These release notes are current as of December 2006. This file contains the following information:
About
This Release
What's
New
Supported
Platforms and System Requirements
Known
Issues
Installing
Insightful Miner
Running
Insightful Miner
Getting
Help for Insightful Miner
Contact
Information for Feedback
To familiarize yourself with this release, see the manual Insightful Miner 8 Getting Started Guide. This manual is provided as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file that you can access by selecting Getting Started from the main Help menu in Insightful Miner. The guide references data sets and documents in the examples folder under your Insightful Miner installation directory; you can use these files to familiarize yourself with the functionality in Insightful Miner.
The embedded S-PLUS engine has been updated to S-PLUS 8.
S-PLUS 8 introduced new graph color specification options. By default,
Insightful Miner 8 uses the same device-specific color palette used in
Insightful Miner 7 rather than the newer global color palette. The default
setting that controls this is use.device.palette(T), and you can
change the colors for any new plot nodes using Set Graph Colors or
Edit Graph colors in Options.
If you want to use the global color palette system, set
use.device.palette(F). If you want to see the color change in
existing plot nodes after setting use.device.palette(F), you must
invalidate and re-run the plot nodes to be able to see the color change in the
viewers. If you change colors via palette(), you must also
invalidate the plot node and re-run it to see the color change.
Solaris does not have this concept of a registered viewer. In previous releases, Netscape was always used to view HTML files and Acroread was used to view PDF files. On Solaris, options are now available in the Global Properties dialog to specify alternative viewers.
For a list of fixed bugs, see the file FIXEDBUG.TXT, located in your base installation directory.
Insightful Miner is supported on the following platforms:
The minimum recommended system configuration is Pentium III with 512MB of RAM. You must have at least 335MB of free disk space for the typical installation (and, if not installing on your C:\, an additional 50MB free disk space on drive C:\ is required for the installation process).
32-bit version for Solaris 8, 9, or 10.
You need 405MB of disk space to install Insightful Miner 8.0. For more information on installation and requirements, consult INSTALL.TXT, located in your base installation directory.
You must have a C or D drive to successfully run the License Wizard and launch the Insightful Miner 8.0 application. If you do not have a C or D drive, the hostid shown in the licensing wizard will be incorrect, although the wizard will complete successfully. When you attempt to launch Insightful Miner, the system will fail, giving the following error:
"Invalid Host - The hostid of this system does not match the hostid in the license file".
To correct this error, you must contact Insightful technical support and have them generate a new license file (support@insightful.com; tel. 800-569-0123)
If possible, set the Display Colors in the Windows Control Panel to use True Color (32 bit).
If the Display Colors are set to High Color (16 bit) the dithering of colors will give overly light images when printing.
If the Display Colors are set to 16 color, the application will fail to start properly.
HTML viewers do not open in a new browser window if you already have a browser open. This behaviour was noticed using Internet Explorer 6.0, and may apply to other browsers/versions. To open a new browser instance each time, in your browser, go to Tools -> Internet Options, click the Advanced tab, go to the Browsing section, and deselect (uncheck) the Reuse windows for launching shortcuts option. In Firefox, go to Tools -> Options, click the Tabs tab, and select the appropriate option.
Insightful Miner 8.0 is developed and extensively tested on the US English version of Windows. It is not tested on other localized versions of Windows.
Our experience suggests that the application will install and run properly on European Windows versions (such as French, German, and Spanish) that use only 8-bit ASCII characters.
Internally, characters are represented using an extended character set. However, the read and write functionality only supports 8-bit characters rather than a full Unicode character set.
Insightful Miner is unlikely to work completely on Asian versions of Windows that utilize multi-byte characters extensively. The Read Text File and Write Text File components provide a Text Encoding option that can be set to UTF-8 to indicate that the text file contains multi-byte characters in the UTF-8 format. The other Read and Write nodes typically do not handle multi-byte characters.
On Solaris, the first time you start Insightful Miner, you will see two S-PLUS tabs and two Insightful tabs. This problem occurs only the first time you start Insightful Miner.
The computational engine checks for an interrupt request whenever a computational node is ready to process a new block of data. If a computation takes a long time to perform, the node may not check for the interrupt very quickly. In this case you can stop the computation by saving the worksheet and exiting the application. Note that it is possible to save a worksheet while the network is running, so you can exit without losing worksheet changes.
Insightful Miner cannot always predict the amount of memory needed for an operation. If the operation requires more memory than is available, Insightful Miner attempts to detect this and generate a descriptive error message. In some cases, the operation will fail without an error message.
To increase the amount of memory Insightful Miner attempts to access, use the -Xmx argument when you start Insightful Miner. This argument instructs the Java virtual machine used to support the GUI that it should attempt to access the specified amount of RAM for the heap.
setenv JAVA_OPTIONS -Xmx1024m
IMiner
(You could create a startup script to set the variable.)
c:\Program Files\Insightful\Insightful Miner 8.0\IMiner.exe -Xmx1024m
(where c:\Program Files\Insightful\Insightful Miner 8.0\ is your installation directory.)
