Development notes

Dates and times

As discussed earlier, the end user is probably best off with a native format that supports microsecond-accuracy precision, such as the DATETIME(fsp), e.g. DATETIME(6), format available in MySQL 5.6.4 and higher [1]. There are others [2], notably PostgreSQL, which uses a TIMESTAMP format that has microsecond precision. You’d think it can store time zones as well (TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE), but close inspection shows that “For TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE, the internally stored value is always in UTC… [a]n input value that has an explicit time zone is converted to UTC…” [3]. In other words, there’s not much to choose between PostgreSQL and MySQL on the basis of date/time handling.

Interestingly, on the commercial side, SQL Server 2008+ provides DATETIMEOFFSET, which preserves timezone information [4], and Oracle has a version of TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE that can preserve timezone information [5]. Neither PostgreSQL or MySQL appear to have an equivalent; the best they offer is UTC high-precision storage (and you could store the timezone of origin separately, e.g. with the TimezoneType from SQLAlchemy-Utils). I haven’t managed to get TimezoneType working cleanly, in that (a) I’m unsure of the best general way to get the current timezone using either pytz or dateutil.tz.tzlocal(); (b) Alembic adds a length=50 argument to the constructor, which is wrong and requires manual removal. Anyway, it’s not too important here.

For general advice, see also [6].

The best Python module was Arrow, which offers arrow.now() to get a timezone-aware, microsecond-precision object in the local timezone. More recently, Pendulum looks better.

There is an ArrowType for SQLAlchemy in SQLAlchemy-Utils [7]; however, this converts to UTC as it sends to the database (and UTC Arrow objects back out again), so the source timezone is lost. But this is actually normal PostgreSQL behaviour, as above, which always uses UTC internally. An alternative (as per CamCOPS) is to use ISO-8601 strings, but they’re much less convenient for end user comparison. So, the best bet is to use Arrow, ArrowType, and accept that everything in the database is in UTC. This works fine for PostgreSQL, where the default TIMESTAMP has microsecond precision. However, by default the ArrowType uses a plain DATETIME in MySQL, which has only second precision; we need DATETIME(6). We therefore require not only MySQL 5.6.4+ but a custom ArrowMicrosecondType. Duly added. For SQL Server, this class uses DATETIME2, available from SQL Server 2008+ [8].

To summarize, in this task, all timestamps are in UTC.

Where to store BLOBs

Completely irrelevant here, but see https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/BinaryFilesInDB.

Primary key naming convention

Primary keys as ‘id’ or ‘trial_id’? There’s no right answer [9]. However, here we are aiming for simplicity of use for database novices. Using SELECT a.something, b.* statements may be common, at which point when a column labelled ‘id’ pops up, people may be unclear as to what it is. So for this particular scenario, we will use the ‘table.table_id’ convention.

For queries, duplicate column names don’t matter (and if their values don’t match, that’s an important clue to query failure!). For views, duplicates do matter, but views should be more carefully constructed anyway.

Strings

The SQLAlchemy String() type can be of variable length in PostgreSQL and SQLite, but needs a length in MySQL. The SQLAlchemy Text() is always of variable length.

Avoid TEXT columns for things that have a realistic maximum length, as you can’t use TEXT columns for primary keys (e.g. for ‘subject’ tables that cross-refer).

Trial maths

Definitions.

The number of permutations of length from objects:

The number of combinations of length from objects:

In our situation, we always offer two choices and have five holes available; this gives possible spatial choices. For a stimulus sequence of length , the number of sequences is . The spatial choice is not independent of the sequence (e.g. if you present lights 3-1-4 you can’t then offer a choice of 2-5). The serial order choice is independent of the sequence, and there are of these, as follows:

Sequence length	Number of possible sequences,	Number of serial order choices,	[Less relevant!] Number of spatial choices, ; not all available on any given trial	Maximum number of independent trial types,
Example: presenting holes 3-1-4 is a sequence of length 3.	Example: with five holes, sequences of length 3 include 1-2-3, 1-2-5, 3-2-1.	Example: if you presented sequence 3-1-4, then the serial order choices are “1 or 3?”, “1 or 4?”, “3 or 4?”.	With five holes, the choices could be presented in holes 1+2, 1+3, …, 4+5, though not all are possible on a given trial.	For each of the possible sequences, you can offer serial order choices.
2	20	1	10	20
3	60	3	10	180
4	120	6	10	720
5	120	10	10	1200

