When:

Fri May 16, 2014 6AM to 9AM

Where:

Santa's House (@ Catonsville Fire Station)754 Frederick Rd, Catonsville, 
MD 21228

What: 

Participants in Bike to Work Day who stop by the event location will receive a free t-shirt, commuting guide, and a chance to win prizes. Coffee & refreshments provided. Simply bike to work, and stop by 754 Frederick Rd. Register here.

Why: 

Bike to Work Day is a national event to encourage and celebrate bicycling to work and promote public awareness of bicycling and bicycle safety. Locally, it's a part of Maryland's Clean Commute Month in May. Register here.

Late Spring is the start of the ground-level ozone season, when we hear about Code Red and Orange Ozone Action Days. On these warm smoggy days, the air is dangerous to breathe – especially for the young and for the elderly. Emissions from single occupancy vehicles(driving alone) contribute approximately 20% of our region's dangerous ozone levels. Driving alone also results in increasingly congested roadways and parking issues. We can save money, protect the environment, stay in shape and have fun while biking.

Transportation accounts for 38% of UMBC's carbon footprint. In 2007, President Hrabowski committed to campus carbon neutrality.

How: 

Resources on UMBC's sustainable transportation alternatives are listed at:http://sustainability.umbc.edu/transportation/

• Ride Transit
• Carpool Together
• Bike to Campus    
• Borrow a Free Bicycle
• Charge an Electric Vehicle
• Borrow a Zip Car

Who: 

These sustainable transportation options have been developed and promoted by the following groups. If this topic is of interest to you, consider getting involved:

• UMBC Transportation Work Group (part of the Climate Change Task Force)
• UMBC Cycling Community
• UMBC Off Campus Student Services, Sustainable Transportation Outreach Intern
• UMBC Sustainability

We in the USA are lucky.

Over two centuries we have developed a rule of law that values the civil rights and liberties of our citizens.

True, there’s room for improvement…

We have yet to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, remove social and political barriers associated with gender transgression, resolve de facto racial discrimination, and detach ourselves from patriarchal norms.

But there is a continued progress around the country to address these hanging social inequalities.

Other countries are not as fortunate.

While we have a judicial system to protect and defend our rights…these women do not…

The shocking images before you are of three women who were doused in acid as punishment for turning down proposals and undesired arranged marriages.

In Western cultures, there is a consensus that arranged marriages are not natural and that couples should elope for emotionally driven reasons, such as love and passion.

Unfortunately, these women are long past worrying about matters of the heart.

To some of them, marriage is another burden and societal pressure.  Defying this deeply ingrained tradition could mean life or death.

The practice seems to western eyes primitive and unjust. But what are we to do?

It is hard to convince other societies to change their ways when there are large cultural differences to factor.

What is to some people a barbaric offence (the attacks above, or the death penalty in the US) is to others a proper form of punishment.

There are good non-governmental organizations trying to draw attention to these and other human rights abuses around the globe. But what should our government role in fighting for human rights?

The US has, at times put human rights at the center of its foreign policy. Unfortunately, with the detention center at Quantanamo Bay, accusations of torture and the atrocites at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, our human rights’ reputation around the globe has taken a hit.

Being good buddies with questionable human rights regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt also doesn’t help the resumé.

Still… we would like to hope that our government would continue to work hard toward stopping the kind of abuse witnessed above.  

By continuing to fight for human rights here and abroad we can, over time, help inspire, educate, and finally instill faith into cultures where abuses often go unpunished.

What do you think we and our government should be doing in the fight for human rights?

Hometown: Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Alma Mater:  University of Baltimore

The task runner Gulp.js is getting more and more popular lately. It can be used for many things, like concatenating JavaScript files or minifying images. If you are new to Gulp.js, I recommend you to start off with Managing Your Build Tasks With Gulp.js. 

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Gulp.js, in order to run a local web server with built-in, livereload support.

The Old Way

Let's assume we want to develop a single page application. The entry point for this app is a simple index.html file. Our goal is to access this file through the browser, by going to localhost. In the past, perhaps you setup an Apache or Nginx server. Well, that's not needed anymore.

A Better Way

Today, an implementation in JavaScript exists for almost everything, even for a web server. The most popular one is called Connect. We will be using it, by utilizing a Gulp.js plugin called gulp-connect. 

In the following sections, we will setup a local web server for a single page application, so I'll assume you have already setup the basic files, like the gulpfile.js file.

Initial Setup

We start off by installing the Connect plugin with the command below. Everything we need will be installed with this single command.

npm install --save-dev gulp-connect

Tip: npm install --save-dev can be abbreviated with npm i -D.

Now, let's define a task for the web server. Our gulpfile.js should then look like this:

var gulp = require('gulp'),
      connect = require('gulp-connect');
    
    gulp.task('webserver', function() {
      connect.server();
    });
    
    gulp.task('default', ['webserver']);

We can now start the web server by simply running gulp in the terminal. We can open up localhost:8080 in our browser, where we should see index.html. The web server mounts the file structure of the folder, where the gulpfile.js lives in, to the root of localhost:8080. The server will run until you stop the task by pressing Ctrl + c on your keyboard. Great!

