Anyone looking for productivity-related Web apps should visit www.sciweavers.org. The sheer variety of free online tools available on the website is mindboggling. No registration is required, you don't need to download any software components and there's no waiting or limits on the number of times you can use each tool.

The naming conventions behind the tools might be a bit silly (they're collectively known as Sci2ools) but you can't argue with honest functionality. So, do you need to convert any webpage into a printer-friendly, downloadable PDF file? iWeb2Print will do it for you in two quick steps.

How about converting a webpage into a high-resolution image (any format of your choice), splitting a PDF file into smaller files or merging multiple PDFs into one? iWeb2Shot, iPDF2Split and iPDF2Merge are the tools you need.

The optical character reader (i2OCR) reads text from an image and converts it into an editable text file. The i2Type tool has an on-screen keyboard that lets you type in over 50 languages (including Indian languages) and download the text as a Word document.

And some of the more basic tools allow you to convert images from one format to another, convert almost any file to a PDF and choose from hundreds of symbols to use in a text file, email or social networking site. The only thing left to do is bookmark the URL instantly for later use.

After use , do share your comments  :-) 

Call it the perils of a healthy virtual life, but if you are someone who spends an hour or two everyday on the internet, it is quite likely that you use more than a few online services from social networking and email to cloud storage and net banking that require you to log in with a password. Most people employ a single passcode for all their accounts, but that could spell disaster. If even one of your accounts is hacked, all your other online properties stand to be at risk. It is therefore recommended that you use a strong, unique password for each service.

For a good password
Make sure it is at least seven to eight characters long. The longer the better. Avoid names, birth dates and anniversaries of loved ones, pets, phone numbers, favourite film stars and rock stars. Avoid words that you can find in the dictionary.

Include upper and lower case alphabets, numerals, as well as special characters (!@ #$% ^&*). Combine two completely different words to create your password. For example, you could combine the chemical oxygen with say the name of toothpaste Close-up.

Better still; separate the two with a number. So youll get oxygen24Closeup. To make your password tougher to guess, replace the o with 0. So your password then becomes 0xygen24Cl0seup. And since you have to create a different password for each of your online properties, if its Gmail, add a G to your password. Or if it’s for Hotmail, you can make it H0xygen24Cl0seup.

If you’re still drawing a blank, you might want to consider free password-making services such as passwordsgenerator. net or www. strongpasswordgenerator. org. Using these tips and tricks, create unique codes for all your web properties.

However, all this effort will amount to absolutely nothing if you click Yes when your browser asks if it should remember your login details and passwords. For instance, if you save your net banking account details on your laptop, your eight year-old son could inadvertently log in. Worse still, what happens if your laptop is misplaced or stolen

So how do you remember all your different passwords

Simple. Use a dedicated password manager programs that save all your passwords in an encrypted form so that no one, except you, can access them. Of course, you’ll need to remember one master password to access all those others.

LastPass:

LastPass is a tool that works with all major web browsers and is accessible through a browser widget. Add all your accounts details and encrypt them with a master LastPass password. After that, regardless of which service you access, LastPass will log in for you with a single click. A premium upgrade includes native mobile apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android, WebOS (Palm) and Symbian, along with additional options and priority support. Get it from: lastpass. com

KeePass:

This open source software is similar to LastPass, but not as simple to use. However, it has one big advantage. KeePass has a portable version, which means you can carry your password data in a USB drive and use it on any computer. Get it from: keepass. info/download. html

PassPack:

This application is a web-only password manager. This means all your passwords are saved in an encrypted form on its servers. The advantage of using Pass-Pack is that it frees a user from a specific machine and all passwords can be used on any computer that is connected to the web. Get it from: www. passpack.com/en/products 

Source: Times

Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.

Cloud computing is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client–server in the early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption, and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves over-the-Internet provision of dynamically scalable and often visualized resources.It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.This frequently takes the form of web-based tools or applications that users can access and use through a web browser as if it were a program installed locally on their own computer.NIST provides a somewhat more objective and specific definition here.The term "cloud" is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used in the past to represent the telephone network,and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents.Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online that are accessed from another Web service or software like a Web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers. A key element of cloud computing is customization and the creation of a user-defined experience.

Most cloud computing infrastructures consist of services delivered through common centers and built on servers. Clouds often appear as single points of access for consumers' computing needs. Commercial offerings are generally expected to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements of customers, and typically include service level agreements (SLAs).The major cloud service providers include Salesforce, Amazon and Google