I read the fixes proposed and implemented them. This morning the rebuild of the index was complete and all is well. This was more work than it should have been but thank you Rosie and Mark for helping us get through the quagmire.

May your blessings abound,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Abraham

I finally pieced together the process and I have the books.  I don't have L3 installed so, here's what I did:

1. Go to http://www.logos.com/products/details/5084
2. Click on "Download Book Files"
3. Right click on each book and select "Save Link As"
4. Save it in some folder.  I used "G:\Logos"
5. Repeat for each book
6. In L4 run the command; "Scan G:\Logos"
7. Restart L4 (The books showed up, but it didn't index them. so no searching worked)
8. In L4 run the command "merge index"

I'm now waiting for a reindex.  We'll see what happens

What is worrying is how opaque Logos is, you make a purchase and you have to either turn detective or trust that the full collection has downloaded.

It is very poor practise of Logos not to make it clear what has been added to your collection, this also ties in with the decision not to let you know what you are dowloading which is really unacceptable, not least because it means that you do not  know when things are going wrong.

How do we know that books are nor being lost all over the place, I am not suggesting any bad motives but thats the whole point of a double entry record is that discrepencies come to light automatically.

Based on the conversation here today; I'd change my opinon and say that we need something like the following:

"Logos is now downloading 14:5mb of data "The Louis Berkhof collection; 15 volumes"

That way we can keep track of what's what.

I have now gone through 3 or 4 "downloads," and a lengthy indexing process last nite. I went to bed with 8 hours left and when I woke up had an error message that said I was out of HD space. I looked and have 10gig free and so I closed and reopened the program as instructed. It downloaded 18.3mb, again, and so far, 9 hours later, has not begun to reindex. I can only search the same one resource everyone else can in the Berkhof collection. I do not want to rebuild the index, I did this on Wed. after 4.0b. Frustrating is just not strong enough a word.

[sigh]

The merge index finished and the Berkhof books are not searchable.  I can read them, put them in a collection, but can't search.

Robert Pavich said:

Based on the conversation here today; I'd change my opinon and say that we need something like the following:

 

"Logos is now downloading 14:5mb of data "The Louis Berkhof collection; 15 volumes"

That way we can keep track of what's what.

Yes, and we also need a way to show in the library the newest books.  How can it be good business practice to make people ask each other and figure out (sometimes using guesswork) if they actually received everything they bought?  Really?

Mine downloaded and then performed 13 hours of indexing. I really get concerned about the toll this indexing is taking on my small laptop. It seems that it's really working the laptop, the fan is running and I can barely do anything when it's indexing. I always put the indexing in pause when I actually need to work on the laptop. And I dread accidentally shutting-down the laptop while it's indexing. I have to leave it on all night. And to top it off, in this case, I have no clue why it wanted to do that. The library window doesn't show any new books.

I tried the L3 method someone else mentioned. Updated L3, downloaded / installed the books, and then synchronized license. L4 still only downloaded 18.3 and did nothing.

I too may be going back to L3 until there's more of a major feature release that has me more convinced that it's stable and improved.

I'm in the same boat.  L4 keeps wanting to download 18.3 MB of resources (Berkhoff) but it never downloads right and keeps trying to download again.   Massive indexing has also started on my netbook.    Very annoying and makes me start rethinking how many more resources I want to add to my Logos4 given the issues with performance.

Douglas,

I'm glad it worked for you; mine is still unsearchable.  Keep in mind though that 14 of your files are probably L3 and only 1 is L4. Whenever they get around to fixing the problem, you'll have to download them again and endure another joyous time of indexing...

Douglas A. McMasters said:

I did notice something.  In my 'Theologies' collection, it lists two entries for Berkhof as author.  One entry has a '.' at the end of the name and thus generates a second author entry.  How do I report that?

I've done it for you. [:)]

Martin Folley said:

Fred Greco said:

Yes, and we also need a way to show in the library the newest books.  How can it be good business practice to make people ask each other and figure out (sometimes using guesswork) if they actually received everything they bought?  Really?

There is probably scope within the metadata for a purchase date field, or a download date field, or a last updated field, or similar, but this will be different for each user and difficult for Logos to implement from their end.

In the mean time I gave all my resources a rating of early on in the L4 beta process. New resources arrive without a rating (rating:0) so that they are easily identified.

