Daily Technologies Update

UV Technology Leads to Wastewater Compliance

Under pressure to start disinfecting its wastewater, the Wilsonville Power Systems Development Facility (Wilsonville, AL) turned to Aquionics, a leader in UV disinfection technology, for help. Now the facility is in compliance with state regulations -- in four years of operation, contaminants have been kept within permit limits with minimal maintenance.

The Wilsonville Power Systems Development Facility (PSDF) is a research and development center that tests various processes, mainly coal-based technologies, before they are implemented at power supply facilities. In 2006, the growing plant employed 200 people and produced a wastewater flow of about 25 gpm. With its size expected to double in the near future, the facility was required by state and local regulators to start disinfecting its wastewater. Since the existing wastewater treatment facility in Wilsonville was too far away for the facility to connect, the PSDF decided to build its own wastewater treatment facility.

Finding the Right System

After evaluating competing products, Wilsonville PSDF decided that Aquionics’ OpenLine 30 UV disinfection system most closely met their specifications and budget requirements. The OpenLine open channel disinfection unit uses low-pressure, high-output UV lamps to destroy microorganisms’ reproductive abilities on a cellular level. The facility installed the OpenLine system in 2007 as the last item in the plant process, providing final treatment of the water before it is discharged into a local river.

The state-issued permit required that no single grab sample of water leaving the facility could have more than 200 fecal colonies per 100 ml. The OpenLine system has provided the necessary disinfection required to meet the site’s permit.

In addition, the system offers a compact footprint and requires virtually no maintenance. The OpenLine has operated for 21,000 hours since installation, meeting disinfection requirements without needing UV lamp replacement.

Toshiba has unveiled its newly developed Flip-Flop circuit configuration using 40nm CMOS process which company claims would reduce power consumption in mobile equipment. For example, the measure data that has been recorder when the new configuration has been applied to wireless LAN verifies that the power dissipation of the new flip-flop is up to 77% less than conventional flip-flop, furthermore, it achieves a 24% reduction in overall power consumption. As an essential part a SoC design, a flip-flop is a circuit that temporarily stores one bit of data during arithmetic processing by a SoC which is incorporated within mobile equipment as well as other digital equipment. Normally, is responsible to incorporate a clock buffer to produce a clock inverted signal required for operation of circuit. The clock buffer consumes power when triggered by a signal from the clock, even when data is not changed. In order to reduce this power dissipation, a power saving technique by the name of clock gating is used in order to cut delivery of clock signal to unused blocks; however by applying this power saving technique, the flip-flop active rate is only 5-15%, leaving room for further power reduction. To further reducing the power consumption, Toshiba has changed the structure of the conventional flip-flop and has eliminated the clock buffer all together.

This approach, would normally, causes data collision between data writing circuitry and the state holding circuitry in the flip-flop, but Toshiba has overcome this issue through addition of adaptive coupling circuitry , combination of an nMOS and a pMOS transistors to the flip-flop, which results in weakening of state-retention coupling and prevents collisions. In spite of the addition of adaptive coupling circuitry, the transistor count has been reduced from 24 to 22, making the cell area smaller that of the conventional flip-flop.

Fujitsu Semiconductor Europe has released series of microcontrollers that are designed for industrial applications such as health care sector as well as medical technology. The newly developed FM3 microcontrollers are based on ARM® Cortex TM-M3 core with special peripheral functions. In addition to peripheral functions, the new FM3 series benefit from number of improvements in its peripheral macros such as dedicated encoder inputs for determining rotor position resulting in a reduced load on the CPU.

In addition to this, the FM3 series features three independent high precision and very fast 12-bit A/D converters with 16 input channels allowing accurate sampling, making them ideal for high-speed precision motors and other components in automation applications, resulting in controlling two motors independently. Furthermore, the new FM3 microcontrollers (MCU) have an integrated, high-speed NOR flash memory (up to 1 MB), which is designed for 100,000 write cycles and data storage for up to 20 years

You wouldn't write your username and passwords on a postcard and mail it for the world to see, so why are you doing it online? Every time you log in to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that uses a plain HTTP connection that's essentially what you're doing.

