Good Evening Everyone!

As most of you are already aware, tonight was the UMBC Mock Trial elections for the 2013-14 executive board. I would like to personally congratulate Mikey, Travis, Kyle, and Cheyenne for your newly earned positions of leadership. It's really encouraging to see that we have some returning leadership as well as some new leadership!

I have updated the "Members" section of the UMBC Mock Trial "myUMBC Group" to reflect the newly selected "officer" roles.

Thank you all so much for a great year. It was truly a wonderful experience to serve on the executive board for the past two years. I am happy beyond words to welcome such a capable and motivated group of members to lead the UMBC Mock Trial team to continued success in the next academic year.

Every app needs controls, such as buttons, check boxes, and drop-down lists. Windows Store apps built for Windows using JavaScript can use two types of controls: intrinsic HTML controls and Windows Library for JavaScript controls. In this article we will focus on how to create and use HTML controls.

Puzzle Perfect

What do crosswords and Computer Science have in common? For starters there’s CSEE professor Marie desJardins. When she’s not furthering the field of Artificial Intelligence, Dr. desJardins has a crossword puzzle in hand. It’s no accident that she’s the top ranking female crossword solver in the Mid-Atlantic.

This March Dr. desJardins joined hundreds of puzzle pros at the 36^th annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Directed by New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, it’s the nation’s oldest and   largest competition of its kind. Hundreds of competitors spend two days solving seven puzzles. It’s a race against the clock to prove their mental mettle.

“It’s a very unforgiving sport,” she says. “It’s like gymnastics. One little foot slipping off the balance beam and you’re not going to be on that podium.”

You need both speed and accuracy to succeed. Dr. desJardins can breeze through smaller puzzles in fifteen minutes; forty-five for the larger, Sunday-New-York-Times-sized puzzles. Though speed isn’t as important as accuracy in these competitions. One mistake can hurt as much as seven minutes of stalling. 

This year Dr. desJardins handed in seven perfect puzzles. That means getting every single word right—even those baffling clues pointing at pop-culture references or words all but erased from the English language. She placed 24^th out of 570 solvers, finishing 5^th in the “B” division.

Years ago Dr. desJardins discovered the tournament from the documentary Wordplay, which follows the personal and competitive lives of a band of crossword enthusiasts. One year she realized that the competition was during UMBC’s Spring Break. So she signed up and hit the road for Connecticut.  

“I wasn’t at all expecting to do well,” she says. It was a pleasant surprise when she placed in the top quarter of competitors. The success got her hooked. Since then, she’s been engaged in a personal battle to beat her own time. She has competed five times, and each year, her speed increases.  

Her secret to success? Practice is part of it. Dr.desJardins completes a lot of puzzles. She does them on Sunday morning with a cup of coffee. She does them to relax before bed. She’s adopted a policy of leaving no puzzle unfinished. Keeping a positive mindset is half the battle, she says.

Being a Computer Scientist may have something to do with it as well. Both require a knack for pattern recognition and problem solving. “It’s just the way my brain is wired,” she says.  

Had Dr. desJardins solved a mere two minutes quicker this year, she would have qualified for the finals in her division. Being a finalist would mean solving an oversized puzzle on a whiteboard against two fellow division “B” finalists. It’s a daunting and high-pressure test made tougher by the gaze of six hundred spectators. It’s no surprise that this is Dr. desJardins’ goal when she competes again next year.  

Photos: Top Right, courtesy UMBC Magazine Left, courtesty crosswordtournament.com

Ajax and moving dom elements around made for some fun, but limited in what kind of experience you could create. For game developers, things are changing, and quickly. HTML5 is introducing a bunch of new options for game development purely in the browser, and the browser vendors are competing hard to be the best platform for the new standards. This article will run through some of the choices to be made developing 2D games while offering some ideas for developing your own games using HTML5.

Eclipse has been the editor of choice for Web Application Development for a while now - especially for Java-powered multi-tiered apps. The Helios release 2 of the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers added support for HTML5-specific development. In today's article, Rob Gravelle shows how to setup a static HTML5 Web project in Eclipse Juno.

In the Testing Ajax Event Handlers using Jasmine Spies article, we saw how the use of Jasmine spies for testing Asynchronous processes. In today's article, Rob Gravelle demonstrates how to use the Jasmine runs() and waitFor() methods, which were both created to test asynchronous Ajax calls where the practical implementations of the HttpXmlRequest and/or the network connection need to be included.