In part due to a large number of requests on MaplePrimes, the command ?plottools,getdata was added to Maple 15. This new command gives programmers a better way to access the internals of plots and do things with the data they contain.

I was trying to come up with something really fun to do with this command, and another recent obsession came to mind: the game Minecraft.  Minecraft is nice, since like Maple it is written in Java and runs on lots of platforms!  For the uninitiated, Minecraft is a a sort of mostly unstructured "sandbox" game. The player starts in alone in a procedurally generated landscape consisting of blocks. They player can collect blocks with their hands or with tools and they use them to build new things. The wide array of things that people create in Minecraft is staggering.

So, I thought I would write some commands to export 3D plots in Maple to block structures in Minecraft.

Now that Maple 15 is out, I thought I should share this little application I made: GoalTracker.mw. It is an application partially inspired by the BMI tracker in Nintendo's WiiFit application; you could easily use it to track a weight loss goal. But it could also be used to track other quantifiable goals. I am posting it here mostly because it takes advantage of two new features in Maple 15.

Back when I was working at the University of Waterloo, I found several copies of a VHS tape sitting on a dusty bookshelf full of old Maple boxes and manuals. The tape's cover had a line drawing of Issac Newton on it and the title "Maple V: The Future of Mathematics".

There was...

I was recently asked a question on using regular expressions with ?type , and I thought it was interesting enough, to share here.

This year I am organizing East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD) 2011 at the University of Waterloo, on April 9th. 

ECCAD is a long running series of annual one-day meetings for those interested in...