E-Prime Stability

[Cognitology]

Hi,

Given that E-Prime 2 is now pretty much a final release, I was wondering how many of you feel it remains *particularly* instable? I mean, E-Studio (2, pro), latest version, and I don’t stupid crashes (say, recursively calling the sessionproc from a list within sessionproc). Just things like

·         Writing inline:

Try typing:

/*

Hoppa

*/.

 

Works! Automatically becomes

‘/*

‘Hoppa

‘*/.

 

Now commented out. However, type in an inline (not the user part)

‘/*

Hoppa

*/....CRASH!

 

·         Just dragging objects around, adding attributes, all sorts of randomness. Sometimes, there are nice big red crosses where graphics usually are.

 

The latter is the more annoying part. In general, when I’m developing something, on both my laptop and home pc (both win7prox64), this happens. In my experience, in fact, most people, even if they are very experienced, have random stability issues with e-studio. My question then is: does the list have similar issues? Say, if you’ve been doing some development, what is the chance that e-prime will crash within 60 minutes? I’m estimating it at 80% here.

 

Cheers,

Michiel

 

Michiel Sovijärvi-Spapé

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology

Aalto & Helsingin Yliopisto,

Finland

 

[David Vinson]

Hi Michiel,

I'm still plodding along using an XP box for my main development
platform, EP Pro latest version and it seems to be much more stable than
you've experienced: P(crash per 1hr) << 5%. Although I haven't done
anything particularly unusual or exploratory lately.

I have had quite a few crashes on running during development - the usual
difficulties getting videos to work; loading nested Lists from file; but
none of these are related to e-studio stability.

Copy-pasting from multiple open experiments, no problem at all; dragging
objects around, ditto. No weird red X's either. Probably your
development and mine is comparing apples and oranges, but my rate of
crashes within E-Studio 2.x has been pretty constant (and low) for quite
some time. Maybe it's more stable on XP?

Obviously this isn't much of a long term solution given the impending
end of support for XP and perhaps some strong institutional pressure to
move on.... I'd be interested to know about others' experiences too.

best,
DV

On 10/10/2013 14:20, Cognitology wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Given that E-Prime 2 is now pretty much a final release, I was

> wondering how many of you feel it remains **particularly** instable? I

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--
David Vinson, Ph.D.
ESRC Research Fellow
Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department
University College London
26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP
Tel +44 (0)20 7679 5311 (UCL internal ext. 25311)

[David McFarlane]

Michiel,

Good question, and I am eager to hear from
others. I have encouraged users at my location
to move up to EP2.0.10, but that's going slowly,
and we do run into some troubles because we have
to get used to new ways of doing things in
EP2.0.10. So I do not have a lot of development
experience with it yet, my experience so far is
mostly instructional and explorational. Based
only on that, I like EP2.0.10 a lot, it
introuduces a *lot* of good features, even some
of the problems turn out to be features once they
are properly understood (Generate PreRun is one
of those, and I will mention another below).

Now to address a couple points in particular.

First, EP2 is not just "pretty much" a final
release, it *is* officially a final release since EP2.0.10.242.

And your commenting example... Yes, that
trippped me up at first too, and it breaks one of
the exercises in my video course, and I found it
very annoying because I used /* */ a lot to
comment things out & in. But try the
following: Select some lines of code. Now press
Ctrl+' (that's the Ctrl key along with the
apostrophe key). See all those lines get
commented with a "'" added to the start? Now for
the fun part, with those lines still selected,
press Ctrl+Shift+' -- see all those lines now
become uncommented? Now press Ctrl+' twice --
see it add two "'" at the start of each
line? Then press Ctrl+Shift+' once, then twice,
to see it remove each leading "'" in
turn. Pretty cool, huh? I sure thought so once
I figured it out. So much easier than "/*
*/"! Now I just use "''" (double "'") to mark
provisional lines during development, I can
easily search for "''" throughout the program
later to fix up those lines before final release
of a program. Etc. So this is one of those
"problems" that is really a feature.

Once again, PST makes a pretty good product, but
utterly fails to explain it well enough to
customers. Just business as usual for them, but
opening opportunities for people like me.