There is a better way, the secure version of HTTP—HTTPS. That extra "S" in the URL means your connection is secure and it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing. But if HTTPS is more secure, why doesn't the entire Web use it?

HTTPS has been around nearly as long as the Web, but it's primarily used by sites that handle money—your bank's website or shopping carts that capture credit card data. Even many sites that do use HTTPS only use it for the portions of their websites that need it—like shopping carts or account pages.

Web security got a shot in the arm last year when the FireSheep network sniffing tool made it easy for anyone to detect your login info over insecure networks—your local coffeeshop's hotspot or public WiFi at the library. That prompted a number of large sites to begin offering encrypted versions of their services via HTTPS connections.

Lately even sites like Twitter, which has almost entirely public data anyway, is nevertheless offering HTTPS connections. You might not mind anyone sniffing and reading your Twitter messages en route to the server, but most people don't want someone also reading their username and password info. That's why Twitter recently announced a new option to force HTTPS connections (note that Twitter's HTTPS option only works with a desktop browser, not the mobile site, which still requires manually entering the https address).

Google has even announced it will adding HTTPS to many of the company's APIs. Firefox users can go a step further and use the HTTPS Everywhere add-on to force HTTPS connections to several dozen websites that all offer HTTPS, but don't use it by default.

The smartphone marketing phrase "there's an app for that" got me thinking -- isn't there an application for pretty much anything and everything I need on my PC? And aren't those apps typically free? Yes, pretty much.

Here are eight of my recent Windows tools discoveries. Let other readers know the ones you've found in the comments section below.

Windows 7 tool No. 1: Evernote
This tool is one that even Mac users will appreciate. I've been using Evernote for the past few weeks to take notes. I brought it to Microsoft's campus for the recent MVP Summit, for example, and CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote even included a reference to note-taking applications. OneNote is the main Microsoft app for that purpose, so it's funny that a Microsoft guy like me has taken up the Evernote flag.

I first discovered Evernote for my Android smartphone and found it let me easily add recorded sound, pictures, and videos to my notes, then sync them to my laptop back at the hotel and to my PC at home. In fact, you can capture pretty much anything you see or hear in the notes, then access the notes from nearly every computer, smartphone, and tablet on the market: Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and so on. And your notes are searchable. Great job!

Windows 7 tool No. 2: Easy Duplicate File Finder
How many copies of the same picture, file, or video do you have on your PC? In my case, I must have two or three copies of some items, but I have no idea where the extras are. I'm also afraid if delete it in one place, I'll later discover that was my only copy of that particular file -- so I keep adding copies. I also have copies on one external drive after another because I gotta have backups. Easy Duplicate File Finder helps locate all those duplicates quickly and lets you resolve them easily and safely.

Although it's not free, you might consider instead DataStor's $99 Professional Desktop Protection 2010, which both backs up and deduplicates those files on your desktop and any external connected drives.

Windows 7 tool No. 3: FastStone Photo Resizer
When I move pictures off my camera, I know I could (and should) rename them, but I don't do so a lot of the time. With FastStone Photo Resizer, I can rename and resize pictures. Plus, I can add watermarks and text, as well as crop, rotate, and change the color depth of my photos.

If you simply want to rename files, you might try File Renamer Basic instead.

Windows 7 tool No. 4: Desktops
Created by Microsoft engineers, Desktops lets you take better advantage of your monitors by providing as many as four virtual desktops to work with.

In addition, you might like some of the other tools that co-creator Mark Russinovich has developed, including ZoomIt (for an easy zoom teaching application) and BgInfo (to show details about the system right on the desktop with an overlay of text).

Windows 7 tool No. 5: TeamViewer
I stumbled upon TeamViewer at a download site. It's a screen-sharing and file-transfer application that provides remote access to a second computer so that you can help tech-challenged relatives. There are other tools like this on the market, but TeamViewer was easy to install and work with; plus, it's free.

