I rather liked to get updates telling me that a forum I had posted in had been updated, but now I no longer get those. Did this feature go away, or did I somehow muck up my settings to remove this option? [I did remove 'aggressive notification', I hope that was not it, as I do want to keep those separate].
Right now, 'jakubi' appears to be online twice -- ie his name shows up twice in the "Who's online"! Even if he is using two computers at once to read mapleprimes twice as fast, this does seem rather weird!
Can someone explain whether this is a bug or is Maple really splitting into 2 languages? In particular, for the input
with(Logic);
BooleanSimplify(Import(a < b and d = e and not a < bd));
in Maple's document mode or in the TTY version, quite different answers come back. I understand the [weird] reason why the TTY version returns 'false'. The question here is, why the difference?
This morning, I saw the announcement of a paper on the
ArXiv, titled
Inequalities for Integer and Fractional Parts. I found the results very pretty, even though many of them are rather weird.
But then it struck me: this ought to be useful. In fact, it ought to be useful when doing experimental mathematics, something for which Maple is rather helpful. So why the blog post? Because of the next realization: I don't really know how I would 'integrate' this knowledge into Maple. Whatever ideas I come up with to do this seem less than half-baked.
The Vim editor ships with a maple.vim file, which is a "maple mode". It was first created by Charles Campbell, and I provided some updates (up to Maple 9.5). I am about to rev that up to Maple 11, so I would like to know if there are any feature requests which I should consider rolling-in at the same time? If you have little bits of vim scripts which you yourself use, by all means, send them along! [You'll get full credit for that, I am fine with being just an aggregator...
There has been quite a number of complaints about new version of Maple being somehow inferior to previous versions in various ways. Lest people think that this is special to Maplesoft,
PC World is running a story titled
Before they Spoiled the Software, on various multimedia software that used to be better before it got seriously bloated. They also draw the reader's attention to sites like
oldversion.com which specialize in archiving older versions of ``free'' software.
I have just noticed that user
_JZlV_BjwBOR has just rocketted up the charts (with 39 points from 13 blog posts). Curious, since I did not remember seeing any such posts, I look at
this user's blog and it is empty. What gives?
A real breath of fresh air post over at
Mozilla Labs:
the combined keyboard-graphical user interface.
It makes really good points that, for user input, the bandwidth of keyboard input really can't be beaten. And of course, for output, graphical is definitely superior. I am really looking forward to seeing this in Firefox, and then hopefully have these ideas spread to other applications as well.
In the TTY version, there are all sorts of fascinating ways to have Maple stop/quit (on purpose). For example
proc() quit end();
is one such way. Much more amusing is
parse(qu||it,'statement');
which has interesting variations where one can really make it obscure what is going on.
This does not work in the GUIs. But variations do produce rather entertaining results. For example, try
FromInert(_Inert_STOP());
and note how the result is subtly different from
qu||it;
Now, try to do any GUI things on that first 'quit' (context-menus, drag&drop, etc, etc), and much fun ensues.
The
New Yorker has an interesting article on
feature creep (via
boingboing). Apparently research shows that we are drawn to things with an insane amount of features in them, then ``digital fatigue'' sets in, and then we prefer the simple versions.
While working on acer's most excellent competition, I hit on a different competition that could be fun too: generate the longest valid obscure Maple expression that actually "does something".
My entry: `#`@`&^`$-0!;
It returns NULL !
And now I need to go back to finding entries for acer's competition.
I must admit that I have a lot of fun looking at the evolution over time of the
Maple Rankings. I'll use this blog entry for some commentary, because it's fun to record these snapshots.
I recently got emailed a .sxc file. I did not know what that was, so off too Google I go, and find the site
fileinfo.net which lists lots of extensions. There I am enlightened: OpenOffice spreadsheet format.
But then I was curious. So I look up .ms, .mws, .mw and .nb. Results:
| .mw | Text | MacWrite Text Document |
| .mws | Audio | MWave DSP Synth Instrument Extract |
| .nb | Data | Mathematica Notebook |
No entry for .ms.
Why is this?
I got spammed by Wolfram, touting their new
Mathematica 6. Being the curious person that I am, I went over to take a look.
First: their marketing material is slick. Very slick. It makes you think that they've invented some nifty new stuff -- until you look just a bit more and realize that some of it has been in Maple for ages. And some of these ideas were invented by Maplesoft, and yet Wolfram markets them better. Very devious - and I am sure will be very successful with a lot of customers!
Second: it's good. It looks like it warrants the major upgrade hoopla. The new features are very tightly integrated. I mean, in the case of Mathematica, the language and the user interface are now one-and-the-same. You can programmatically access the whole interface (live!), and you can use interface components in any program. This is going to give Maple 11 some serious competition.
It had been quite a while since I had read
Joel Spolsky's great blog on software, so I headed on over and read his
rather thoughtful post on customer service. I learned something from reading it, so I thought I would share it with others.
