• Joe Kirby, AVP DoIT
• Joel DeWyer, Associated Director, The Commons Administration
• Nate Czarnota, Associate Director, Registrar's Office

Thank you

Joe Kirby, AVP Business Systems Group of DoIT

kirby@umbc.edu

Every day it seems as if the medical field is finding new ways to exploit the rapidly expanding technology of 3D printing. We have seen 3D printed human cells, 3d printed prosthetics, and now tiny 3D printed molds are being used to create medical devices for cancer research.

Potomac Photonics teamed with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to try and unclog the bottleneck that existed in the microfabricationn of tiny PDMS (Polydimethylsiloxane) microchambers, which are used by researchers to grow cancer cells in a controlled environment.

Maxime Deforet, the Program Director at Sloan Kettering Institute, stated that “These Acrylic 3D-printed prototypes are molds, subsequently used for PDMS microfabrication. PDMS microchambers are now broadly used for biology and biomedical applications. However, development of such microfabricated devices (often based on photolithography) can be a bottleneck as it requires costly equipment and long process cycles. Acrylic 3D printing allows rapid prototyping of microfluidic assay for moderate price. In particular, the mold shown here is used to make a PDMS microchamber for cancer cell growth in a controlled environment.”

Potomac Photonics, who is not unfamiliar with 3D printing tiny medical devices and molds, has recently been partnering with several Universities as well as companies in an effort to streamline the production of devices which can be used to both find cures for, and treat various forms of cancer. The project was partially funded by Potomac Photonics Educational Manufacturing Initiative, who works to connect Universities and companies in a way that maximizes progress in the development of cancer research and therapy devices. Discuss this news story at 3DPrintBoard.com.

IT Security Industry Veteran Larry Link Brings Unique Understanding of the Next-Generation Security Challenges Facing Today's Enterprises

SAN DIEGO, CA, Apr 08, 2014 (Marketwired via COMTEX) -- DB Networks, an innovator of behavioral analysis in database security, today announced that it has named Larry Link, former Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Palo Alto Networks, to its Board of Directors. In this new role, Mr. Link will provide insight and counsel based on his deep domain experience as the company expands its market for its behavioral analysis based IT security products.

Larry Link brings 25 years of experience as a Senior Operating Executive with an extensive experience in the enterprise market to his role on the Board of Directors at DB Networks. Mr. Link also is on the Board of Directors at Mojave Networks and NetCitadel, and is an investor and advisor to several startups targeting the enterprise market. Mr. Link's security industry experience includes serving as Senior VP of Worldwide Sales for Palo Alto Networks, growing the company from its first sale in 2007 to IPO in July 2012 at a run rate in excess of $400M per year.

"Larry is a strategic addition to the DB Networks board," said Brett Helm, Chairman and CEO of DB Networks. "He brings a unique mix of executive leadership, security industry savviness and entrepreneurial experience, which collectively makes him an excellent addition to the DB Networks board."

"The IT security industry is rapidly moving away from traditional signature based black list / white list technologies toward highly intelligent products that are instead based on behavioral analysis," said Mr. Link. "I am very excited about this opportunity to work very closely with the DB Networks' board and executive team as the company rapidly expands."

Mr. Link's operating experience spans three decades and includes leadership roles at four successful startups. Most recently he was SVP of Worldwide Sales for Palo Alto Networks. Prior to Palo Alto Networks, Larry was SVP of Sales for Silver Peak Systems. He ran Worldwide Sales at Neoteris from inception through its acquisition by Juniper Networks in April 2004. Prior to Neoteris he was Vice President of Enterprise Sales for Excite@Home from its launch in 1996, through IPO in 1997, and its subsequent merger with Excite in 1999. He earned a BS degree in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University.

About DB Networks DB Networks is innovating behavioral analysis technology in the field of database security. Developed for organizations that need to protect their data from advanced attacks, including Zero-Day attacks, DB Networks offers effective countermeasures against SQL injection attacks. Database attacks happen rapidly -- in a matter of minutes -- and bypass traditional perimeter security measures. DB Networks' unique approach uses behavioral analysis technology to automatically learn each application's proper SQL statement behavior. Any SQL statement dispatched from the application that deviates from the established behavioral model immediately raises an alarm as a possible attack. DB Networks is a privately held company headquartered in San Diego, Calif. For more information, see http://www.dbnetworks.com , or call (800) 598-0450.

