Will

Read the abstract for this medical journal. It describes "Tai's Model" for determining the area underneath a curve. Apparently the article has received 75 citations.

I found this great post on Twitter today. Two fans of Maple dress up as Maple and MATLAB for halloween:

I just updated MaplePrimes to have a Print-Specific CSS file that fixes a bug in Firefox that was stopping more than one page printing. This also improves the quality of printouts for all browsers because it removes the sidebar, footer and header links. It also extends the main content to take up the whole width of the page.

You will only see this change when printing a page from Primes, it does not change the appearance of the site when browsing normally.

We just published an update to MaplePrimes that dramatically decreases the load times for thread pages. The improvement comes from not including the Comments or Branch information in the initial page load. Instead, the comments and branches are loaded via JavaScript after the initial page load. We are also loading the right hand sidebar of the site using JavaScript, so the size of each page is much smaller. Your browser will cache the sidebar and only reload it when new information appears there.

In our experimentation, we find that thread pages load considerably faster especially for pages with many comments. Also, and added bonus of serving the sidebar via JavaScript means that the Google spider will no longer include the sidebar content in its index, so this issue will be resolved.

The Popular Post and Popular Question badges require 1000 different people to view the Post or Question. A number of Posts and Questions show that they have over 1000 views, but their creators haven't received the badge. This is because the count currently displayed includes all views of the page, including repeats from the same Member or IP address.

I just published an update that now allows you to hover over the view counter and have the number of unique viewers appear in a tooltip. This should be useful for people curious to see how close they are to earning those two badges.

I was able to find over 1000 files that were missing from the new MaplePrimes. I did some spot checking and it appears that the vast majority of files are now intact. 

I did see some posts where the files are still missing. If I come across a backup containing additional files, I will restore them as well and post about the recovery here.

Due to Joe Riel pointing out comments missing from that thread, I looked into the MaplePrimes migration process and discovered comments that were missed during the migration process.

I am currently running a process to import additional comments and answers. This means that the recent page will be filled with older posts as comments are being imported. The process should complete in several hours, after which the page will return to its normal behavior.

I have just published a new update to MaplePrimes. This fixes a number of issues and ads a couple of new features.

• Autocompletion of tags now works. When you are typing a tag in, a list of possible completions appears, you can click or arrow down to select one of these tags.
• We have added a new Products list. This shows all Maplesoft products that have Posts or Questions associated with them. This link has been added to the top bar, the Tags link has been moved to the "More" drop down. 
• The ordering on the Recent pages has been fixed to sort by last action date descending.
• You can now view tags such as 2Dmath
• Paging has been fixed for many sections of the site including the tag details page
• If you choose to upload files when editing an item, the new file will now work correctly.
• If you choose to convert your Comment into an Answer, you now have the ability to choose the correct parent for that comment.

I've seen a few people talk about how they are bookmarking /recent/all instead of /recent/unread. I wasn't sure why they were working this way, but realized they might not realize how /unread works.

/unread lists all Posts and Questions on MaplePrimes that you have not viewed. Once you click on one of those items, it no longer appears on the list. However, if the item is updated or a comment or answer is added to the item, it will re-appear in the /unread list. This means that by checking /unread, you will see everything that is posted to MaplePrimes, even if it posted after you last viewed that thread.

I believe the confusion was that items don't re-appear in the /unread when replies are posted, so people were viewing /all so they could see everything. I hope this clears things up.

I just fixed several of the MaplePrimes badges. Two of the badges, 2-Dimensional and Historian weren't being awarded when they should have been. This has been fixed, and now two people have earned the 2-Dimensional badge, and 91 people, the Historian badge.

I also updated the text for the "Popular Post" and "Popular Question" badges. They both now state that the question needs to be viewed by over 1000 people. The number that is displayed at the bottom of Posts and Questions is the total number of views, so refreshing the page counts as another view. To earn the badge, 1000 unique IP addresses need to view your Post or Question. There are several items that have almost 500 unique visitors thus far, so in a couple of weeks, the first people will start earning these badges.

An important part of the new MaplePrimes is the reputation system. Reputation gives users access to different features of the site, and is also a quick way for people to get a better idea of how knowledgeable a users might be about Maple.

Since MaplePrimes has been around since 2004, it is important to preserve all of the reputation that our long-time users have built up. There wasn't any method for voting posts before, so we can't use the same algorithm as we'll use going forward. So we came up with a new method using comments to signify an up-vote.

The algorithm is very simple. For every post, question, or answer that you posted on the old Primes, for every comment that is added to your item, you receive 4 reputation points. Also, using the same limit we'll use in the future, you are limited to gaining 200 reputation points in a single day.

We find that this algorithm has done a great job of exposing the top MaplePrimes users as you can see on the top users list. Over time as people start up-voting posts, questions and answers, the reputation scores will continue to grow, and this method for calculating the back-reputation will become less meaningful as the reputation gained from up-votes will overpower the initial reputation that legacy users received from the back-reputation.

I've just published an update to MaplePrimes that fixes a few minor bugs and adds one new feature:

• Your Bio is now displayed on your profile page. This can be edited on your edit profile page. 
• The paging between Answers, Questions and Posts on a user's profile is now working.
• The rendered image from the 2-D math button is now up 300px wide, which should cause most math to appear better.
• When creating a post, the date is now stored correctly instead of 4 hours off as it was before.
• The "Mark Page as Read" button now works on the Recent tab.

As some of you noticed, we launched the new version of MaplePrimes today. Unfortunately, we have ran into server problems with the new site, and have switched back to the old version of the site. We are working on figuring out what the cause of the problem is, and will be re-launching the new site soon.

UPDATE: WE have made some changes to the site that have fixed the problem we experienced before. Please enjoy the new and improved MaplePrimes!

We've been working hard on the brand new version of MaplePrimes over the last few months. I am glad to announce that the new version will be launching publicly next week. The new site fixes many of the requests we've received from MaplePrimes users over the years, and adds new features that we think will make the new site easier to use, and a better way to get and share information about Maple and MapleSim.