Fuddland

The progress bar—some of you, particularly those who spend all bloody day messing around with Matlab, may call it the “waitbar”—is a wonderful thing. It puts one’s mind at rest; it says, “Hold on for a second, I’m just doing something, but don’t fret: so long as I keep inching towards 100%, you can rest assured I’ve not hung your precious machine. Tell you what, why don’t you have a nice cup of tea? Go on, I’ll just keep on letting you know how much further I have left to go.”

Previously, when I set my code running, I had no idea how long it would take. Well, I could guess, based on certain parameters I’d set: minutes, maybe hours, possibly days. But would “hours” turn out to be “several days” written another way? Would “days” be “weeks times seven”? I was never really sure, and it usually meant I’d stop the code before it had finished its run, change a couple of things to try and make it run a bit quicker but with less accuracy, then restart it all over again—and I had no idea if I’d stopped it three seconds before it was due to spit out the end result.

Then I discovered I could make Matlab display a progress bar, that this was incredibly simple to do, and all was joyous in the land of Fudd. Not just because now I can judge how long my code is going to take, based on the speed of the various bars that I’ve added at various stages, but also it makes the code appear to run faster: I can quite happily sit and watch the bars creep up to the big one-oh-oh and not go slightly mad wondering if I should stop everything and change that 0.05 to 0.04.

Of course, my progress bars live in a strange fantasy world far-removed from those we come across in everyday life: my progress bars always reach 100%; they increase fairly uniformly, except for one which accelerates, but that’s because the code I wrote does fewer and fewer calculations the farther it gets through its run. The progress bars we see during our average days, however, are progress bars gone bad.

They tease us: they shoot up to 95% in ten seconds, then take ten minutes to do the last 5%; or they get distracted by something on the telly and give up completely on the task in hand, sitting firmly at 45% until you crack and hit the “Cancel” button; sometimes they pretend to be finished, displaying a lovely filled-in block of one-hundred-percentness, but refuse to relinquish control of your computer. “What is it you have left to do?” you plead. “Oh, nothing,” the bar whistles innocently, “I just like being here.”

Not so my progress bars: they are Plato’s Progress Bars, plucked straight from the world of ideas. Now if only the rest of my code would find its way down from there…

#1

Lyle | 2004 / 07 / 19 – 23:32

You’ve been using Opera for far too long, from some of those comments about ‘real world’ progress bars. Still, that little lot certainly looks/sounds interesting.

Is it worth asking what it actually is that your research involves? Or would it just leave my brain smoking on the ground?

#2

RanK | 2004 / 07 / 20 – 01:31

The project I’m working on imports a lot of files the first time it’s run…initially it didn’t show anything so the first time my boss used it he used CTRL-ALT-DLT to stop it because he thought it had crashed…now it shows the name of the file it is importing, which is totally meaningless as they change so quickly it just flickers…but at least it looks like it’s doing something…the things we do to keep users happy

#3

David | 2004 / 07 / 20 – 08:28

Re #1: I’ve been thinking about ways to explain to the non-mathematician what it is I do, so I might write something soon. My biggest fear is that it will come across as too patronising if I try and make things really simple—but then I suppose that’s better than melting peoples’ brains. ;)

Re #2: That’s exactly it: so long as it looks like the computer is doing something, I’m happy. :)

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