MathDrag'n

I've been gone for a long time.  In fact, I had rather lost interest in MathDrag'n.  My research was pulling me in other directions, and it seemed like nobody was interested.  Several things changed this.

 First was a friend of mine here at school who came back to visit and give a presentation.  He asked me how things were going, what I was getting done, etc.  I told a little about scattering signals off of chaotic cavities, which is what I'm actually paid to work on.  He said---No, no!  What's going on with that math thing you were working on?

Then I get a couple of emails, completely out of the blue, asking about MathDrag'n.  One was making a good suggestion about how to do MathDrag'n, which I unfortunately had to turn down, but which I may use in a slightly different form.  The other was just asking about how to get MathDrag'n working with Maxima, a perfectly fair question, and one which helped me debug MathDrag'n significantly.  (I think the new version should work with Maxima just fine now.  I will be reading the comments regularly now, so if you ask for help, I will help you.)

 Well, all of this interest, coming up out of (for me) absolutely nowhere got me excited again.  The other students I work with who I've shown it to also really, really liked it.  I've decided that I'm going to make some progress on MathDrag'n every week, no matter how little.  Sometimes this will have to give while I'm working on my thesis research, but just a small bug fix may be all that's needed.

 So I've made several changes.  I can't make any promises about the timeline, unfortunately.  I want to make a release version of MathDrag'n which I can put up on sourceforge for general use.  The biggest differences will be:  the much improved connections with Maxima (now much more flexible and likely to work on other systems and with different versions), the addition of derivatives and integrals, and a boat-load of minor bug-fixes.  Oh yeah.   And a windows installer and uninstaller, with a bundled JRE.  If you don't know what that is, don't worry---the installer takes care of it.