Well, I've been working on a units poster for some time now... Okay, so this isn't the same as some of the blogs which are currently posted, but c'est la vie. I recall thinking how close g (= 9.80665) was to π, and only now do I learn that that is more than coincidence. When the French came up with the metre, I guess they wanted something very close to three Parisian feet, and there were at least two possibilities: 1/10 000 000 the distance from the North Pole to the Equator or the length of a pendulum which has a half period of 1 s. As it turned out, they picked the former, but as both were close appropximations to the same standard, it ended up that `≈`(sqrt(g/m), pi/s), and thus, solving for g, we get that `≈`(g, pi^2).

Hello everyone and welcome to MaplePrimes. My name is William Spaetzel and I am the guy who did most of the technical work behind this website.

Hello everyone and welcome to MaplePrimes. My name is William Spaetzel and I am the guy who did most of the technical work behind this website.

This is just a test
> x <> 23!!
>>> x^@

Under "my account" there seems to be no easy way of listing all of my recent posts (of all types). There's only an option to list recent blogs. Most of my content are either forum posts or stories as proper blogs are not one of the default content options that I'm given. T4.

You can now choose to add a Creative Commons license for all posts that you make to MaplePrimes. At the bottom of the posting page you will find a new section that lets you choose the different uses of your content that you will allow. To learn all about Creative Commons licensing, check out http://creativecommons.org/learnmore.

I find the font/colour combinations make posts a bit hard to read sometimes.

1. The title colour for comments and times is a light grey, while the colour of comment text is a darker grey. These can be hard to read against a white background. With occasional exceptions, non-coloured text against a white background should be black for maximum contrast.
2. Distinct comments should be visually separated from each other somehow, either by a horizontal bar or by using a different background colour for comment headers. (The latter is what is done, for example on Slashdot).

Presently, any links outside of the Maple Primes site open in the same window. Would it be possible to have the external links open in a different windows. This way once done viewing the external link the window can be closed and there is still a Maple Primes session window open. Presenly, one must backspace out of the external site to get back to Maple Primes. Any thoughts on this? JB

According to the information on message formatting, all posts are formatted using HTML tags. This will prove problematic for people posting snippets of Maple input, which is likely to happen often. For example: ========================================================= > p := piecewise(x

This post is primarily a test of attaching pictures and documents within the environment. If this works, you should see a photo of the view from our rental apartment during my family's recent holiday in Tuscany, and you should be able to access a Maple document via the attachment. Any problems in viewing or detaching, contact me. Any questions on the apartment, see www.toscanacasevacanza.com.

The XML icon for the site's RSS feed appears on the left-hand side of the screen, and the feed works when I add it manually as a Live Bookmark in Mozilla Firefox. So the site is certainly capable of RSS feeds. However, I think the convention is that sites with RSS should also advertise this fact by adding metadata to the page header, which MaplePrimes doesn't yet do. An example of this metadata is: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://examplesite.com/feed/" /> <link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="http://examplesite.com/feed/rss/" />

I'm not sure what the snail-mail addresses are going to be used for. In any case, if they're going to be requested, it would be helpful to include a field for province/state information there. We currently have just "City" and "Country". As it is, there isn't enough information to create a mailing address from what's provided. (There's actually a Waterloo, Quebec, as I'm reminded of every time I go to theweathernetwork.com site.)

Might it make better sense to have the 'Home' and 'About' site navigation tabs in the top right of the page to be reversed?

It would be nice if the site could remember the login information, so that we don't have to log in every time.

In some applications it is necessary to map an angle to a range of 0 to 360 degrees. Adding 360 degrees to an angle, or subtracting 360 from an angle does not change actually change the angle. One way to do this would be to add (or subtract) enough multiples of 360 degrees until the angle falls between 0 and 360. For example, given an angle of 400 you would subtract 360 to get an angle of 40 degrees. In Maple, this is easily accomplished by the following function.

Frem := (x,y) -> x - y*floor(x/y);