MathDrag'n

Well, I'm back and thinking again.  I swear, going to grad school is like putting your brain on a mallet and hitting it repeatedly.  I didn't want to do anything (and I mean *anything*) after getting done with the last semester.  I've slowly been recovering, but it takes time.

I do have a bit of good news:  Sourceforge has finally updated their reporting system.  Up until last week, all the statistics shown on the Sourceforge page were from the middle of January, with an activity percentile of 0 and about 5 downloads in the past month.  With the new system, the activity is in the 96.05 percentile and a lot more people have been looking/downloading.  I'm glad to see that I've attracted more interest.  Now the ball is in my court to implement features people actually need. Of course, as always,  feedback is appreciated.

Right now, I'm trying to get MathDrag'n's Mathematica connection to work on as many systems as possible.  This means (among other things) that I need to create code which allows the user to select the Mathematica install directory manually.  This is a bit tricky.  The Java code may be system independent, but the Windows is from Venus and Mac OS X is from Mars (not sure where Linux is from yet.)  (Update: According to C Y from the Maxima mailing list "Linux would be the asteroid belt - we've got the mass to be a planet, but we're scattered all over the place and we're waaay out there. ;-)" ).  The frustrating bit is that the technique for connecting to each of these is very similar, and yet at the same time ever so trivially different.  Windows needs the kernel executable.  So does OS X, but it's installed in a completely different location.  Windows needs single quotes in an initialization string.  OS X needs both single and double quotes and an extra term.  Everything changes in OS X between versions 4.1 and 4.2 of Mathematica, including the default install location.  In Windows, the changes aren't nearly as drastic.  Etc, etc.  No wonder I haven't been able to get the OS X version to work with Mathematica-lot's of things can go wrong and all it takes is one character off, and wham! it can't connect.

Anyway, just as soon as I figure out the best way of manually connecting, and as soon as I have the defaults working, I'll be sure to release the code again.  Hopefully this should solve a lot of problems.  If you've been having trouble with MathDrag'n saying it can't solve equations, and if you have Mathematica installed, this should solve your problems.