what about connections between mapleprimes and comp.soft-sys.math.maple ? is it possible to build a "bridge" bewteen them? for instance a "forum" in mapleprimes which will recieve all comp.soft-sys.math.maple posts, or a link to open it into the mapleprimes central frame. we could use the google interface? it will be easier to have only one place to concentrate all informations about maple... comp.soft-sys.math.maple

Since the book entries do not yet have their own tracker (like the forums, blogs, etc), I figured I would give a particular entry I crafted on advanced maple programming a bit of a boost by making a blog entry of it, at least until Will get the tracker back online. I did spend a huge amount of time on that book entry, so I want it to get some visibility!

XKCD continues to post some great comics, often relating to math. Check this one out:

And yes, Maple does get it right

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So I thought it would be cool to go buy Vista, not thinking that some of my favorite applications won't work in it. So is there a way to install Maple 10 on Vista Home Premium? If so, any help on that would be greatly appreciated. I don't know if I could go a full day without Maple capabilities. Thanks! Brandon

Occasionally when I do an inline solve, the result is shifted to a new line directly below my input (not centered like a ; solve). Is this a known bug? Is there a way to prevent this from happening? Thanks

Does Maple read .DVI files? if so how do you load them if not is what is a good program to read .DVI format.

Does anyone have anymore infromation on the XMLTools[Tranformation]() package function? The help? files are limited and unchanged since 9.5 ( i suspect earlier ) - does the XSLT use XPath or another method, as the schemas ( given in the help files ) use statements like: ...xpath=".//xppmath|.//xppedit"/... Is this strictly and 'xsd:selector' syntax or can the xpath selection be given in an xsl transformation document? - at the moment the statement: ...value-of select=\"node_name/@*|text()\"... will select the attribute of the node and and: ...value-of select=\"node_name\"...

So you have used Maple as a glorified calculator (Maple 101), then wrote a few 1 liners (Maple 201), and even a few larger procedures (Maple 301), where you were both amazed and horrified by 'op'. But when you get serious about programming in Maple, even for not-so-large procedures, what are the fundamental parts of the system that you should know? Other pages in this book talk about particular features. This one is instead a simple list of those Maple commands and concepts you need to know to be able to call yourself a Master Maple Programmer.

The left hand navigation bar calls it High Performance Maple Programming Techniques but the book itself is (now) called Tools of the Maple Masters.

It took me forever to find which tags were allowed. Why? because, silly me, I searched for it. And there is no page that has that information on it. Or, to be more precise, pretty much every page has that information in it, in the JavaScript region at the bottom of the input box. It is also interesting to note that the tags listed there do not include 'blockquote', and yet the toolbar does.

In my latest blog post, I used both the cite tag and the blockquote tag, to see if they did anything different. They do not. Worse, neither does what they are supposed to do, which is to indent what I post, so that it stands out. Why? Another issue seems to be that, according to the W3C, you can't have raw text in a blockquote, you are suppose to have enclosing tags (like 'p' for example), otherwise what you get isn't valid. So why does the button generate known invalid html? It's one thing for Microsoft to flaunt standards, but...

I am going to post this rant here on my primes blog instead of polluting some other post (like a book entry say) with all sorts of tangential opinionated stuff. The book entries should, over time, become canonical. The most useful stuff might even make it back (with proper attributions!) into product documentation. Right, so what's this rant about? Efficiency. I know all about that, you think to yourself. So this guys' going to go off and rant about how Maple is slow, show some examples that make his point, and so on. Bzzt, wrong. Ok, so Maple isn't the fastest thing ever, but it is generally fast enough. And when it isn't fast enough in some area where it is clearly behind, wait a couple of years (ok, sometimes 5, but I am patient), and voila, it's fixed. And the same holds for memory usage (though there one has to be even more patient). OK, so if it's not the product efficiency that he wants to rant about, what is it? People efficiency. Yes, I mean my time. The time it takes me to get my job done. I do a fair amount of work in Maple. In fact, I spend hours and hours using Maple, and minutes and minutes (when it's not fractions of seconds) doing computations. So when my tools slow me down, that makes a real difference to me. Like others, this is why I am interested in better development tools for Maple. And why many of us get upset when some features like copy and paste don't work quite right. This is the fundamental reason why some of the misnamed ``usability'' features irk me so. Let's take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about usability:

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.

So, take the procedure d := proc (n) options operator, arrow; piecewise(n = 0, 1, `mod`(n, 2) = 1, 2, `mod`(n, 4) = 2, 4, `mod`(n, 8) = 4, 8, `mod`(n, 16) = 8, 16, 32) end proc I tried to use unapply, but it doesn't work at all and gives strange results.. it appears to evaluate the mod beforehand. So, just evaluting d(n) above works fine > l := [seq(d(n), n = 0 .. 16)]; l := [1, 2, 4, 2, 8, 2, 4, 2, 16, 2, 4, 2, 8, 2, 4, 2, 32] However, simplify(d(n)) destroys the function. Also, prod(d(n),n=0..m) returns the wrong values, mul(d(n),n=0..5) works for a finite value such as 5, but does not work symbolically... what gives, why is maple behaving so badly with the mod operator? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The frontend command is a bit tricky. The basic idea is that it replaces expressions in the arguments to a procedure with names, evaluates the procedure with the replaced arguments, then back-substitutes the expressions for the the names in the final result. The first argument passed to frontend is the procedure that is to be evaluated. The second argument is a list containing the arguments to be passed to the procedure. Remaining arguments are optional, we'll get to those in a second.

I had problems with interputing an LaTeX enumeration and continuing it after that. I finally found the solution:

 \begin{enumerate}
   \item ...
   \item ...
   \item \label{it:ob:last}
 \end{enumerate}
 ...
 \begin{enumerate}\setcounter{enumi}{\ref{it:ob:last}}
   \item ...
   \item ...
 \end{enumerate}

thank you to some web sites:

• \jeff{krimmel}