While running Maple (13.0 and 13.02) on a Linux system that has IPv6 enabled (Debian Sid AMD64 as of December 8, 2009) I found that the xmaple interface was unable to connect to the Maple kernel.  Command line maple worked fine with a simple test of 2 + 2.  Xmaple had some odd behavior as the kernel connection issue is not reported until running a calculation.  Aslo I found the many of the menu items were dimmed out such as "Help" -> "About" and "Help" -> "Maple Help."  Further selection of the "Tools" menu caused t

I find the General tab of the Options dialog in Maple 11 has a section for the Mathematical Engine.  The user is given the choice of a new engine for each document or to share one engine among all documents.  I am running a Intel Core 2 Duo so I presume that I should enable SMP support.  But, I don't know what factors to consider when deciding on the use of shared or multiple engines.

Are there specific tradeoffs to consider?  Does the use of a shared engines save memory or increase performance?

Maple includes a useful StringTools:-Entropy procedure which computes the Shannon Entropy, or Information Entropy of a string.  Wikipedia has a nice article describing the measure online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_entropy.  I wanted to compute this value over a Matrix so I wrote the following procedure.  Let me know if you have any comments or improvements on the implementation.

The XMLTools package appears to use a DOM parser.  This requires that all of the XML data be loaded into memory and parsed before it can be used.  This is less efficient than a SAX or stream-based parser that operates on only parts of the XML tree at a time.  It would be a useful enhancment to include SAX based parsing in Maple.

GraphTheory includes ImportGraph and ExportGraph.  These are handy functions but they would be much more useful if they supported GraphML.  GraphML is a popular standard.  It is particularly useful for integration with tools built with the Prefuse API (http://prefuse.org/).  Please add GraphML support for importing and exporting Graphs.