Finished GSOC 2009, new features coming

The GSOC programme for 2009 is now finished, and we have several exciting new features added to ASCEND. Of general interest will be

* improved DAE syntax, that to Dante,
* full support for the IPOPT optimisation solver, together with exact calculation of second derivatives, thanks to Mahesh,
* support for reading data from CSV and other tabular data formats, with cubic spline interpolation, thanks to José

Of a more experimental nature, we also have
* major improvements to the new canvas-based GUI, thanks to Arijit
* exciting new developments for real-time data processing with ASCEND, thanks to Dipak.

We hope to integrate all of these changes into the ASCEND repository trunk in the coming weeks.

Thanks to all our wonderful students, and for all your hard work!

Cheers
JP