DB Networks is a registered trademark of DB Networks in the United States and other countries. All other company and product names are either trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

MENLO PARK, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 04/04/14 -- Ayasdi (www.ayasdi.com) today announced that it is certified on Cloudera Enterprise 5. This certification ensures that Ayasdi's solution has been tested and validated to work with Cloudera Enterprise 5, Cloudera's platform for big data built on Apache Hadoop.

From a technical perspective, Ayasdi leverages CDH 5's Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for managing large amounts of customer data and uses HBase for storing some of its operational metadata that is randomly accessed and frequently updated.

"Most large global organizations require that their real-time data streams are always available because shortening the 'time to insight' from massive amounts of data is what sparks ideas that drive innovation in today's fast-paced competitive environment," said Shane Paladin, Vice President, Worldwide Sales at Ayasdi. "Working with Cloudera is a natural fit given that we have many joint customers who want to leverage the best of both platforms. Together, we look forward to helping them discover cures to diseases, new sources of oil and energy, identify new sources of fraud, and beyond."

"We welcome Ayasdi into the Cloudera Connect partner program as the company provides a unique solution," said Tim Stevens, Vice President, Business and Corporate Development. "With Cloudera's tools, resources, and deep domain expertise, Ayasdi's customers can now leverage Cloudera Enterprise to build an enterprise data hub -- one place that provides robust security, comprehensive data management, corporate governance, and open support -- to uncover the hidden insights in their data, without formulating queries or models."

Ayasdi is transforming how the world uses data to solve complex problems. Founded in 2008 after a decade of research at Stanford, DARPA, and NSF, Ayasdi is pioneering a new approach for enterprises to automatically discover and operationalize insights from their data. Ayasdi's Insight Discovery platform uses Topological Data Analysis (TDA) combined with an ensemble of machine learning techniques to enable data scientists, domain experts, and business people to achieve value from their data without the need to write code, queries, or ask questions. Funded by Khosla Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, GE Ventures, Citi Ventures, and FLOODGATE, Ayasdi's customers include General Electric, Citigroup, Merck, Anadarko, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and Mount Sinai Hospital. To learn more, visit www.ayasdi.com or follow us @ayasdi.

Ayasdi helps the world's biggest and most sophisticated organizations discover breakthroughs that change how we all live and work. People who share this passion can view Ayasdi career opportunities here.

Awhile ago, the awesome Jeffrey Way created a tool called Prefixr which was meant to help with the onerous task of managing vendor prefixes in your stylesheets. It worked by analyzing your stylesheet and automatically adding the vendor prefixed version of different rules into an output that you could then paste into your file. It was a pretty slick tool.

Unfortunately, now that the site has gone the way of the dodo bird and after having several users ping us about it, we wanted to provide some alternatives that can help provide similar capabilities.

The Express Prefixr Library

The first option which is closest to the functionality of Prefixr is a site called Express Prefixr. This was created by the awesome TJ Holowaychuk who apart from being an expert on Node.js development, also created the Express web application framework for Node.js.

With Express Prefixr, you're presented with two textarea fields, one for entering your styles and the second to receive the prefixed output from the service. This is very similar to the way that Prefixr worked:

To test this out, I'm taking the same code sample that Jeffrey used in his original article:

.box {
       opacity: .5;
    }
     
    .container {
       box-shadow: 20px;
       -moz-transition: box-shadow 2s;
       -webkit-border-radius: 4px;
       animation: slide 1s alternate;
       background: linear-gradient(top, #e3e3e3 10%, white);
    }
     
    @-webkit-keyframes "slide" {
       0% { left: 0; }
       100% { left: 50px; }
    }
    

Then pressing on the "Prefix it!" button, I can immediately get my prefixed styles sent to me:

Here's the complete result:

.box {
        -webkit-opacity: .5;
        -moz-opacity: .5;
        -ms-opacity: .5;
        -o-opacity: .5;
    }
    
    .container {
        -webkit-box-shadow: 20px;
        -moz-box-shadow: 20px;
        -ms-box-shadow: 20px;
        -o-box-shadow: 20px;
        -moz--webkit-transition: box-shadow 2s;
        -moz-transition: box-shadow 2s;
        -ms-transition: box-shadow 2s;
        -o-transition: box-shadow 2s;
        -webkit--webkit-border-radius: 4px;
        -moz-border-radius: 4px;
        -ms-border-radius: 4px;
        -o-border-radius: 4px;
        -webkit-animation: slide 1s alternate;
        -moz-animation: slide 1s alternate;
        -ms-animation: slide 1s alternate;
        -o-animation: slide 1s alternate;
        background: linear-gradient(top, #e3e3e3 10%, white);
        background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #e3e3e3 10%, white);
        background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #e3e3e3 10%, white);
        background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #e3e3e3 10%, white);
        background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #e3e3e3 10%, white);
    }
    