-----
David McFarlane
E-Prime training
online: http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx
Twitter: @EPrimeMaster (https://twitter.com/EPrimeMaster )

/----
Stock reminder: 1) I do not work for PST. 2)
PST's trained staff take any and all questions at
https://support.pstnet.com , and they strive to
respond to all requests in 24-48 hours, so make
full use of it. 3) In addition, PST offers
several instructional videos on their YouTube
channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/PSTNET
). 4) If you do get an answer from PST staff,
please extend the courtesy of posting their reply
back here for the sake of others.
\----

[Paul Groot]

I also worked on several scripts that had stability issues when editing in EStudio (XP and W7). I think some of those problems only occur under specific circumstances or in specific scripts. However, in most cases it seems hard to reproduce the crashes. So, pressing the save button every now and then has become standard practice for me. However, here is another nice (reproducible) demonstration of a problem in EStudio, which took me some time to isolate from a larger script. This case is related to a bug in the ScriptSense option:

- open estudio and start with an empty script
- open windows task manager to monitor cpu usage of estudio
- add an inline script object to SessionProc and enter the following code:

Dim n As Integer
While False
   n = 1
Wend

Note that an empty line at the top of the script seems to be essential. Although this problem is not very apparent, the high CPU-load could cause  time accuracy issues when running a script directly from EStudio.

Best
Paul

On 10 October 2013 16:59, David Vinson <d.vi...@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

Hi Michiel,

I'm still plodding along using an XP box for my main development platform, EP Pro latest version and it seems to be much more stable than you've experienced: P(crash per 1hr) << 5%. Although I haven't done anything particularly unusual or exploratory lately.

I have had quite a few crashes on running during development - the usual difficulties getting videos to work; loading nested Lists from file; but none of these are related to e-studio stability.

Copy-pasting from multiple open experiments, no problem at all; dragging objects around, ditto. No weird red X's either. Probably your development and mine is comparing apples and oranges, but my rate of crashes within E-Studio 2.x has been pretty constant (and low) for quite some time. Maybe it's more stable on XP?

Obviously this isn't much of a long term solution given the impending end of support for XP and perhaps some strong institutional pressure to move on.... I'd be interested to know about others' experiences too.

best,
DV

On 10/10/2013 14:20, Cognitology wrote:

Hi,

Given that E-Prime 2 is now pretty much a final release, I was wondering how many of you feel it remains **particularly** instable? I mean, E-Studio (2, pro), latest version, and I don’t stupid crashes (say, recursively calling the sessionproc from a list within sessionproc). Just things like

·Writing inline:

Try typing:

/*

Hoppa

*/.

Works! Automatically becomes

‘/*

‘Hoppa

‘*/.

Now commented out. However, type in an inline (not the user part)

‘/*

Hoppa

*/....CRASH!

·Just dragging objects around, adding attributes, all sorts of randomness. Sometimes, there are nice big red crosses where graphics usually are.

The latter is the more annoying part. In general, when I’m developing something, on both my laptop and home pc (both win7prox64), this happens. In my experience, in fact, most people, even if they are very experienced, have random stability issues with e-studio. My question then is: does the list have similar issues? Say, if you’ve been doing some development, what is the chance that e-prime will crash within 60 minutes? I’m estimating it at 80% here.

Cheers,

Michiel

Michiel Sovijärvi-Spapé

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology

Aalto & Helsingin Yliopisto,

Finland

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ESRC Research Fellow
Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department
University College London
26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP
Tel +44 (0)20 7679 5311  (UCL internal ext. 25311)

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[David McFarlane]

With regard to XP vs. Vista/Win7... For the
longest time I advised EP users to stick with XP
32-bit. PST now certifies EP2.0.10 to work under
Vista/Win7, and with both 32- and 64-bit
platforms, and I have subsequently reversed my
advice. I have been testing and doing some
development using a dual-boot XP-32/Win7-64
machine, and EP2.0.10 has worked well for me on
the Win7-64 side, maybe even better than on the
XP-32 side. E.g., I have been testing sound
latencies -- under XP-32, I get sound latencies
on the order of 30 ms. Using the *same* machine
booted to Win7-64, and using the available
CoreAudio API, I can get sound latencies solidly down to around 10 ms.

But don't get me started on movies! Movies have
been a headache in every release of EP2, but for
that matter we have also had trouble with movies
in PsychoPy. So I do not think this is the fault
of EP, I think this is just the nature of our
digital movies, a lot of this attributable to the poor state of our codecs.

-----
David McFarlane
E-Prime training
online: http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx
Twitter: @EPrimeMaster (https://twitter.com/EPrimeMaster )

[David McFarlane]

Paul,

But of course, While Wend went out with the
Commodore-64 and has been deprecated for a couple
decades, and should never have appeared in
E-Basic at all (see my comments at
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/e-prime/JXcYIfRPWVE
and www.pstnet.com/forum/Topic3215-9-1.aspx
). What if you use the more modern Do Loop? E.g.,

Dim n As Integer
Do While False
n = 1
Loop

I don't have any sympathy for crashes that result from use of While Wend :).