As I became familiar with the different resources, I used for the stuff that I am not interested in (but just could not bring myself to remove!  ... targums etc.) and for the stuff that I want to investigate later. or stars are reserved for resources that I have found particularly useful, or come highly rated by others.

That's a useful system. Thanks for the idea! I've got a lot of catching up to do rating my resources...

Tom Traubitz said:

Oddly, I have two Louis Berkhoff's in my library when sorted by author.

One has a period after his name and needs correcting by Logos.

Me too!

william,

so far it is...

Ok..here is the lowdown on the Berkhof hack.....

I had 14 volumes show, and they are fully searchable...

Robert Pavich said:

william,

so far it is...

It didn't work for me. I don't have Logos 3 installed on my new computer. Logos 4 keeps downloading the new material everytime I start the program. I only have one Berkhof book showing up in my library.

mcfadden@abh.org said:

...in Berkhof, they do not search, however. 

Logos, hellllllllp!!!!

 

After pulling in the resources via L3 & the scan method, I took L4 offline, then forced a reindex.  It took a long time (I let it run overnight), but since then the new resources are searchable for me and L4 is as stable as it has been since I upgraded to 4b (apparently it loves to divide by zero when I create certain reading plan layouts, so I've had to work around that).

  Of course, it still pops up the occasional "downloading 18M" messages, but the constant reindexing has stopped and I can get work done....even with Use Internet/etc re-enabled.

Logos has shut down on me twice tonight and when I restart it wants to index,,,again, I know of the workaround but with the thousands of dollars I have invested in this company I don't feel I should have to. I really hope this gets worked out tomorrow.

I love Logos and know they are doing nothing intentionally but as an ambassador I can't bring myself to tell people how great this product is when, at this time, it is not.

Dave Hooton said:

Tom Traubitz said:

However, this fix does not seem universal (it worked correctly on my workstation, but does not seem to apply properly on my netbook.)

Without wondering why it does not apply (?) you can work offline on the Netbook ie. start L4 whilst holding Ctrl key down and select Work Offline.

The turning off automatic downloads worked OK.   It was loading of the downloaded books manually that seemed problematic.   What I learned is that the "scan x:\" command does not seem to load resources when the indexer is running.   (At least that is my hypothesis.)   Loading the downloaded books once the indexer finally finished up on my Netbook (a 14-15 hour proposition in the case of my little Toshiba) did work.   Right now I have Berkhof on both my machines, but it did take a considerable amount of time waiting out the re-indexing processes that seemed to get kicked off by this download.

Ryan,

Thanks for the post and apology.  My inconvenience was minor compared to some, and a workable solution came from this forum, which I very much appreciated.

I will say again that Logos has cashed in a significant number of chips with some of their faithful customers.  Enough to make them leave?  Perhaps not, but I'm sure they aren't willing to recommend Logos 4 until things change significantly for the better.

In addition to having boot on the ground in the tech support dept when new products are released, may I offer another reason not to issue products on Fridays--many of us are completing sermons for Sunday and Fri/Sat/Sun are particularly critical days when we need a stable product in Logos.

Douglas A. McMasters said:

In addition to having boot on the ground in the tech support dept when new products are released, may I offer another reason not to issue products on Fridays--many of us are completing sermons for Sunday and Fri/Sat/Sun are particularly critical days when we need a stable product in Logos.

Very good point. Thanks, Ryan, for working to get this process improved. As another user pointed out in another thread, having good IT processes and practices in place is as important as writing good software. A small company can sometimes get away with not having such, but Logos has matured. The number of customers in the installed base, the size of investment that people have in their Logos products and the mission critical nature of what they are doing really makes it urgent that release processes be formalized and adhered to every single time. Proofing the metadata for example. Ad hoc releases just don't cut it anymore for the company Logos is now.

I still do recommend Logos 4, but I always do so with certain disclaimers. And I'm available to help when people have problems, but it's a huge time sink for me and I would love to not have to do that anymore. I'd love to spend my support time helping people learn the power of the product rather than overcoming these sorts of challenges.

SteveF said:

Tom Traubitz said:

What I learned is that the "scan x:\" command does not seem to load resources when the indexer is running.

Tom, thank you for this. I will try to keep it in mind. I'm not sure that anyone has specifically stated it before.

Thanks again

At this point its only a theory.      The Scan command doesn't give any feedback that I can see (such as a message indicating resources are loaded) and I haven't investigated further. 

-T