Zilog’s Crimzon Connects - Ultimate Home Automation
The ultimate in home automation has arrived. It comes with support for web based control of virtually all of your household appliances. I have always respected Zilog as the Z80 was the first microprocessor that I got to learn. Zilog has been quite actively working in the embedded domain for a long time. For example, the eZ80 was one of the first few microprocessors to offer a hardware TCP/IP stack.
Home automation systems need to be very user friendly, safe and energy efficient. Crimzon Connects from Zilog fulfills all these requirements. One has to see the Crimzon Connects Video to believe it. You can use an iPhone to control and command all the electronic appliances and lighting in your home connected via Crimzon Connects.
Yet another achievement by Zilog Corp. Hats Off to you !!
gOS - Lightweight Ubuntu for Netbooks
gOS or “good OS” is an operating system created by ‘Good OS LLC’, a Los Angeles-based corporation. The company initially advertised it as “An alternative OS with Google Apps and other Web 2.0 apps for the modern user.” The first version gOS was based on Ubuntu 7.10 and the Enlightenment window manager.
Based on the idea of cloud computing, all versions of gOS lean heavily on on-line applications built on Web 2.0 and AJAX technology so they also do not use much hard disk space for applications. The whole gOS-1 system fits comfortably in less than 2 GB of disk space. Also many of the documents created with gOS, such as Google Docs documents, can be saved on Google servers instead of on the local hard disk, so gOS can work with very small hard disks. In gOS V2 Rocket, Good OS introduced the use of Google’s “Google Gears” technology which promises to make Google’s web applications usable without an internet connection. Currently, Google Reader and Google Docs are the only supported Google applications.
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Hifn 5NP4G Network Processor
We are all quite choosey when it comes to buying a PC or a Laptop.. Did you ever think what powers your router or wireless access point? I remember being stunned to find out what powered my trusted CISCO 2500 series router 
It was a Motorola 68030 CISC processor. Far behind the state of the art processors that were available at the time the 2500 was created. But, to be fair, routing devices don’t really need super computing performance when it comes to the central processor. Recently, we have been seeing some brave architectural innovations featuring ASICs and Network processors & co-processors.
Hifn have created a first of its kind Network Processor 5NP4G. The 5NP4G is a programmable network processor optimized for packet processing at speeds up to OC-48. The 5NP4G implements copper interconnect technology and integrates a switching engine, search engine, frame processors, and multiplexed MACS. Designed to satisfy enterprise, core, edge networking, and Internet service requirements at wire speed, the 5NP4G network processor can deliver complex functions, such as (QoS), scheduling, flow control, and differentiated services.
TreeMark™ Tree Rating - A fresh perspective to green computing
Recently, we have been seeing lots of energy-efficient products entering our lives, the change has been triggered by factors like rising oil prices, increase in environmental pollution and soaring electricity costs. There has been a significant shift towards energy efficient computers, especially in the data centers.
Centaur Technology have come up with a very interesting way of evaluating the energy efficiency of micoprocessor products. It is called the TreeMark™ Tree Rating. Centaur defines it as “The number of trees that need to be planted to counter the amount of carbon dioxide created as a by-product of the electricity generated to power the processor over its operational lifetime”. The good thing is, Centaur’s processors rate very well on this benchmark when compared with their Intel or AMD counterparts.
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IPv6 around the corner - APNIC 26
Whether you’re just beginning to think about IPv6 or have been rolling it out for a couple of years, there’s IPv6 content at APNIC 26 to suit you. APNIC is holding their 26th open standards summit that starts today at Christchurch in New Zealand. The details of the event can be found here.
Yes, the buzz is getting stronger every day… I still remember buying my first book on IPv6 around 8 years ago. It did discuss the theoretical aspects of the successor of the prevalent IPv4 protocol. I kept wondering what happened to IPv5 though
I have started planning my move to IPv6 already,I would suggest we all take it seriously.
Cuil - The Elegant Search Engine
I stumbled upon http://www.cuil.com while browsing for some high-tech stuff. Believe me, it made me forget what I was looking for. An excellent user interface combined with very intelligent search semantics, very impressive indeed. I was amazed at the relevance of the results. Although the number of results shown at once is lesser than the contemporary search engines, it makes up for it by ensuring two things. First, the search results are extremely relevant: Second, the search results carry tabs for each of the related possible suggestions, the user may effortlessly click any of the tabs to get results for that tab. Cuil is a brain child of Anna Patterson and Tom Costello. It has been designed to be the largest search engine on the web.
The two features, namely faceted drilldown and tabbed search for related terms are shown in the figures below.
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32 bit Floating Point for Micro Controllers
There are times in the life of embedded system designers and programmers when the absence of a floating point unit is very strongly felt. The processing power of these tiny, space-saving micro controllers, frequently becomes a limiting factor if some hefty mathematical computation is required. Although we have been seeing chips like Blackfin and dsPIC that combine µC features with powerful DSP processors but the kind of price involved is a hindrence in using them for smaller projects. it looks like someone came up with a superb solution to the problem.
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nLite - Windows Installation Customizer
If you have ever wished that Windows XP / 2000 would install unattended and you had control over which components would install…. there is a tool just right for you. nLite allows you to customize & automate the windows install process with amazing flexibility. nLite comes with the following features:
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DBSight - The Ultimate Faceted Database Search
“Information Retrieval” as a science has attained a certain level of maturity and we are seeing a lot of companies offering nice products making use of the most advanced techniques. I recently came accross such a product that’s worth mentioning here. I was able to set it up on my pc in less than 3 minutes. It comes with a very easy to use web interface. It makes use of JDBC to retrieve data from virtually any database. You can specify an SQL query to specify the search able records. DBSight automatically retrieves the records from database, creates the search index and it can automate the process as per a schedule specified by you. The figure below shows the possibilities for search results retrieval once an index has been created.
DBSight Overview
Twisted - The Ideal Internet Server Engine
Twisted Matrix Logo
If you need to create an internet server, be it an email server, dns server, web server, chat server or a web 2.0 server: You should consider using the Twisted framework. The Twisted framework is written entirely in Python and is very easy to program. It makes use of event driven network programming to provide excellent scalability and performance. Any one who is familiar with programming the Python programming language can effortlessly make use of the Twisted Framework.
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