This is the second article in the “bug hunt” series. In these articles, I go through a recent bug in Brian (or one of its dependencies) and describe all the steps I used to find the source of the bug and how I fixed it.
Today’s bug is about a strangely named file that seemingly appears out of nowhere when running Brian simulations. The final fix for the bug will turn out to be a single character change in the Brian code base 😀!
This article starts a new series of blog posts about “bug hunts”. In these articles, I will go through a recent bug in Brian (or one of its dependencies) and describe all the steps I used to find the source of the bug and how I fixed it. I will try to not only focus on the Brian-side of things, but also show some general tools like git bisect or “monkey patching” that can be helpful to find the source of these nasty critters (no actual bugs were harmed during the making of this blog post).
Let’s start! Today’s bug will be about equations, and more specifically about their LaTeX representation. As most of you probably know, Brian can represent equations, quantities, etc. in LaTeX. This representation can then either be included in a LaTeX document or directly rendered for example as the output in jupyter notebooks.
Marcel Stimberg will talk about Brian’s development process in a live developer session on Thursday, Feb 11 2021, 17:00 UTC (check local time). For more information and the link to the Zoom session see the announcement.
This article is written as a Jupyter notebook which you can execute and modify interactively.
You can either download it via the “Source” link on the top right, or run it directly in the browser on the
mybinder infrastructure:
For more information, see our general Notes on Notebooks.
SHIFT+ENTER on your keyboard or press the play button
() in the toolbar aboveSHIFT+ENTER while this cell
is selected.
“Scheduling”: mechanism to determine the order of operations during a simulation
In this video we will look at its importance for:
You can also watch the screencast video on Youtube.
In these very particular times, we are nevertheless happy to announce a new release, Brian 2.4. This release fixes a large number of bugs and includes a number of small improvements. As announced with the previous release, Brian 2.4 is the first release that no longer supports Python 2. For a full list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update.
This article is written as a Jupyter notebook which you can execute and modify interactively.
You can either download it via the “Source” link on the top right, or run it directly in the browser on the
mybinder infrastructure:
For more information, see our general Notes on Notebooks.
SHIFT+ENTER on your keyboard or press the play button
() in the toolbar aboveSHIFT+ENTER while this cell
is selected.
“Scheduling”: mechanism to determine the order of operations during a simulation
In this notebook we will look at its importance for:
StateMonitor
You can also watch the screencast video on Youtube.
Ask questions, chat and learn with other Brian users, show off what you’ve done, suggest new features, … We will try out a brand new forum for support questions and general discussion, replacing our previous forums on Google Groups. The new forum builds on the Discourse platform which gives us exciting new features such as giving credit to users for answering questions.
We will experiment with running a Brian tutorial online. The first tutorial of this kind will take place on Friday, August 7th 2020 from 2pm-6pm BST (UTC+1, see here for other timezones). Free (but mandatory) registration here. We will run the tutorial as a Zoom meeting – registering with the link will give you the URL (please don’t share so we can avoid zoombombing). We will record the meeting and if everything goes reasonably well, we will upload the videos later.