Robert Deluty, associate dean of the graduate school, has published a new book of poetry, “Saluting from the Shore.”

In his review, Ronald Pies writes, “Once again, Robert Deluty presents us with a splendid collection of short poems, inspired by Cheryl Strayed’s observation that we will never know the lives we have not chosen – the ‘ghost ship that didn’t carry us…’ We wonder, for example, what other ship might have carried the dean who confides that ‘…feigning interest all day/ is wearing him out.’ We wonder how the life not chosen might have spared ‘the dying soldier/ recalling his grandfather/ saying Be a man.’ In a sense, these poems are a salute to paths not taken, lives not chosen, which—through Deluty’s illuminating explorations—are given voice and dignity.”

Copies of “Saluting from the Shore,” as well as of Deluty’s other books, are on sale at the UMBC Bookstore.

Four UMBC alumni are among the 98 invitees for the 2014 Federation of International Lacrosse (FIL) World Championships, where the U.S. men seek to defend their title in Denver, Colorado on July 10-19, 2014. Attackmen Brendan Mundorf ’07, and Drew Westervelt ’07, will attempt to earn their second consecutive team selection. They were both members of the 2010 squad that won gold with a 12-10 victory over Canada in Manchester, England. Midfielders Terry Kimener ’08, and Peet Poillon ’10, are embarking on their first journeys to the championships.

Tryouts will be held Aug. 30 – Sept.1 at Goucher College in Baltimore, Md. after which the roster will be cut to 40. That group will then begin preparing for the Federation of International Lacrosse (FIL) World Championships, where the U.S. Men seek to defend their title on July 10-19, 2014.

Patterns have graced our designs for thousands of years. The texture, color and life added by patterns have enhanced design the world over.

The love of pattern reached new heights with the advert of the web and our ability to easily tile graphics. And adding pattern to your site is easy thanks to these 25 free patterns from our friends at Vecteezy.

Featuring a 50s style retro color palette, the shapes cover a range of styles from 60s op-art to 70s pill shapes and even contemporary illustrative patterns.

Whether you use them to create an engaging background or to lift the texture of your foreground, these great patterns will really set your site apart.  Download after the preview…

Have you used these patterns in a project? How do you use pattern in your designs? Let us know in the comments.

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Heavenly UI Kit for E-Commerce Sites – only $9

SPDY (pronounced “SPeeDY”) is a new technology that aims to decrease page load times by fixing a number of flaws present in HTTP 1.1. It’s not a replacement for HTTP but instead adds a number of features that help to make web transactions faster.

SPDY was initially developed at Google and is used on almost all Google products. It is also being used by other tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter and WordPress.com.

In this article you are going to learn the basics of how SPDY works and how it helps to speed up web performance.

Note: The HTTP 2.0 Working Group has chosen to use SPDY as a starting point for the new HTTP 2.0 specification, but SPDY itself was not designed to be a direct replacement.

How SPDY Fits Into The Existing Architecture

SPDY works by adding an additional layer to the request stack that augments the existing functionality of HTTP.

How SPDY fits into the web stack

Before we look at the features that SPDY introduces, lets first take a look at the problems that SPDY aims to solve.

Problems Introduced in HTTP 1.1

HTTP 1.1 has a number of flaws that affect the efficiency of requests between a client and server. These flaws impose limitations on the performance of your websites.

The aim of SPDY is to provide functionality that helps to solve the following problems.

Limited Number of Connections

Due to the way that HTTP is designed, each resource requires a separate HTTP request to a server. Modern browsers currently support up to 6 simultaneous connections to a server. This means that if your website requires more than 6 resources from the same server the browser will have to wait until one of the resources has been downloaded before it can open up another request. This can have a significant impact on the overall page load time.

Developers have used a strategy called HTTP pipelining to get around this problem, however this still suffers from the First-In, First-Out (FIFO) problem.

Note: Research carried out by HTTPArchive found that the average web page consists of 84 requests from 30 different domains.

HTTP Headers

Another issue that is present in HTTP is the use of uncompressed or unnecessary headers. HTTP headers are fundamental to the way that web transactions work but all this data still needs to be sent over the wire and so the more headers you have, the longer your request will take.

While there are technologies in use today that compress headers they are usually optional. There is the potential for a significant saving by compressing request headers or emitting headers that are not needed.

Developer Workarounds

Web developers have adopted a number of strategies in order to decrease the load times of their web pages. These include things like:

• Image Spriting – Combining a number of smaller images into one image ‘sprite’ and then using some clever CSS to display the correct section of the sprite image on the page.
• Concatenation and Minification – Combining multiple CSS or JS files in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests in a page. Minification refers to the practice of removing whitespace and other supplementary content from files in order to reduce their size.
• Domain Sharding – Placing resources under different sub-domains so that the browser can open more parallel connections.
• Inline Resources – Using Data URIs to embed images into the HTML code, again reducing the number of HTTP requests.