    @-webkit-keyframes "slide" {
        0% {
            left: 0;
        }
    
        100% {
            left: 50px;
        }
    }
    

Taking this further, Express Prefixr also provides an API that you can leverage to integrate into your applications or use third party tools like curl. So taking the following snippet:

curl http://expressprefixr.herokuapp.com/api/processor -d css='body { border-radius: 10px}'

And pasting it into my terminal window gives me the following results:

reys-mbp:~ rey$ curl http://expressprefixr.herokuapp.com/api/processor -d css='body { border-radius: 10px}'
    body {
        -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
        -moz-border-radius: 10px;
        -ms-border-radius: 10px;
        -o-border-radius: 10px;
    

One final great thing about Express Prefixr, is that the code is available on GitHub allowing you to easily fork it and customize the software to your needs.

The Autoprefixer Library

The next option is actually designed to integrate more so into your workflow, rather than being a visual UI tool. Autoprefixer does in fact add prefixes where appropriate by using rules provided by the popular site, Can I Use. Autoprefixer's slogan is:

"Write your CSS rules without vendor prefixes (in fact, forget about them entirely)"

And it holds true. What this means is that in your stylesheets, you can focus on using the standards-based syntax and Autoprefixer will handle adding in the prefixed rules if necessary.

Let's look at some code:

:fullscreen a {
        transition: transform 1s
    }

The above code will be updated by Autoprefixer to the following:

:-webkit-full-screen a {
        -webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s;
        transition: transform 1s
    }:-moz-full-screen a {
        transition: transform 1s
    }:-ms-fullscreen a {
        transition: transform 1s
    }:fullscreen a {
        -webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s;
        transition: transform 1s
    }
    

Take a close look at the syntax. Notice that the transition rule was pretty much left alone except for the addition of the two Webkit-specific entries. That's because Autoprefixer only applies vendor prefixes when it's appropriate. In this case, transition is widely supported in modern browsers and doesn't really need to be prefixed.

But, the :fullscreen pseudo-class is still evolving and does need to be properly prefixed. Autoprefixer, using the Can I Use data, is smart enough to determine when to prefix something based on a browser's level of support for a feature. Very cool!

The thing to note is that Autoprefixer is meant to be incorporated into your normal deployment workflow. It's not a client-side library and you leverage it via any number of third party integrations. This includes:

• Grunt via the grunt-autoprefixer plugin
• Compass via the autoprefixer-rails gem
• Stylus via the autoprefixer-stylus plugin
• Broccoli via the broccoli-autoprefixer plugin
• Sublime Text with the sublime-autoprefixer plugin

And so many more options. Even the new Atom Editor now has the atom-autoprefixer package which shows that Autoprefixer is well-maintained.

If you'd like to see Autoprefixer in action, jump on over to the following demo and add a bunch of CSS rules that you've traditionally had to vendor prefix and see how it works for you.

The -Prefix-Free Library

The final option is a great client-side library by Lea Verou called -prefix-free. Lea's been a long-time advocate of cross-browser development and built this library to, as a bit of a shim, ensure that your site uses all of the proper vendor prefixes. She built it at a time where, unfortunately, many web developers were simply forgetting to add all of the appropriate prefixes, causing sites to not render properly across all modern browsers.

The key difference between this and the two others I mentioned previously is that -prefix-free is a JavaScript library that looks at your stylesheets in runtime and adds the vendor prefixes when needed.

Using the library is as simple as adding the following line to the head of your page:

<script src="prefixfree.js"></script>

No, seriously. That's it. The library handles the processing of every stylesheet in link or style elements and adds a vendor prefix where needed. This is especially useful for sites that are already deployed and it may not be possible to go back and update it.

It also has solid browser support being compatible with IE9+, Opera 10+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+ and Chrome on desktop and Mobile Safari, Android browser, Chrome and Opera Mobile on mobile.

Hoping Vendor Prefixes Go Away

It's great to have alternatives to Prefixr and these solutions certainly fit the bill. Ultimately, though, vendor prefixes have become more complicated than they're worth and with many developers not respecting the original intent of them (for example, to designate experimental features) and leveraging them in production systems, hopefully they'll go away in the near future. 

Thankfully, Google mentioned when they announced their Blink rendering engine, that they would be shifting to a feature-flag model which would hide experimental features behind hard-to-set flags which aren't accessible via code. Thank goodness!