A few problems with MathPiper

[fhub]

Hi,

I'm a new user of MathPiper (coming from GeoGebra), and I also have a
few questions.
I've downloaded the last development version 79M (6.Jan.2011) and I'm
running it in Win98 and Java 6-07.

1) There's a problem with win_run.bat:
the commandline "java ..." is too long, at least for Win98!
When I run it there's an error message "Command not found" and the
batchfile closes.
Looking at this batchfile I saw that the entry "./non_plugin_jars/
jlm_greek.jar;" appears twice in the list, so fortunately I could
delete one and then MathPiper starts correctly.
Maybe you can fix this for the next release ...

2) I also saw in win_run.bat that there's a "./non_plugin_jars/
abcl.jar" at the and of the list, but I couldn't find this jar-file in
the non_plugin_jars folder. So I searched for it in the internet,
found the right website, downloaded this "abcl.jar" and put it into
this folder.
But strangely after starting MathPiper again, I couldn't find this
plugin in the plugin list!?
So my question: how can this CommonLisp interpreter/compiler be used/
called within MathPiper?
And what is it really good for?

3) And finally there's one thing that annoyes me a bit:
each time I start MathPiper it wants to connect to the internet! :-(
I've searched through the options but couldn't find anything related
to this internet connection trial.
Can this behaviour be switched off anywhere?

Regards,
Franz

[Ted Kosan]

Franz wrote:

> 1) There's a problem with win_run.bat:
> the commandline "java ..." is too long, at least for Win98!
> When I run it there's an error message "Command not found" and the
> batchfile closes.
> Looking at this batchfile I saw that the entry "./non_plugin_jars/
> jlm_greek.jar;" appears twice in the list, so fortunately I could
> delete one and then MathPiper starts correctly.
> Maybe you can fix this for the next release ...

Thanks for finding this bug. I will fix it before the next release.

> 2) I also saw in win_run.bat that there's a "./non_plugin_jars/
> abcl.jar" at the and of the list, but I couldn't find this jar-file in
> the non_plugin_jars folder. So I searched for it in the internet,
> found the right website, downloaded this "abcl.jar" and put it into
> this folder.
> But strangely after starting MathPiper again, I couldn't find this
> plugin in the plugin list!?
> So my question: how can this CommonLisp interpreter/compiler be used/
> called within MathPiper?
> And what is it really good for?

The abcl.jar file contains a copy of Armed Bear Common Lisp:

http://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/

Since MathPiper is implemented on top of a custom Lisp interpreter,
sometimes it is useful for me to have access to Common Lisp in order
to learn more about Lisp and to compare MathPiper's Lisp interpreter
to it. When I need to use abcl, I place a copy of abcl.jar into the
mathpiperide\non_plugin_jars directory and then I also place a copy of
the abcl_plugin.jar file into the mathpiperide\jar directory (each
file in mathpiperide\jar contains a plugin). The abcl_plugin.jar file
is the one that creates the abcl plugin inside of MathPiperIDE.

The abcl.jar file and the abcl_plugin.jar file are not present in the
MathPiperIDE distribution because it is an experimental plugin that
only a few of the MathPiper developers use.

I have left the abcl.jar reference in win_run.bat and unix_run.sh
because it does not hurt anything and because it is tedious to add and
remove :-)

> 3) And finally there's one thing that annoyes me a bit:
> each time I start MathPiper it wants to connect to the internet! :-(
> I've searched through the options but couldn't find anything related
> to this internet connection trial.

> Can this behavior be switched off anywhere?

MathPiperIDE should not be accessing the Internet when it is launched.
I used a network traffic monitoring tool in Linux to verify this, but
I have not located a tool which can monitor network traffic by
application for Windows yet.

Try adding:

-noplugins

at the end of the second line in your win_run.bat file (you can remove
";./non_plugin_jars/abcl.jar" if you need to make room for it). This
will cause MathPiperIDE to launch without loading any plugins. If
this fixes the problem, then one of the plugins is accessing the
Internet for some reason.

If you would, let me know what happens and then I will look into the
problem further.

Thanks,

Ted

[fhub]

Hi Ted,

thanks for the very comprehensive answer! :-)

I've now removed the abcl.jar, because I'm certainly no MathPiper
developer - at least not yet. ;-)

And also the problem with the internet connection I could solve:
First I've tried your "-noplugins" method and it didn't try to connect
anymore, so it was indeed a plugin.
Then I've removed one single plugin after the other to find out which
causes this problem, and it was the threedxplormathj_plugin.jar.
This plugin tries to load the site "http://3d-xplormath.org/j/docs/
en",
but fortunately this can be changed in the plugin's options dialog
(for the documentation), so finally also this problem is solved.

Thanks again for your help and for your excellent MathPiper program,
Franz.