In general, since this task is about serial order detection, serial order choices are the most important and should vary most rapidly (e.g. for , every 6 trials should cover all of the 6 possible serial order choices, in random order). Next most important is spatial choice (it’s of some importance that choices are equally distributed spatially); note that the number of spatial choices is not always a multiple of the number of serial order choices. Last comes sequence (it’s least important that all possible sequences are presented). But there is no obviously consistent way of randomizing in groups across all three (since some of them are interdependent and they are not necessarily multiples of each other), so I think the best approach is to randomize across sequences, which should give a nice spatial spread (through randomness alone), in addition to the guarantees about serial order sampling.

Therefore our algorithm will be:

• For each stage, we establish the possible serial order choices, and the possible sequences. We combine them into all possible combinations.

• We then shuffle them in blocks, such that serial order is randomized in blocks with the highest rate of change, so that in every trials there are all possible serial orders.

• Since that gives a rather dull and static stimulus sequence, we then randomize the sequences. So sequences vary randomly but the serial order sampling is in blocks.

• We then sample in order from our ‘hat’. If we run out, we repopulate the hat, as above.

Progression maths

If we progress when of the last trials are performed correctly, then we should have some sense that this isn’t going to happen by chance. In R, use binom.test(x, y) to get the p-value based on the assumption of P = 0.5 for chance (and it is, after all, a two-choice test). The default values are 10 out of 12, for p = 0.03857.

Trials can also be failed by not responding, affecting the “ignorance ⇒ P = 0.5” assumption, but in a conservative way.

Alternative installation methods that can fail

CAN WORK, CAN FAIL: Windows installation from PyPI source: Python 3.4

Don’t use Windows XP; it’s too old for MySQL. The following has been tested on Windows 10.

• Install Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013, which you’ll want in order to get MySQL Workbench installed.

  • Get this from https://www.microsoft.com/en-GB/download/details.aspx?id=40784.

• Install Python 3.4, which by default will be installed to C:\Python34\.

  • Explore from https://www.python.org/, or go direct to https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-344/.

• Install MySQL. (The alternative is PostgreSQL; see later.)

  • Browse to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/installer/ and follow the instructions.

  • The web installer works fine here. Choosing the defaults works well, and you can add additional users during setup. The default port is 3306, and the default superuser account is root.

• Download a binary version of PySide 1.2.2, since source code versions have all sorts of tricky compiler requirements.

  • Download PySide-1.2.2-cp34-none-win_amd64.whl or PySide-1.2.2-cp34-none-win32.whl from http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pyside. Remember where you stored it.

• Create and activate a virtual environment. Upgrade the installation tools (may be unnecessary, but confusing errors appear if it was, in fact, necessary). Install PySide and MySQL Connector/Python, then whisker_serial_order.

  • Start a command prompt (Start ‣ Command Prompt) and type the following.

    C:\Python34\python.exe -m ensurepip
    C:\Python34\python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip
    C:\Python34\python.exe -m pip install --upgrade virtualenv
    C:\Python34\python.exe -m virtualenv C:\venv_whisker_serial_order
    
    REM Activate the virtual environment:
    C:\venv_whisker_serial_order\Scripts\activate.bat
    
    pip install https://cdn.mysql.com/Downloads/Connector-Python/mysql-connector-python-2.1.3.tar.gz
    
    REM Change the filename that follows if you are using the 32-bit
    REM version; add a path if you stored it somewhere other than the
    REM current directory).
    pip install PySide-1.2.2-cp34-none-win_amd64.whl
    
    pip install whisker_serial_order
    

  • If anything fails to build, download the corresponding binary from http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/, install it as above, and repeat pip install whisker_serial_order. Nothing else was required on the test machine. But others (with 64-bit Windows 7) had problems with other packages not compiling.

