Of the many "it seemed like a good idea at the time" things I have done in my life, one was to volunteer to set up the OpenBUGS pages. I did this in the spirit of helping out, rather than one of showing off my html skills (I hope this is obvious from the pages). Nowadays this mainly means transferring a zip file from a memory stick to our we server, and then checking I haven't broken anything. The real programming work is done by Andrew Thomas, so he's the one who should get all the thanks now.
Anyway, as you might have guessed from the title, I've just put version 3.0.1 of OpenBUGS up on the web. Actually, this is a slight cheat - I put a version up a couple of weeks ago, and then we promptly found a couple of bugs/features. Andrew solved both of them, although one solution is geopolitical - giving the Åland islands back to Sweden.
The good news about the changes is that it gave Andrew more time to work on the BUGS to LaTeX language converter, ably supported by Mikko Sillanpää. Of course, the first thing I tried with it was throwing some of my more complex models at it, but it seems to manage. For example, here is what the LaTeX code produces for this paper:
OK, it's not perfect (and looks better on its own: bits are disappearing off the edge of the window) but it is fairly easy to edit the LaTeX code. There are also a few changes to the BUGS code that would make it more readable (e.g. writing tau.S, rather than tauS, so that BUGS recognises the tau). Overall, I'm impressed, and suspect I'm going to drift even deeper into the clutches of LaTeX now.
So, I'm happy for a bit - even if I should be doing N other things this week.
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