Recently I encountered an R package called pingr, made by Rasmus Bååth (the same guy who did MCMC in a web page, my visualization of 2013). You install it, you type ping(), and it goes ping. Nice.

Hear me now

In fact there are nine built-in pingr noises. It’s more useful than it may seem; I was using it within minutes of reading the blog post because I had a series of Bayesian models running on my laptop while I wrote some stuff on my desktop PC. When the models finished, they went ping, making everything as efficient as possible. It got me thinking about beeping alerts in all sorts of data analysis software.

In Stata, you can just type ‘beep’. Job done. In fact, that locates the system general alert sound (in Windows at least) and plays it. I spent some time extracting data from a primary care database recently, where there were several computers grinding through the big data for different researchers in a windowless room. Every now and then, a lion’s roar would emanate from one of them. I found it a bit disconcerting but played it cool until someone told me they had replaced the Windows alert beep with this .wav file for a laugh.

SPSS used to have sound alerts in the General Options menu, but they have quietly (?) been dropped sometime around version 20. The pain about that was it was either on, beeping every time some output was added, or off. There didn’t seem to be a syntax command for beeping. However, there is now one (STATS SOUND) in the extension commands package; it’s not clear whether one has to pay extra for that or not, and frankly, I’m not going to bother finding out.

When I’m able to glance at the computer regularly, perhaps because I’m eating what passes for lunch in Stats HQ, I particularly like R’s txtProgressBar with style=3. Stata users can easily display dots in a similar fashion, although it’s interesting to look online and see the alternative solutions, such as displaying progress in the window title, which could have advantages in some situations.

My latest long-running simulation made me try something quite different. I wanted progress reports but I was going to be in another room. If something went wrong, I would go back to the office and try to fix it. On my (Android) cellphone I have an app called Minutes. It’s a basic text editor that syncs very easily to Dropbox. So all I needed to do was have the stats software write periodically to a text file in the Minutes folder, and the update appears on my phone!

How 21st-century is that! This is how I’ve done it in R:

progress<-0
fileConn<-file("C:/Users/Robert/Documents/Dropbox/Apps/Minutes/progress.txt")
for (k in 1:1000) {
if(floor(k/100)>progress) {
writeLines(paste("Now on iteration ",k,sep=""),fileConn)
progress<-floor(k/100)
}
# more complicated stuff follows, and then ...
}
close(fileConn)
ping() 

and in Stata:

local progress=0
forvalues i=1/1000 {
 if (floor(`i'/100)>`progress') {
 file open minutes using "progress.txt", write text replace
 file seek minutes tof
 file write minutes "Now on iteration `i'"
 file close minutes
 local progress=floor(`i'/100)
 }
 // some complicated time-consuming stuff...
}
beep

Notice how the file is written to the drive each time you writeLines in R, even without closing the fileConn, but in Stata you have to close inside the if branch. Also, R will carry trying to run commands after an error, so it’ll (probably) go ping, while Stata will stop and therefore you will hear no beep.

It will get a little more complicated to catch errors, but not much. If your program grinds to an unpleasant halt, your progress.txt file will just be stuck there on the last number, and it could be a while before you get suspicious and go to check. One simple solution is to write all your output to the progress.txt file, but this will slow things down if you can’t avoid (or don’t want to avoid) writing lots of lines to the output; this was the case for my simulation with rstan. You only want one special line written in case of an error that says

I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.

You could send an SMS too, if you prefer…