"C:\Program Files\Insightful\Insightful Miner 8.0\IMiner.exe" -Xmx1024m
(where c:\Program Files\Insightful\Insightful Miner 8.0\ is your installation directory.)
The above examples specify 1024MB of RAM for the heap. If the value you specify is too large, the application fails to start.
random() and randomGaussian() functions in the
Expression LanguageIf random() and randomGaussian() were called in
multiple column expressions for the Create Columns node (or the bigdata
library function bd.create.columns), the calls would return the
same values for a given row. This has been fixed, so that these random numbers
are independent. Note this also applies to the S-PLUS bigdata library function
bd.create.columns.
If the random seed was specified for the Create Columns, Filter
Rows, or Split Rows nodes (by specifying Random Seed or
Enter Seed in the Advanced tab), this value was ignored by the
random() and randomGaussian() functions. This has been
fixed, so setting a seed causes the same random sequence to be generated. Note
this does not apply to bd.create.columns,
bd.filter.rows, or bd.split.rows, since there is no
method to set the random seed.
If the wrong delimiter is specified when reading a text file, the preview may see the whole row or whole file as a single item and may take a long time to compute.
The status of a read file or read database node does not change when the file is changed external to the program. To re-read the file, invalidate the node.
The read and write database components stop processing when accessing data from a Windows 2000 machine using the Oracle ODBC driver version 8.1.5. The problem is fixed when the Oracle ODBC driver is upgraded to version 8.1.5.7.
All Write database nodes convert table names to upper case. The read database nodes match table names without regard to upper or lower case, so a table named "Table23" can be read by specifying a table name of "Table23", or "table23", or "TABLE23". Some databases such as Sybase can contain two distinct tables whose names just differ by case. In this situation, it is possible to retrieve the different tables by using an explicit SQL statement, such as "select * from Table23" or "select * from TABLE23". To prevent accidentally creating two such tables, all of the write database nodes convert the specified table name to upper case.
Note that the Write Oracle - Native converts the
When importing or exporting data sets with long column names, the column names can be truncated. The allowable length of the imported/exported column name depends on the file type and/or the database being accessed.
When you view a large number of charts, sometimes you will notice a lag associated with the chart scrolling that allows the charts to fall out of alignment with the headings.
When you create Trellis® graph using the option All Rows for plot types bar chart, dot plot, pie chart, level plot, contour plot, and wireframe, the conditioning columns are treated as categoricals by the underlying plotting function. The strip labels contain the category label specifying the range of each bin as text, rather than specifying the column names, with the width of the bar in the strip specifying the bin range.
When fitting a single tree with a large Maximum Rows value, you may need to reduce the value in Stop Splitting Complexity When Complexity Changes to grow a tree.
The dialog is not able to traverse Windows shortcuts pointing to other directories. If an item does not appear as a folder in the left-hand pane in Windows Explorer, it will not appear as a folder in the file selection dialog.
Files and directories may not be deleted from this dialog.
a b and cd!! was input to
an S-PLUS Filter Rows node, these columns would be accessed by the names
a.b and cd... The process is called "column name
mangling".
In Insightful Miner 7.0, a bug was introduced so S-PLUS Script node column name mangling was incorrect in a few cases:
This bug has been fixed so that the behavior is now consistent with Insightful Miner 3.0.
Note that column name mangling is never done when the Execute Bigdata
Script option is specified for the S-PLUS Script node, or when
calling S-PLUS bigdata library functions such as bd.block.apply,
bd.filter.rows, etc.
This is a problem intrinsic to running Java on remote X-servers. When the display of the Java application is exported to a remote X-server (like X-Win32), the application asks the X-server to use the same set of fonts that it uses natively. The X-server is a completely different machine which may or may not have all of the fonts.
There are many ways to work around this problem, but adding fonts is the best workaround for X-Win32 (one of the more commonly used remote X-servers):
In your Windows tray, right-click the X-Win32 icon and select XConfig.
Select the session you want to edit.
Select the Font tab, and highlight the line that
contains
...\lib\Fonts\75dpi
Select the Edit Alias File tab, and edit the file (in
Notepad or any text editor) and add the following lines:
monotype-arial-regular-r-normal--*-140-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1
b&h-lucida-medium-r-normal-sans-14-140-75-75-p-81-iso8859-1
Close all open X-Win32 sessions and reset X-Win32 (from the context menu).
Similar solutions exist for Linux® and Cygwin™ users, but this is a problem mainly with Windows users with X-Win32.
This has been disabled on Solaris to prevent a known crashing bug when running a worksheet; you can still use the Neural Net viewer after the node has completed running. This run-time viewer is functional in Insightful Miner for Windows.
You must have access to Netscape for HTML viewers to run in the Solaris version of Insightful Miner.
Installation instructions are available in the INSTALL.txt file accompanying these release notes. Different versions of this file are available for Windows and Solaris.
After you install Insightful Miner, the Insightful Miner 8.0 program group appears as an option under Programs when you click the Start button. This program group contains the following options:
Insightful Miner Help opens the help
system.
