Pocketpedia knocks out iPhone wi-fi?

[josephabennett99]

This is very strange, but I can't think of any other reason this is happening. and I haven't been able to find this in the forums so far (could be a bad search?). I just bought DVDpedia and downloaded PocketPedia (moved away from Delicious Library). I have never, ever, ever, had problems with the iPhone accessing the wi-fi in my house, but since I've installed PocketPedia2, when I hit "sync", it seems that 90% of the time, it knocks out the iPhone's wifi. Here is what happens:

I see that wifi on the iPhone is connected.
I have DVDpedia running on my Mac, a macbook pro wirelessly connected to my house's wifi
I start up Pocketpedia. I can see in the status bar of the iPhone 3G, running 3.1, that wifi is still connected, with full strength.
I hit the "sync" button, and choose DVDpedia (I also have CDpedia installed, so it asks which one)
It brings up the dialog box saying it is connecting to the Mac
Then I notice, about 90% of the time, that my iPhone changes from full strength wireless to 3G connection
Thus, no syncing occurs. Sometimes I get a message saying I'm not on the network, sometimes not. Usually not, and it just hangs there.
I quit PocketPedia, and have to go into settings and connect the wifi again.
If I don't do this, but quit PocketPedia and "wait a while" (about 5 minutes) wifi will start showing up as connected on the iPhone again.

I have turned off (rebooted) the iPhone, turned off the Macbook's wifi and turned it back on. I have also rebooted the Mac. I use the Mac to connect via VPN to work, but whether VPN is running or not, doesn't seem to make a difference in how well it connects to PocketPedia.

Any suggestions?

Sorry if this has been covered in another post -- i searched for things like this, but just didn't find anything.

[Conor]

Pocketpedia of course should not affect your WiFi connection. From your description it seems that the moment that Pocketpedia starts asking for data from DVDpedia the connection is dropped. Could be that when your router starts transmitting information it causes interference. Before trying different router settings (a new channel, extend the DHCP client lease time, change from WPA to WEP or vice versa), I would create a dedicated wireless network from your MacBook Pro, this will eliminate any local network variables. To set up a network choose "Create Network..." from under the Airport menu. Then connect the iPhone directly to this network under Settings-->WiFi and try a sync with Pocketpedia. Let us know the results as we haven't heard of this specific problem before.

[josephabennett99]

That doesn't seem to help. I'm guessing it still "knocks out" (for lack of a better word) the iPhone's Wi-fi, because it still doesn't sync and still gives that hang where it doesn't seem to do anything. Sometimes, regardless of creating a network or using the house's network, it will change the dialog from "requesting collections" to "please be sure to have Pedia version 4.5.4 or higher on your Mac", which I interpret as "I initially made the connection, but now I can't seem to move data" (due to the fact that wifi is not active on the iPhone.

Clearly, Pocketpedia is not turning off or disabling wifi, but there is something going on in the communication where the iPhone gets confused and disconnects from that wifi connection, only connecting later (when I close the app and wait for several minutes or go and explicitly reconnect).

I am running an Apple Airport Extreme as my base station with firmware version 7.4.2. I have enabled "WPA/WPA2 Personal" on it (WEP sucks for security). I don't have "interface robustness" checked because I didn't want to affect performance, but I could try that.

[josephabennett99]

I have had better success when I turn-off Bluetooth on the phone before trying to sync.

I also had better success after removing PocketPedia and then re-installing it. I had some other problems, which I think had to do with the fact that the database was imported from a Delicious Library database. I would see both CDpedia and DVDpedia "hang" during a sync with PocketPedia after a certain number of records. Luckily, I know sqlite3 pretty well, and was able to find the records it was having problems with by their UID (needed a little detective work to find that stuff out), and then by updating those records inside the *pedias, was able to get a sync to go through.

Joe

[Nora]

What exactly was it that you had to fix in the entries from Delicious Library? Maybe that's a fix we can address in the Pedias directly?

[josephabennett99]

It was hard to pin it down exactly. For whatever reason, when importing into CDpedia, all the tracks from an album in Delicious Library showed up as a single track with carriage returns in between tracks in CDpedia (the ZTRACK table). I think in the one in question, there may have been some kind of hidden (i.e. non-printable ASCII) character in the ZENTRY field of one of the tracks. When I manually deleted this track from within the GUI of CDpedia (it was hanging on importing track 36 into Pocketpedia, and I was able to cross-reference this to the album via the ZENTRY field in the ZTRACK table against the ZENTRY table), I was able to get it to go further, and then it hung on another track later.

I eventually went in via sqlite3 and deleted all records from the ZTRACK table, and then the import to Pocketpedia went fine. I have since repopulated the ZTRACK table via the CDpedia GUI for all my albums (well, not entirely - there are 270 albums in my collection!)

I never did open up the Pocketpedia.sql file under sqlite3 to see what may have happened. I also should point out that the albums were originally entered under Delicious Library 1.5 and then migrated to Delicious LIbrary 2.0, so who knows how much corruption may have occurred over time.

Regardless, my seemingly useless geekery knowledge on sqlite3 actually paid off for something!

So, if you were to look at anything in the *pedias on this, I would look at how you are copying table information from *.pedia to the Pocketpedia *.sql. There should never be a reason there would be non-printable ASCII characters in the database , but maybe the *pedias or sqlite3 on the iPhone has a problem with them...

[Nora]

Ah, geekery is never useless! Thanks for the detailed info. We'll take a look at that here.