Regards,

-----
David McFarlane
E-Prime training
online: http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx
Twitter: @EPrimeMaster (https://twitter.com/EPrimeMaster )

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>
>
>--
>David Vinson, Ph.D.
>ESRC Research Fellow
>Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department
>University College London
>26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP

>Tel <tel:%2B44%20%280%2920%207679%205311>+44

>(0)20 7679 5311 (UCL internal ext. 25311)
>
>
>
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>
>On 10 October 2013 17:54, David McFarlane

><http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx>http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx
>Twitter: @EPrimeMaster
>(<https://twitter.com/EPrimeMaster>https://twitter.com/EPrimeMaster )

>
>/----
>Stock reminder: 1) I do not work for PST. 2)
>PST's trained staff take any and all questions
>at

><https://support.pstnet.com>https://support.pstnet.com

>, and they strive to respond to all requests in
>24-48 hours, so make full use of it. 3) In
>addition, PST offers several instructional
>videos on their YouTube channel

>(<http://www.youtube.com/user/PSTNET>http://www.youtube.com/user/PSTNET

[Michiel Sovijarvi-Spape]

Hi,

Hah, I knew it when the Wend came up!

Best,

Michiel

Sent from Windows Mail

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[Michiel Sovijarvi-Spape]

Hi,

Well, I know it is a billed as a final release, but until the documentation is done well, and in place, as was the case for e1.2, I think it cannot be considered such. Scattering the documentation around in the old helpfile, new features guide and several knowledge base articles does not lead to a solid workflow. We will hope for the long promised new user-guide + ebasic guide that is complete and coherent to come along with E-Prime 2 final final version 😊.

The top-of-procedure vs before-object-run, I found particularly annoying, actually. While I agree this is a good feature, it is similar to textdisplays and slides being set to 75% by default and prerelease == duration by default: good features but they will lead to interesting results if you are used to the old way. A bit like charms and the start menu of Windows 8: here’s the new way, we think it is better, cope.

I’m also hoping, by the way, that some of the promised features will be implemented soonish… Global variables (or something of the sort, I forgot the name), more extended use of task events, etc.

In other news, we completed our new E-Primer and it should be out soon! I put you in the acknowledgements as well, but I think this is the more appropriate venue, given I don’t know how many years.

Twitter:  @EPrimeMaster (https://twitter.com/EPrimeMaster )

/----
Stock reminder:  1) I do not work for PST.  2)
PST's trained staff take any and all questions at
https://support.pstnet.com , and they strive to
respond to all requests in 24-48 hours, so make
full use of it.  3) In addition, PST offers
several instructional videos on their YouTube

channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/PSTNET

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/e-prime/5256cda9.893d320a.34a6.68c9SMTPIN_ADDED_MISSING%40gmr-mx.google.com.

[Lee]

My lab has also been experiencing a lot of issues with frequent crashing on Windows 7. One of our build files seems to crash under 5 minutes of opening the file. I can't even look at it long enough to figure out if something in it is causing the crashes. Other files just crash intermittently especially when copying objects.

Has anyone found a solution for this besides switching to XP? 

Best,

Lee

[David McFarlane]

Lee,

Just to clarify, are you reporting that the same
E-Prime program of yours, using the same runtime
version of E-Run, crashes when run on a Windows 7
machine but not when run on a Windows XP machine?

And exactly which verion of EP2 do you run on each machine?

Thanks,
-- dkm

At 1/30/2014 03:43 PM Thursday, Lee wrote:
>My lab has also been experiencing a lot of
>issues with frequent crashing on Windows 7. One
>of our build files seems to crash under 5
>minutes of opening the file. I can't even look
>at it long enough to figure out if something in
>it is causing the crashes. Other files just
>crash intermittently especially when copying objects.
>
>Has anyone found a solution for this besides switching to XP?
>
>Best,
>Lee
>
>On Thursday, October 10, 2013 9:20:36 AM UTC-4,

>Michiel Sovijärvi-Spapé wrote:
>
>Hi,
>
>Given that E-Prime 2 is now pretty much a final
>release, I was wondering how many of you feel it
>remains *particularly* instable? I mean,

>E-Studio (2, pro), latest version, and I don’t

>stupid crashes (say, recursively calling the
>sessionproc from a list within sessionproc). Just things like
>

>· Writing inline:

>
>Try typing:
>
>/*
>
>Hoppa
>
>*/.
>
>
>
>Works! Automatically becomes
>

>‘/*
>
>‘Hoppa
>
>‘*/.