While all of these strategies are effective at speeding up page load times they can be a pain to implement. Fixing some of the issues in HTTP 1.1 would eliminate the need for developers to worry about adopting these workarounds.

Solving These Problems with SPDY

Now that you understand some of the problems that SPDY aims to fix, lets take a look at some of the key features that make up SPDY.

Multiplexed Streams

With SPDY, requests are mapped to streams. SPDY allows for multiple concurrent streams to use a single connection between the client and browser. This massively reduces the amount of time that is taken to establish connections.

These connections are bidirectional and therefore streams can be initiated from both the client and server. More on this later.

Prioritized Streams

SPDY streams include prioritization. The client can instruct a server that certain resources are more important than others and therefore should be sent as soon as the bandwidth is available.

This helps to solve the ‘first-in, first-out’ problem I mentioned earlier.

Header Compression

SPDY compresses request and response headers in order to minimize the amount of data being sent over the wire. Experiments carried out by Google observed an ~88% reduction in the size of request headers and an ~85% reduction in the size of response headers after enabling compression. This amounted to a saving of between 45 and 1142 ms in the overall page load time.

The SPDY team is also experimenting with ways of eliminating headers that are unnecessary. For example, after the user-agent header has been sent to the server we should be able to safely assume that it will not change for the rest of the session. We can therefore omit this from future requests, reducing the size of the header data.

Server Push

Another great feature of SPDY is the ability to create server-initiated streams. These allow the server to push resources down to the client before the client has requested them.

For example, a server could parse an HTML file and see that it contains a <link> element that references a CSS stylesheet. Traditionally the server would have to wait until the client issued a request for the stylesheet before it could send it down. However as we know that the client will need this file why don’t we just send it automatically. We would then eliminate the time it takes for the client’s request to reach the server (also know as latency).

The priciniple here is essentially equivalent to using Data URIs to embed images within the HTML markup of a page. We know that the resource will be required so it makes sense to eliminate the need for the extra request.

Using SPDY Today

Now that you’ve seen what SPDY has to offer, I’m sure that you are wondering how you can put it to use. The good news is that SPDY is ready for primetime. As I mentioned earlier many companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter have it running on production systems today.

For Apache users there is a module available called mod_spdy.
Nginx users should check out the ngx_http_spdy_module.

Note: You don’t need to modify any of your site content in order to start using SPDY.

One thing to keep in mind is that SPDY requires SSL. This does introduce a small latency penalty but ensures a secure connection between the client and server.

Browsers with support for SPDY currently include Chrome, Firefox and Opera. Microsoft also recently confirmed that SPDY will be supported in IE11.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully you should now have a basic understanding of what SPDY is and how it fits in with the rest of the web stack.

SPDY promises to make our lives as developers a lot easier by eliminating the need to implement workarounds for the bottlenecks found in HTTP 1.1. The days of creating image sprites and implementing domain sharding may well be coming to an end.

Useful Links

• High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik
• Apache Module: mod_spdy
• Nginx Module: ngx_http_spdy_module
• SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web
• Can I use SPDY?
• SPDY Website Checker

The post Making The Web Faster With SPDY appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The fact-checking site PolitiFact recently asked UMBC political science professor Roy T. Meyers to weigh in on the accuracy of House Speaker John Boehner’s statement that President Obama has “announced that he would not sign any spending bills this year unless sequestration spending cuts are eliminated.”

Meyers noted that Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs) Boehner references here do indicate a veto threat, saying that this type of wording from the Obama administration is usually “meant as a strong ‘no’ … but a ‘no’ that is meant to say he is firm in his position and that it’s time to negotiate.” Combining this with the finding that the SAPs reference the House Republican budget but do not specifically cite the restoration of sequestration cuts, PolitiFact rates Boehner’s statement as “Half True.”

Read the full analysis at PolitiFact.

A bid to clean the air with algae

Howard Co. startup is trying to prove that its algae bioreactors are an answer to greenhouse-gas pollution

The Howard County startup running these bioreactors hasn't hit on an entirely new idea. The U.S. Department of Energy started funding projects related to algae and power plants at least 35 years ago, but the focus largely has been on growing algae for fuel.

HY-TEKBio's aim is emissions reduction, an area getting increasing interest from both companies and countries that see potential in algae. HY-TEK's leaders say algae products — such as biofuel, pharmaceutical ingredients and nutritional supplements — would be secondary, a way to help make the main goal cost-effective.