You can find the source code for this and all following examples on Github. Each example contains all necessary files to reproduce a working setup. You just need to run npm install in the respective directory.

Adding livereload Support

Setting up the basic web server was easy, right? So let's continue to get livereload running. We need to do two things: first tell the web server to start with livereload support and secondly, we tell livereload when to refresh the page with new content.

The first step is simple. Just set the livereload property to true. The webserver task then looks like this:

gulp.task('webserver', function() {
      connect.server({
        livereload: true
      });
    });

The second step depends on your use case. In this example, we will setup automatic compilation of LESS files to a CSS stylesheet and inject it into the browser. Let's break down this example into its parts. We need a "watcher", which checks if some LESS files got changed. This watcher should then trigger the LESS compiler, which outputs a CSS file. This CSS file should then be injected via livereload.

For this example, we will use the gulp-less plugin. You can install it by running npm install --save-dev gulp-less. The watcher comes already shipped with Gulp.js. Our app file structure should roughly look like this:

.
    ├── node_modules
    │   └── ...
    ├── styles
    │   └── main.less
    ├── gulpfile.js
    ├── index.html
    └── package.json

In the watch task, Gulp.js listens for changes in all *.less files in the styles folder and triggers the less task. Here, the main.less file is the entry point for LESS. After each compile step, the result will be automatically injected into the browser. The code for the gulpfile.js looks like the following, feel free to copy and paste it, to your project.

var gulp = require('gulp'),
      connect = require('gulp-connect'),
      less = require('gulp-less');
    
    gulp.task('webserver', function() {
      connect.server({
        livereload: true
      });
    });
    
    gulp.task('less', function() {
      gulp.src('styles/main.less')
        .pipe(less())
        .pipe(gulp.dest('styles'))
        .pipe(connect.reload());
    });
    
    gulp.task('watch', function() {
        gulp.watch('styles/*.less', ['less']);
    })
    
    gulp.task('default', ['less', 'webserver', 'watch']);

Let's rerun gulp in the terminal and open up again localhost:8080 in the browser. We can now make some changes to a LESS file in the styles folder. It will be instantly compiled and refreshed in the browser. Note that you don't need any browser extensions. livereload works out of the box.

A Few Adjustments

Please keep in mind that the previous gulpfile.js is just a minimal demonstration of how to use Gulp.js as a web server with livereload. I highly recommend playing around with some other plugins. You should also try to rearrange the task structure and use the non-builtin gulp-watch plugin, which allows you to process just the changed files. This becomes important if you're working with a bigger code base. Later in this tutorial, we will see what an alternative task structure might look like.

Changing the Hostname & Port

The gulp-connect plugin itself has many configuration options. For example, you can modify the web server port or hostname. You can even use a custom hostname with port 80 (default is localhost:8080).

connect.server({
      port: 80,
      host: 'gulp.dev'
    });

To get this working, we need to have gulp.dev in our hosts file and run the command sudo gulp. Administrator rights are needed in order to use port 80.

Some Advanced Features

You can go even further using the connect plugin for spawning multiple web servers at the same time. This becomes useful, for example, if you want to run a development web server and run integration tests, simultaneously.

gulp-connect also provides the possibility to use several directories as a root folder. For example, when you're using CoffeeScript and you want to save the compiled JavaScript files in a temporary folder, you can then mount this folder without polluting your source folder.

For more examples, please checkout the GitHub repository.

Refactoring Our Code

In the previous example we setup a minimal gulpfile.js to compile LESS files to CSS and inject them immediately into the browser. It worked, but we can do better. It might be problematic that we mixed the compile and livereload steps into one task. So, let's split them up and watch for changes in the generated files. For that, we will be using the previously mentioned gulp-watch plugin.

Let's go even a step further and add a CoffeeScript compile step. With this additional step, the new structure should be more clear. We install the new plugins in one batch via:

npm install --save-dev gulp-watch gulp-coffee 

And require them in the top of our gulpfile.js. In the following setup, I assume you already have some .coffee files in a directory called scripts. For an example setup, please checkout this repo. The refactored gulpfile.js could look like the following. We'll go through the changes, step by step.

