I just wanted to let you know that our recent webinar with IEEE & NI, “Accelerating the Model-based Development & Enabling HIL Testing for Mechatronic Systems” is now available on demand through IEEE’s website. If you would like to learn more about the webinar or if you would like to (re)watch, click here.

The new version of MaplePrimes is rapidly approaching the finish line and I am happy to announce that we will be launching it to a group of Beta testers (edit: the Beta program is now live).  A reminder that if you would like to participate in the Beta, please send me a private message and I will add you to the list.  For those who have already asked to participate, thank you.  Everyone will receive a message tomorrow with details about how to access the Beta site.

Back in September, I posted an announcement about our plans for the new version of MaplePrimes.  Well a few months and many, many hours of development later, we are approaching the end point!

The Maplesoft corporate blog has seen the addition of many interesting new posts recently, and I thought I'd share a few of the most recent ones with MaplePrimes.

Visualizing a Parallel Field in a Curved Manifold
Posted by Robert Lopez, Maple Fellow

Speaking of Languages...
Posted by Tom Lee, Chief Evangelist

An analytical model of mornings in the Wright household
Posted by Derek Wright, Application Engineer

MaplePrimes is a community where thousands of members share their expertise and knowledge of Maplesoft products, and of math & technical topics in general.  To help nurture the environment, and to maintain a quality resource for MaplePrimes members, we have decided to extend content moderation to the community.

I expect that the roles of moderators will evolve as we move forward, but to start, moderator’s will have the following capabilities:

• Remove commercial messages (spam) or otherwise inappropriate or offensive content as described  in the MaplePrimes Community Guidelines.
• Re-categorize posts to the correct forum category.
• Select high quality blog posts or message topics to appear on the front page of MaplePrimes.
• Correct bad formatting within messages.

We have re-enabled new user registration. We will be keeping a close eye on new content and users on the site over the next couple of days. We hope that by closing down registration temproarily, we may have stopped the spammers from coming to the site, but we will be making several immediate changes to reduce the amount of spam on the site including adding a Captcha to the user registration form.

We apologize again for the inconvenience caused by the spam attack. It was unfortunate timing having this happen over the holidays.

As many of you have noticed, MaplePrimes has been deluged with a spam attack over the past week.  We have been working to keep it under control, but the attacks are coming faster than we can reasonably keep up.

This blog entry marks two milestones:

• I will report on my visit to Maplesoft as the first MaplePrimes Mentor of the Year
  
• I wll earn my 1000th MaplePrimes "point"

 
Scheduling this visit was a challenge. Each semester I limit the number of classes that I miss for professional travel and I have numerous (and increasing) adminstrative responsibilities as the Undergraduate Director for the Department of Mathematics at The University of South Carolina (particularly during the summer months). These constraints, combined with the various travel schedules of Maplesoft's staff necessitated the deferral of this trip until November 2009. (The additional one month delay in preparing this is due to end-of-semester administrative responsibilities.) I wrote the original draft of this from various airports on my way to the 14th Asian Conference on Technology and Mathematics in Beijing, China and, now that Christmas is history, have some time to finish it.

The MapleSim Tire Component Library has just been released. This product is an add-on to MapleSim. It provides industry standard tire force model components such as Fiala, Calspan, and Pacejka’s magic tire formula. In addition, linear tire models and user-defined tire models are available. Once installed, the tire components work like any other MapleSim components, so you can drag them into your diagram and join them to your existing vehicle model, change parameters, plot and analyze dynamic and kinematic quantities, attach CAD images to be used in the animations, etc.

We have recently released updates to four toolboxes. Here are the highlights. More details, and instructions on how to access each one can be found on the Maplesoft downloads page.

MapleSim LabVIEW Connector - now also connected to NI VeriStand. As a result, this product gets a new name. It's now the MapleSim LabVIEW/VeriStand Connector.

MapleSim Control Design Toolbox - improvements have been made to performance, functionality, and examples.

I would like to introduce a new face that you will be now be seeing on MaplePrimes from time to time.  His name is Rick Andrade, and his primary role within the Primes community is to pay close attention to your questions, to make sure that help is being offered where needed, and to engage appropriate people from within Maplesoft.  And while the majority of his work within MaplePrimes will be done quietly in the background, you can also expect him to post stories and/or links that he thinks you will find interesting. 

As many of the users on MaplePrimes are instructors, I thought it appropriate to let everyone know about a new resource available on the Maplesoft web site called the Teacher Resource Center.

As most users of MaplePrimes are aware, we currently reward participation with a number that indicates Maple Rank. So every time someone posts a forum comment, for example, they are awarded 1 point. This number gets appended to user names and it has become a way to immediately recognize a person’s ‘prestige’ within MaplePrimes.

We’ve just released a new version of the Maplesoft-MAA Placement Test Suite (PTS). PTS 5.0 includes high school prognostic tests from the MAA. The idea is that colleges/universities can offer early feedback to high school students about how they are likely to do on the institution’s math placement tests. With early feedback and time to make changes, students will be better prepared, which means they are less likely to have to take (and pay for!) remedial classes that don’t even count towards their degree.

Maplesoft has just released a collection of new engineering products, including MapleSim 3, the latest version of our physical modeling tool. It includes a new hydraulics library, more electrical machines and improved solvers which expand the scope of models it can handle. It also comes with a new project manager, more diagnostic tools, a 3-D visualization preview feature, and other improvements to the interface which reduce the development time. See What’s New in MapleSim 3 for details.