>
>
>
>Now commented out. However, type in an inline (not the user part)
>

>‘/*
>
>Hoppa
>
>*/....CRASH!
>
>
>
>· Just dragging objects around, adding

>attributes, all sorts of randomness. Sometimes,
>there are nice big red crosses where graphics usually are.
>
>
>
>The latter is the more annoying part. In

>general, when I’m developing something, on

>both my laptop and home pc (both win7prox64),
>this happens. In my experience, in fact, most
>people, even if they are very experienced, have
>random stability issues with e-studio. My
>question then is: does the list have similar

>issues? Say, if you’ve been doing some

>development, what is the chance that e-prime

>will crash within 60 minutes? I’m estimating it at 80% here.
>
>
>
>Cheers,
>
>Michiel
>
>
>
>Michiel Sovijärvi-Spapé

>
>Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
>
>Aalto & Helsingin Yliopisto,
>
>Finland
>
>
>

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[jsi...@uw.edu]

I'm also having stability issues with EPrime 2.0 Professional on Windows 7. The build files are crashing every now and then but, even worse, the Run files are crashing when it first initializes to run. No pattern to it, though, and happening with one set of related protocols but not another. Might happen with one file one time and another file another time. Sometimes it happens several times in a single session, other times it doesn't. In addition, when it crashes, it locks up all of the EDataAid files that have been created since the last time we opened the program, so we have to use the recovery function to open them again. Very, very frustrating.

I'm also in contact with the EPrime support folks, but would welcome any insights this group might have.

Thanks!
JoAnn.

[David McFarlane]

Just on the particular block comment (/* */)
issue again: Note that PST explains this at
http://www.pstnet.com/support/kb.asp?TopicID=5347
, and fixed the issue in EP2.0.10.353 (aka EP2
SP1). And earlier in this thread I already
expressed my like of the newer commenting feature.

-- David McFarlane

On Thursday, October 10, 2013 6:20:36 AM UTC-7,

Michiel Sovijärvi-Spapé wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Given that E-Prime 2 is now pretty much a final
>release, I was wondering how many of you feel it
>remains *particularly* instable? I mean,

>E-Studio (2, pro), latest version, and I don’t

>stupid crashes (say, recursively calling the
>sessionproc from a list within sessionproc). Just things like
>

>· Writing inline:

>
>Try typing:
>
>/*
>
>Hoppa
>
>*/.
>
>
>
>Works! Automatically becomes
>

>‘/*
>
>‘Hoppa
>
>‘*/.

>
>
>
>Now commented out. However, type in an inline (not the user part)
>

>‘/*
>
>Hoppa
>
>*/....CRASH!
>
>
>
>· Just dragging objects around, adding

>attributes, all sorts of randomness. Sometimes,
>there are nice big red crosses where graphics usually are.
>
>
>
>The latter is the more annoying part. In

>general, when I’m developing something, on

>both my laptop and home pc (both win7prox64),
>this happens. In my experience, in fact, most
>people, even if they are very experienced, have
>random stability issues with e-studio. My
>question then is: does the list have similar

>issues? Say, if you’ve been doing some

>development, what is the chance that e-prime

>will crash within 60 minutes? I’m estimating it at 80% here.
>
>
>
>Cheers,
>
>Michiel
>
>
>Michiel Sovijärvi-Spapé

[Er...@ericwalden.net]

I agree that it is not that stable.  I had a new PhD ask about it and suggested that he learn Matlab.  Cut and paste is insane.  Movies are ... well today I filled at a survey about features in EPrime 3.0 and I told them they should fire the people who developed the movie modules and then sue them for industrial espionage because there is no way that programming that bad was a mistake.  Codec issues make it worse, but the underlying programming is awful.  Today it was telling me that a goto label that was there did not exist, which is strange not only because I cut pasted the name, but also because it had worker a few hours earlier and I had not changed anything.  Their documentation and online community is awful.  This group and, David McFarland in particular, are the only thing that makes it usable for complex things.

If you do stuff that is pretty standard and don't try to cut and paste it works OK, but I would say EPrime 2 is still in the beta stage and not really ready for release.

[JACanterbury]

touch wood, i get very few crashes now in EStudio.

I do agree with David though that

' PST ... utterly fails to explain it well enough to customers. "

vast amounts of the 'documentation' seem to be automatically generated from the code and it just states the ble*din' obvious in detail whilst failing to answer any of the questions I want answering :$

John

[Hank Jedema]

Thanks for posting about the cut and paste issue with EP 2.0.10.242. I often use it while writing programs (Matlab or E-prime) and it drives me crazy that EP (W7-64) crashes for no apparent reason with such a simple procedure (I just often copy just a line or 2). I haven't seen any CPU or memory load issues but it just freezes E-studio with no apparent way out. 

Hank