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Re: Mathematica crashed -- where did my notebook go?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg99181] Re: Mathematica crashed -- where did my notebook go?
  • From: Helen Read <hpr at together.net>
  • Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:37:03 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <gt3evs$i7v$1@smc.vnet.net> <gt6fjc$rqb$1@smc.vnet.net>
  • Reply-to: read at math.uvm.edu

David Bailey wrote:
> 
> My impression is that since 6.0, frontend crashes (which 
> destroy unsaved notebooks) have become more frequent - presumably 
> because of all the extra complexities associated with the dynamic mechanism.

This semester I saw students repeatedly lose all their work when they 
tried to save a file that had RevolutionPlot3Ds in it. Sometimes the 
front end would crash while they were in the middle of working (as soon 
as they made a RevolutionPlot3D), but what was far worse was that it 
would crash whenever they tried to save the file.

I saw this twice this semester, first when we were doing volume for 
solids of revolution (7.0.0 at that point), and again when we did 
surface area for surfaces of revolution (7.0.1 by then). Moving to a 
different machine and saving to the hard instead of the network did not 
help any, nor did downloading a fresh copy of the file and starting 
over. I finally told the students who were having the issue not to make 
the revolution plots until they had everything else finished, then make 
sure the file is saved, *then* do the plots but delete the output before 
they save again. Futzing around with this probably doubled the time it 
took them to complete the assignment.

The crashing problem only affected a couple of students, and I have no 
idea what was different for them. I have not been able to reproduce it 
myself, but I did witness it when it happened to the students.

--
Helen Read
University of Vermont


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