Insightful Miner launches the Insightful Miner
application.
Insightful Miner Release Notes opens the
release notes (this document).
Wizard for License Manager
launches the Insightful License Fulfillment wizard which generates and installs
license keys.
To start Insightful Miner in Windows:
By default, the installation program places a shortcut to Insightful Miner on your desktop. You can simply double-click the shortcut icon to launch Insightful Miner.
During installation, a shortcut to the IMiner shell script will be placed in a location determined by the system administrator. If this script is installed in a commonly available location in the user’s path, it will be directly available by typing IMiner at the Solaris prompt. This script is also available at the top level of the Insightful Miner installation directory.
On Solaris, the X-Windows system is used to display graphical user interfaces. Insightful Miner requires an X-server to be running on the machine displaying the user interface.
To use Insightful Miner on Solaris, you must be able to connect to your local X window server. Thus, you must have the environment variable DISPLAY set, and the X window server on your local machine must allow Insightful Miner to create windows on your machine; see the Solaris programs xauth or xhost. Typically, if you can run xclock on your machine, then Insightful Miner should also be able to access the X window server.
To set your display from a C-like shell (csh, tcsh, etc.), use the setenv command:
% setenv DISPLAY <display_name>
where <display_name> is the name of your local machine. From the Bourne- and Korn-like shells (including sh, ksh, bash, etc.), use the following commands:
% DISPLAY=<display_name>;export DISPLAY
You do not need to do this if your DISPLAY variable is set already; check the output from echo $DISPLAY to be sure.
Solaris versions of Insightful Miner may be accessed remotely from a Windows desktop using X-server software. Insightful Miner has been testing with the following products:
Exceed (Hummingbird)
Reflection X (WRQ)
X-Win32 (StarNet)
Cygwin (Redhat Cygwin)
The graphical user interface (GUI) performance of Insightful Miner will depend upon the X-server software. The performance of the underlying Insightful Miner engine is not affected.
The following notes describe configurations that have been found to produce the best results.
Version 8.0.0 of Exceed was tested, and no significant performance problems were observed. When launching Insightful Miner from an xterm, the xterm pops in front of the Insightful Miner application when it first displays, and the Insightful Miner application must be clicked with the mouse to recover desktop focus. Fonts were smaller than on other X-servers. Exceed seemed to have the best response time of any of the X-servers.
Version 10.0 of Reflection X was tested, and no performance problems were observed.
When using some versions of X-Win32 to start-up X-applications on your desktop, we have found that the "multiple windows" setting causes some latency in GUI response and some defects in displaying GUI elements. We recommend running in "single window" mode.
If you are connecting with XDMCP, then running in "single window" mode should present you with a default window manager from which you may run Insightful Miner.
If you are connecting with rsh or rexec in "single window" mode, the application may be displayed in a "raw" X-session that lacks a window manager. We recommend that you start the Solaris default window manager (/usr/dt/bin/dtwm) using either the X-Win32 "Command" option, or from an xterm on the Solaris host. After you launch the window manager, the Insightful Miner application should run and display successfully.
The open-source Cygwin product - currently sponsored by Redhat - provides a UNIX-like environment that runs on top of a Windows operating system. It includes a port of XFree86 that provides X-server capabilities. The X-server utility is /usr/X11R6/bin/XWin.exe, and it is generally invoked from a start-up script in the same directory, named startxwin.sh.
By default, Cygwin installs with the twm window manager, and the startxwin.sh script uses twm as the window manager when launching XWin. While this works fairly well, we have found that the WindowMaker (wmaker.exe) window manager to be much better in working with Insightful Miner applications. To use the WindowMaker window manager under Cygwin, make sure that the wmaker package is included when installing Cygwin, and then, following the installation, you will need to modify the startxwin.sh script to call wmaker instead of twm.
Cygwin also offers the FVWM-2 window manager, but that does not work as well as WindowMaker in displaying the Insightful Miner application.
Recently Cygwin introduced a "multiple window" option for XWin. This appears to have significant defects at the present time. We recommend that you avoid using this option.
On Windows, the help system in Insightful Miner uses Microsoft’s current help standard, HTML Help. On Solaris, the help system uses JavaHelp.
To obtain help on a particular component in this release, click Help in the Properties dialog for the component. Alternatively, you can right-click on a node in your worksheet and click Help from the context-sensitive menu. To view the table of contents, index, or search pages for the help system, use the options under the Help menu in the Insightful Miner graphical user interface.
You can access online PDF versions of the Getting Started Guide and the User's Guide. In the Insightful Miner main menu, go to Help and select the appropriate manual from the drop-down list.
Please feel free to contact us with suggestions and questions regarding possible bugs in this release. Bug reports can be sent to the following email address:
We are very interested in receiving your comments and suggestions for improving Insightful Miner.
General information about this release of Insightful Miner is available at:
http://www.insightful.com/support/iminer80/default.asp
The list of Insightful Miner Frequently Asked Questions is available from: