I found this interesting story about a company that makes insulating and light diffusing glass, Advanced Glazings Ltd.

From the company website:

Advanced Glazings Ltd. was founded in 1995 by Dr. Douglas I. Milburn to develop, manufacture and market sustainable and commercially viable technologies related to sunlight. To date, Advanced Glazings Ltd. has developed two important products; SoleraTM, for the architectural daylighting market and InsolCoreTM for the greenhouse market, both based upon transparent insulation technology. Solera was introduced at the 2000 conference of the American Institute of Architecture.

The TorStar story, Going green with glass 5 Dec 2005 describes a hockey arena project in Cape Breton. They use the special glass to allow natural light in but maintain ice quality and even lighting.:

Ojolick consulted with Douglas Milburn, founder and president of Advanced Glazings Ltd. in Sydney, N.S. Milburn is an expert in transparent insulation, having spent the early 1990s doing his Ph.D. on the topic at the University of Waterloo.

During that time Milburn engineered a transparent honeycomb-structured glaze for glass that acts as an insulator for windows and has the ability to diffuse direct sunlight. After graduation he founded Advanced Glazings, and since then his insulating glaze product, called Solera, has become an architect’s dream.

I took some courses from Milburn’s supervisor. It would have been interesting to hear about their research back then. It is still interesting now though.

The Kitchener-Waterloo lacrosse team is moving up from Senior B to Major Series in the Ontario Lacrosse Association. I just saw the 7 March 2006 announcement from K-W Kodiaks:

With the unanimous support of the Board of Governors of the Major Series Lacrosse, the KW Kodiaks have purchased the St. Catharines Athletics from former owner Bill LeFeuvre with approval to immediately move the club to Waterloo for the 2006 season. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The new Kodiaks, moving up to play Major Series Lacrosse, will be a blend of the best players from the Athletics with those of the 2-time Presidents Cup Champion Kodiaks. The existing Kodiaks’ Executive, coaching staff and support staff will remain in place to guide the new club.

The Kodiaks organization has done well. The team only restarted in town three years ago. They won two cups and now they are joining the majors.

It looks like when Chris was updating his site, studentlifecentre.com, it was hacked, but so poorly that likely no one saw it nor did Chris even know.

While he was upgrading the software that runs the site the site had a directory listing. I looked in a content sub-directory to see if I could view a front page and I found this:

I looked at the source and found a message that on some browsers would scroll across the bottom of the window:

What is strange is that this page was the index of a sub-directory and not the root directory, where people coming to see the webpage would see it.

I looked for other directories that had been modified recently and the images/ was the only other one. Aside from containing images there was a php file that seemed to be some kind of cracking tool.

I alerted Chris about it when I found it and waited to hear back before posting this. I didn’t want to tell expose a vulnerability before it could be removed.