I agree that some kind of broad categorization of forum topics is a good idea. It will help Maple users with similar interests to form their own communities within the general Maple community. I'd also like to see a place on MaplePrimes for bug reports. That way, Maple users can find out about common bugs and their workarounds. When these bugs are fixed in a patch or new release, that can be noted on the forum as well. This will serve to document the progress that Maplesoft has made in fixing Maple bugs and thereby answer some of Maplesoft's most vocal critics. -- Frederick W. Chapman, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/~fwchapman/

How about this: For each file in the public filespace, keep a counter of the number of links which point to that file. Do not permit deletions unless the counter is zero. That way, MaplePrimes members can delete their own files without breaking their own links! I suggest counting links only from posts authored by the owner of the file. Someone who does not own my file should not be able to prevent me from deleting it! The lesson is: Do not link to another member's files—link to their posts. In fact, you could take it one step further to guarantee that no file links are ever broken: Do not allow members to link to a file unless they own it. There you have it—the best of both worlds! Is everybody happy? :-) -- Frederick W. Chapman, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/~fwchapman/

Will wrote:

The conversion of Maple code and MathML is done by calling a function on a MapleNET server. Unfortunately, MapleNET does not currently support TeX or LaTeX. Adding TeX functionality would be a difficult problem to solve.

I appreciate the difficulties, and I sympathize. My point above was that ORCCA has already done the hard part for you—figuring out how to convert entire TeX/LaTeX documents into MathML. Since the MapleNet server can already render MathML as 2-D math, all you need to do is figure out how to interface the ORCCA TeX/LaTeX-to-MathML translator with the MapleNet server. Since Maplesoft supports ORCCA's research, ORCCA might agree to let Maplesoft use their translator engine on the MaplePrimes site.

A feature that I plan to add in the coming months is a 2D editor that should allow you to create any Math that you desire without the use of any markup.

In principle, that would be the ideal solution. In practice, that may be much more difficult to do than what I suggested above. My suggestion is to take existing building blocks and make them work together. Are there any existing building blocks which you can use to build a 2-D math editor? Will your editor support all of TeX? That's the math I desire! :-) You might want to contact MacKichan Software, the company which developed Scientific WorkPlace, Scientific Word, and Scientific Notebook. These are powerful, easy-to-use, high-level interfaces for TeX/LaTeX. I don't know if MacKichan has developed any web-based math editors, but they might be interested in developing a partnership with Maplesoft in this area. (MacKichan used to license the Maple engine for use in Scientific WorkPlace.) Regardless of how you do it, a web-based 2-D math editor is a great idea. I look forward to enjoying the fruits of your labor! -- Frederick W. Chapman, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/~fwchapman/

It's great that we can now upload and share files so easily. At the moment, we can upload one file at a time. I can think of situations where it would be very convenient to upload a group of files, such as all filenames matching a pattern with wildcards, or all files in a specified directory. For example, I can use Scientific WorkPlace (SWP) on my PC to easily typeset complex mathematical formulas, which are stored in TeX/LaTeX format. SWP also lets me export my TeX/LaTeX document to HTML—it automatically converts all the formulas to GIFs, which it stores in a subdirectory. It would be much easier to publish the results on MaplePrimes if I could upload all the GIFs at one time. Is it feasible to implement this on MaplePrimes? -- Frederick W. Chapman, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/~fwchapman/

Will, thanks for all your replies. If Maplets aren't supported by MapleNet on MaplePrimes, is there any other way to query the user for input during a live worksheet demonstration? Can the user change any elements of the worksheet, or must it be run exactly as is? -- Frederick W. Chapman, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/~fwchapman/

Will, I feel totally jazzed about the free MapleNet server which you have made available on MaplePrimes. Is there any Maple functionality which the MapleNet server does not support? Can we run Maplets via MapleNet, for example? Can we generate 2-D and 3-D plots? How about animations? Is there a timeout on lengthy computations? Inquiring minds want to know! I would find it really helpful if you could prepare a simple Maple worksheet and upload it to MapleNet on MaplePrimes so that we can all see how this works. I've never used MapleNet before. Thanks, Fred -- Frederick W. Chapman, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/~fwchapman/

Will, let me be the first to congratulate you and Maplesoft on adding this significant new file manager and MapleNet server functionality to MaplePrimes. You, sir, are a mind-reader! Why, just last week, I was thinking how useful it would be if I could upload my own graphics images of complicated mathematical formulas to MaplePrimes to include them in my posts (e.g., when neither Maple syntax nor MathML suffices). Now, thanks to the new file manager, I can! I have a question about the new file manager. I uploaded a couple of files as a test, but I don't want to keep them on MaplePrimes. How do I delete them? Thanks so much, Fred -- Frederick W. Chapman, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/~fwchapman/

Hello, Axel! I see from some of your MaplePrimes posts that numerical integration is an interest of yours. Same here! Thanks very much for reading my Research Statement (attached above) and asking for more information about my work on multiple integration. In reply, I've uploaded a PDF preprint of this ISSAC 2005 publication (also attached above):

O. A. Carvajal, F. W. Chapman, and K. O. Geddes, “Hybrid Symbolic-Numeric Integration in Multiple Dimensions via Tensor Product Series,

This is a clarification of item #2 in my list above concerning lost blog and forum posts. This happened to me again when I was posting to the Great Maple Links collaborative book. Now I know exactly what happened: I left the post preview screen to visit another web page in the same browser window. When I attempted to return to the preview screen, I was told that the page with my draft post was no longer available. OUCH! This can easily happen by accessing the browser Favorites, History, or Search in the MaplePrimes browser window. It also happened to me when I tested a hyperlink to an external website which I included in my post; for some reason, the external site failed to open in a new browser window, as it is supposed to do by default on MaplePrimes. Can MaplePrimes add a save-draft button and an auto-save feature? (Gmail has both of these.) It is vitally important to have a way to reload the form data when returning to the post composition screen or post preview screen after visiting another web page in the same browser window. I can tell you from bitter experience that losing a long post after spending a lot of time and effort on it is a very discouraging experience. Since we don't want to discourage people from participating in MaplePrimes, I urge Maplesoft to make fixing this a high priority. As I see it, MaplePrimes cannot leave beta testing until this serious problem is fixed. -- Frederick W. Chapman, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo http://www.scg.uwaterloo.ca/~fwchapman/