I was playing around with plotting volumes of revolution for calculus.  My opinion is that the defaults for Student[Calculus1][VolumeOfRevolution] could be improved by a couple simple changes.  My hope is that the people here can make my plots better to give Maplesoft a good idea of how to change the defaults.  

The standard code and output are

Download Volum_rev_2023_trial1.mw

Changing the surface style to patch and the surfce colors to different colors creates a plot that I find easier to interpret.

Download Volum_rev_2023_trial2.mw

What do you think about getting the defaults changed?  I hope someone can give better suggestions for the plot defaults.

When upgrading from Opensuse 12.2 to opensuse 12.3 with an nvidia graphics card I got some strange behavior.  It appears that something in the old maple configuration files was causing the trouble.  To eliminate the problem I  deleted the .maple and .maplesoft directories.

If you have some serious configuration information, you would need to save that first or track down exactly where the error ocurs.

I was trying to get the labels and titles in a plot to be typeset using LaTeX fonts on a computer running SUSE 12.2.  Everything worked on a Windows 7 computer with the LaTeX fonts installed.  Maple 17 would use not use the CMU Open Type fonts that were installed on the Linux computer.  After switching in the CMU True Type fonts for the CMU Open Type fonts, everything works properly in the attached worksheet on the Linux machine.

This is a comment and warning to anyone in the United States using MapleTA 8. 

If you get login information using LDAP, MapleTA 8 gets the "employee number" from the LDAP data base  and displays it on the screen when a person is logged in.  After talking to our IT people, they acknowledge that this is a FERPA violation when using MapleTA in a lab where people can see screens of other people's computers.

Our IT people have contacted Maplesoft for...

There is a flaw (bug) in the DEplot routine.  If you load the plottools package before using DEplot with the arrows=line option, the DEplot routine tries to use the line definition from the plottools package.  A worksheet illustrating this problem is below.