The SerialOrder program itself will now be accessible as the command whisker_serial_order without any PATH modifications as long as you have activated the virtual environment (see activation command in bold above).

FAILED: Installation from a Python binary wheel

The idea here is that you have a development computer that can compile anything necessary, i.e. with (a) Python 3.4, (b) MSVC 10.0 (such as from Visual C++ 2010 Express) [10], and (c) CMake (https://cmake.org/) installed to the PATH (or: set PATH=%PATH%;“C:\Program Files (x86)\CMake\bin”). Then to build, you (1) run the Visual Studio Command Prompt (2010) to set up appropriate environment variables; (2) activate your Python virtual environment; run pip wheel whisker_serial_order. However, at present this complains that it can’t find cmake, even when cmake is on the path (whilst running setup bdist_wheel for PySide). So perhaps PySide doesn’t live happily with this.

NOT YET POSSIBLE: Windows installation from PyPI source: Python 3.5

• Install Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015, from https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx [11].

• Install Python 3.5 (e.g. 3.5.0) from https://www.python.org/. Simplest is to use the x86-64 (64-bit) or x86 (32-bit) web installer. Change the install location to C:\Python35\ for simplicity (or change the path references below accordingly).

• Create and activate a virtual environment. Upgrade the installation tools. Install MySQL Connector/Python, plus whisker_serial_order and its dependencies.

  • Start a command prompt (Start ‣ Command Prompt) and type the following.

    C:\Python35\python -m ensurepip
    C:\Python35\python -m pip install --upgrade pip
    C:\Python35\python -m pip install --upgrade virtualenv
    C:\Python35\python -m virtualenv C:\venv_whisker_serial_order
    C:\venv_whisker_serial_order\Scripts\activate.bat
    pip install https://cdn.mysql.com/Downloads/Connector-Python/mysql-connector-python-2.1.3.tar.gz
    pip install whisker_serial_order
    

• However, the pip install whisker_serial_order step fails because PySide 1.2.4 explicitly doesn’t yet support Python 3.5 (as of 2015-03-22), and PySide 1.2.2 just fails to install.

PyInstaller complications

If you use EXE(console=True), Python logging output goes to the console window (good). But if the user closes the console, the child GUI process dies instantly without asking for confirmation (very bad). If you use EXE(console=False), there is good protection against user error, because you can trap exit requests (very good), but if an error occurs that is not reported by the GUI – such as a database connection error causing a Python exception – you see nothing, which is very confusing (bad).

What would be ideal is the ability to set console=True (or equivalent) but prevent the parent console from being closed.

Or to have the primary process being GUI (console=False and perhaps the launch_no_console.pyw script as per Starfeeder), but have a child console [12]…

Todo

GUI/console problem could be improved.

Footnotes

[1]

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/datetime.html

[2]

http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/core/engines.html#supported-databases

[3]

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/datatype-datetime.html

[4]

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb630289.aspx; https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bartd/2009/03/31/the-death-of-datetime/

[5]

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14225/ch4datetime.htm#i1006081; but see https://tonyhasler.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/tonys-tirade-against-timestamp-with-time-zone/

[6]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1646171/mysql-datetime-fields-and-daylight-savings-time-how-do-i-reference-the-extra; and especially http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2532729/daylight-saving-time-and-time-zone-best-practices

[7]

http://sqlalchemy-utils.readthedocs.org/en/latest/data_types.html

[8]

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cdnsoldevs/2011/06/22/why-you-should-never-use-datetime-again/; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1334143/sql-server-datetime2-vs-datetime

[9]

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114728; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1369593

[10]

https://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9709969

[11]

Visual Studio 2015 is the standard C/C++ compiler for Python 3.5 under Windows (https://docs.python.org/3/using/windows.html). A compiler is needed to install and build third-party tools from source where those tools include C components.

[12]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24469662/how-to-redirect-logger-output-into-pyqt-text-widget; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11465971/redirecting-output-in-pyqt; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8356336/how-to-capture-output-of-pythons-interpreter-and-show-in-a-text-widget