var gulp = require('gulp'),
      connect = require('gulp-connect'),
      watch = require('gulp-watch'),
      less = require('gulp-less'),
      coffee = require('gulp-coffee');
    
    gulp.task('webserver', function() {
      connect.server({
        livereload: true,
        root: ['.', '.tmp']
      });
    });
    
    gulp.task('livereload', function() {
      gulp.src(['.tmp/styles/*.css', '.tmp/scripts/*.js'])
        .pipe(watch())
        .pipe(connect.reload());
    });
    
    gulp.task('less', function() {
      gulp.src('styles/main.less')
        .pipe(less())
        .pipe(gulp.dest('.tmp/styles'));
    });
    
    gulp.task('coffee', function() {
      gulp.src('scripts/*.coffee')
        .pipe(coffee())
        .pipe(gulp.dest('.tmp/scripts'));
    });
    
    gulp.task('watch', function() {
      gulp.watch('styles/*.less', ['less']);
      gulp.watch('scripts/*.coffee', ['coffee']);
    })
    
    gulp.task('default', ['less', 'coffee', 'webserver', 'livereload', 'watch']);

The biggest change we see is the additional livereload task. This task just watches (via the gulp-watch plugin) for changes in the compiled files and refreshes them in the browser. The custom watch() function allows us to just reload the changed files, whereas the built-in gulp.watch() command would reload all files and not just the changed ones.

Because of this single additional task, we don't need a .pipe(connect.reload()) command after each compile step. So we separated the tasks by their concerns, which is always a good idea in software development.

We also noticed that the compiled files aren't saved in their respective source folder any more. They are now stored in a temporary folder named .tmp. The contents of this folder are just generated files and won't pollute the styles or scripts directories any longer. It's also recommended to exclude this folder from your revision control system. All we have to do to get this working, is to also mount .tmp as a root folder, which is done by

root: ['.', '.tmp']

This refactored setup should work just like the one before. But it's way cleaner and easier to extend.

Conclusion

You've just learned how to use Gulp.js as a web server. 

You can combine this technique with many other use cases, like testing or building your single page application. Note that this web server is just meant for local development. For production purposes, you should use a more performant solution like Nginx or a CDN. 

Notice that all the presented features are also possible with Grunt or similar projects. Gulp.js just provides a very simple and elegant way of doing things.

We are conducting interviews with graduating leaders to share their stories and inspire UMBC students for years to come. We can inspire others to enact and lead progress towards a more sustainable society.

1. In what ways were you involved in Sustainability efforts on campus during your time as a student?

I first heard about the Biodiesel club during the spring semester of my second year at UMBC. I was inspired by the club’s mission to generate energy from waste and took over the initiative that following summer. In order to teach myself and others more about biodiesel, I constructed a lab-scale reactor designed to produce a small quantity of biodiesel from waste vegetable oil.

The following semester, I was honored to be one of four students to receive an SGA sustainability intern position. This work experience helped me make connections with like-minded faculty and staff at UMBC and beyond. Throughout the academic year, the other interns and I worked together to bring about sustainable change, including single stream recycling, composting, and most importantly, heightened awareness from the UMBC community.

2. What compelled you be involved? What did you get out of the experiences?

Prior to engaging in sustainable efforts at UMBC, I had an eye-opening experience in the chemical industry. The summer after my first year at UMBC, I accepted a sustainability intern position at global chemical company. The main objective of this position was to quantify waste generated by a number of chemical plants, and the results were quite shocking. In comparison to other countries, the United States consistently generated more waste! From the beginning of my undergraduate chemical engineering career, I vowed to work toward achieving more sustainable practices. It was not long after this experience that I became more involved in sustainable efforts at UMBC.

3. What changes have you seen take place during your time at UMBC?

Recycling has improved drastically since my beginnings with UMBC sustainability. It is much more available throughout campus compared to in the past. The composting initiative was also brought to fruition soon after my gig as a sustainability intern ended. Overall, the UMBC community has become much more aware and compliant with sustainable efforts, thanks to the students’ collective voice and faculty support. Organizations like SGA and SEA in conjunction with the Climate Change Task Force have pushed forward more sustainable efforts in record time.

4. What is your vision for the state of sustainability at UMBC 5 years from now?

I am impressed with the UMBC community’s response thus far to calls for more sustainable practices. It is my hope that the community not only maintains, but increases its level of awareness and sustainable practice for years to come. It is encouraging to see new sustainable ideas and approaches capturing the attention of the community as my final days at UMBC draw near.

5. What are the most important lessons you’ve learned through your work and efforts that you wish to share with UMBC students?

Persistence is the key. There were many times that I was forced to reevaluate my sustainable goals. I was very discouraged the first few times this happened, but then I realized that each and every change in plans added a new level of resilience and “sustainability” to my original goal.

Don’t be afraid to voice your opinion – to anybody. In my early days as an SGA intern, I was terrified to truly state my opinion to faculty, staff, and advisors. However, as I watched fellow interns speak boldly, I noticed that their opinions were truly received. Over time, I gained the confidence to speak firmly and with respect. My words took me to places that I never dreamed I could go.

Laura is graduating with a major in Biochemical Engineering. She is also part of the Honors College and UMBC Cross Country/Track and Field. Thank you, Laura.

Video clip of Laura in the Biodiesel Club

Digital fabrication company brings advanced manufacturing to UMBC

Company is the third digital fabrication lab in Baltimore County