As you've probably noticed, the ControlGlobal site has been having issues. Here on the home front, we call them code salad. Click on the link to an article you want to read, and the first thing you see is line after line of impenetrable code that to the uninitiated makes absolutely no sense. It's really annoying. We know. We apologize.

It's not you. It's us--and our infrastructure. The provider promises the coders are "working on it." Meanwhile, here's a couple of things you should know that might help deal with the worst of it.

sercos international, supplier of the sercos® automation bus, offers a free update for the sercos Monitor used to monitor the health of SercosIII systems.

Nivis, www.nivis.com announced that they are now providing the source code for their ISA100.11a and WirelessHART software platforms which will certainly encourage the development of products of both protocols. Reading the press release http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Nivis-Announces-Open-Source-Avai... further of which I have passed the relevant part below, it appears the business model they plan to follow is a combination of the one used by many Linux providers, such as Red Hat.

There continues to be much discussion about natural gas for a variety of reasons, not just the large reserves made possible because of Shale gas deposit development, but also because the associated economic repercussions to industry and manufacturing around the world.

I was recently informed about a new White Paper by respected cybersecurity authorities Ralph Langner and Perry Pederson of the Brookings Institution called "Bound to Fail: Why Cybersecurity Risk Cannot Be Simply 'Managed' Away" that is now available for free after registration from ControlGlobal at  www.controlglobal.com/whitepapers/2013/130304-langner-pederson-cybersecu...

Apologies about tardiness in posting this, though ironically part of the reason for the delay is that the internet in my hotel in Orlando stopped working after my first night. Rather than report on the forum presentations, which have limited access I will provide instead a short synopsis on the network related announcements made during Press Day at the forum.

WINA are sponsoring a Webinar: “A Winning Strategy for the Global Industrial Wireless Trifecta” Tuesday, February 26 at 10:00 ET that might help you better understand the challenges and benefits of mixing wireless field sensor networks.  The presenters are Robert Assimiti, and Rares Ivan, of Nivis developers of several radio chip sets used in field level networks.

I was fortunate enough to be able to participate and speak at the “68th Annual Instrumentation Symposium for the Process Industries” January 22-24 at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

Each of the days of the symposium features a 2-hour Workshop session where 5 parallel tutorials on topics from Ethics to instrument basics, cybersecurity, and safety systems. Other presentations were typically 40 minutes in length. This year’s event also featured the first annual Instrument Reliability Network Symposium as a program track.

With the increasing use of Ethernet in the plant environment it is always a good idea to have the tools at hand to help you better understand your network and what is connected to it. This is obviously important not only for configuration, operations and maintenance, but also for security reasons as well.

Softing has developed one useful tool, “Search and Configure” to help you find devices on your local area network. “Search and Configure” can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.softing.com/pub/outgoing/bus-check/faqs/BC-502-PB-Search-and-C...