Windows 7 tool No. 6: ClipTraining
This is my company's tool, but it's worthwhile. ClipTraining has 100 videos (five hours' worth) on Windows 7 task-based training, plus instructions for Office and other applications.

Windows 7 tool No. 7: AllMyApps
Here's a good idea: Take all the applications you normally need to download and install one by one, but instead, choose them all from one source, then download and install them in one group. AllMyApps has more than 1,600 apps available.

Windows 7 tool No. 8: Dropbox
The cloud-based Dropbox tool lets you access its included free 2GB of space (you can rent more if needed) to establish offsite backups and transfer data easily from one system to another. Dropbox is also a great collaboration tool; unlike with an FTP site, you can simply drop a file in the Dropbox folder on your system and have it sync with others to which you've granted access. It works in Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and other platforms.

There are, of course, many tools available for Windows users. My InfoWorld.com colleagues and I have covered some of them in other stories:

10 Free Chart Scripts

This week I’ve been working on a project that required data to be shown visually. I needed a Chart Script that was attractive yet gets the data across. The Charts scripts below are built using JavaScript, Flash, Silverlight, and Java.

Flot – Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. The focus is on easy usage , attractive plots and interactive features. With Flot you can interact with the data, look at specific data by zooming in, plot a time series, and other various options.
Open Flash Chart – Open Flash Chart is a Flash charting component. It is fairly easy to setup and has classes written in PHP, Perl, Python, Java, Ruby on Rails, and .Net to connect to the Chart. You can create some really nice looking Bar Charts, Pie Charts, Area Charts and etc…
AmCharts – AmCharts are animated interactive flash charts. The charts include Pie Charts, Line Charts, Scatter/Bubble Charts, Bar/Column Charts, and even a stock chart. AmCharts can extract data from simple CSV or XML files, or they can read dynamic data generated with PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Perl and ColdFusion. All the charts are free but they have a link to AmCharts on the upper left.
Emprise JavaScript Charts – Emprise JavaScript Charts is a 100% Pure JavaScript Charting Solution that requires no JavaScript frameworks. Emprise JavaScript Charts include Line, Area, Scatter, Pie, Bar charts with zooming, scaling and scrolling ability. Tested and works with all major browsers.
PlotKit – PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. PlotKit works with MochiKit javascript library. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support. PlotKit also has great documentation.
Flotr – Flotr is a javascript plotting library based on the Prototype Framework version 1.6.0.2. Flotr lets you create graphs in modern browsers with features like legend support, negative value support, mouse tracking, selection support, zoom support, event hooks, CSS styling support and much more.
PHP/SWF Charts – PHP/SWF Charts is simple yet powerful tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic data. You use PHP to gather the data and put it into flash. It supports many charts types, Line, Column, Stacked column, Floating column, 3D column, Stacked 3D column, Parallel 3D column, Pie, 3D Pie, Bar, Stacked bar, Floating bar, Area, Stacked area, Candlestick, Scatter, Polar, Mixed, Composite and Joined. These Charts have some great features like Animated transitions, Printable charts, and more.
Visifire – Visifire (Powered by Silverlight) is a set of open source data visualization components. With Visifire you can create animated Silverlight Charts with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML.
FusionCharts – FusionCharts is a cross-browser and cross-platform flash charting component that can be used with ASP.NET, ASP, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails, simple HTML pages or even PowerPoint Presentations. All you need to know is the language you’re programming in.
JFreeChart – JFreeChart is an open source Java chart library that makes it easy for developers to display quality charts in their applications. The JFreeChart project was founded seven years ago, in February 2000, by David Gilbert and is used by approximately 40,000 to 50,000 developers. JFreeChart supports many different output types that includes JPEG, GIF, PDF, EPS and SVG. This is a great resource for Java developers.

If you know of any other Charting Scripts please post below.