While working on acer's most excellent competition, I hit on a different competition that could be fun too: generate the longest valid obscure Maple expression that actually "does something". My entry: `#`@`&^`$-0!; It returns NULL ! And now I need to go back to finding entries for acer's competition.

I must admit that I have a lot of fun looking at the evolution over time of the Maple Rankings. I'll use this blog entry for some commentary, because it's fun to record these snapshots.

I recently got emailed a .sxc file. I did not know what that was, so off too Google I go, and find the site fileinfo.net which lists lots of extensions. There I am enlightened: OpenOffice spreadsheet format.

But then I was curious. So I look up .ms, .mws, .mw and .nb. Results:

.mw	Text	MacWrite Text Document
.mws	Audio	MWave DSP Synth Instrument Extract
.nb	Data	Mathematica Notebook

No entry for .ms. Why is this?

I got spammed by Wolfram, touting their new Mathematica 6. Being the curious person that I am, I went over to take a look. First: their marketing material is slick. Very slick. It makes you think that they've invented some nifty new stuff -- until you look just a bit more and realize that some of it has been in Maple for ages. And some of these ideas were invented by Maplesoft, and yet Wolfram markets them better. Very devious - and I am sure will be very successful with a lot of customers! Second: it's good. It looks like it warrants the major upgrade hoopla. The new features are very tightly integrated. I mean, in the case of Mathematica, the language and the user interface are now one-and-the-same. You can programmatically access the whole interface (live!), and you can use interface components in any program. This is going to give Maple 11 some serious competition.

It had been quite a while since I had read Joel Spolsky's great blog on software, so I headed on over and read his rather thoughtful post on customer service. I learned something from reading it, so I thought I would share it with others.