The flowers are starting to blossom, the air is getting warmer, the days longer – what does all this mean? It’s time for a spring vacation, even if it’s just for the weekend. Do it now before cabin fever gets the best of you.

If you are a UMBC alum, you have special perks awaiting. UMBC and Enterprise have paired up to give you a ride and a discount to wherever it is you’re aching to go this spring season. Take advantage of this perk while the weather is right.

Pick UMBC and Enterprise; we’ll cut you a deal and they’ll pick you up!

Pack your bags and get the details now!

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Flexible Box Layout Module Level 1. The specification describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent. Both horizontal and vertical alignment of the children can be easily manipulated. Nesting of these boxes (horizontal inside vertical, or vertical inside horizontal) can be used to build layouts in two dimensions. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. Comments are welcome through 22 April 2014. Learn more about the Style Activity.

12 finalists named in InvestMaryland Challenge

Nick Sohr —  March 25, 2014

BALTIMORE, MD (March 25, 2014)– The Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development (DBED) announced today that 12 startup companies have advanced to the final round of the InvestMaryland Challenge, the State’s national business competition. The finalists are competing for $100,000 top prizes in four categories — Information Technology, Life Sciences, General Industry, and, new this year, Cybersecurity. All companies who entered the Challenge are eligible for more than $300,000 in other prizes, including grants, software and lab and incubator space. The winners will be announced in May.

The Web Performance Working Group has published a Working Draft of Navigation Timing 2. This specification defines a unified interface to store and retrieve high resolution performance metric data related to the navigation of a document.

The Group also updated the Candidate Recommendation of Resource Timing, which defines an interface for web applications to access the complete timing information for resources in a document. The main change is that onresourcetimingbufferfull is now an event handler instead of a callback function. A diff document is available.

Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.

The Web Cryptography Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Web Cryptography API. This JavaScript API performs basic cryptographic operations in web applications, such as hashing, signature generation and verification, and encryption and decryption. Additionally, it describes how applications can generate and/or manage the keying material necessary to perform these operations. Comments are welcome through 20 May 2014. Learn more about the Security Activity.