If you’re like me your shoulders creep up to your earlobes with stress during the day. I hold all of my stress in my upper back and neck. And while I prefer a massage, I can’t get one every day. But this series of simple stretches help, and I can do them in the comfort of my own office chair. Why not give them a try yourself?

1. Chin Tuck

To loosen stiff neck and shoulder muscles, drop your chin to your chest and stretch. I also like to roll my head from side to side to stretch the side of my neck and the backs of my shoulders. Take some time to relax and do this stretch—it feels so good.

2. Side Neck Stretch

You can also stretch your neck muscles by simply turning your head from side to side. It might sound simple (and it is) but if you think about how much of our day is spent facing straight forward at our computer screens, turning your head from side to side every so often doesn’t sound so weird. You can also stretch your neck by tilting your head from side to side from a face-forward starting position. Do your ears touch your shoulders?

3. Shoulder Stretch

This is another good shoulder stretch for you to try. You’re going to place one hand on the elbow of your other arm and pull it across the front of your body. Keep your back straight and face forward. Hopefully this will loosen your muscles and make your arms feel longer.

Sometimes I feel myself slouching at my desk. My legs are crossed and it feels like my chest has caved in on itself. Gotta stretch that, too!

4. Chest Stretch

Put your hands behind your head and point your elbows to the side. Feel a stretch by pushing your elbows as far behind you as possible, squeezing your shoulder blades together.

Maybe you hold your stress in your lower back instead of your shoulders. A good office chair with lumbar support can help, but if you don’t have one (or it’s not enough) try stretching.

5. Lower Back Stretch

All you have to do is sit forward in your chair and bring one of your knees towards your chest at a time. Use your hands to grab the back of your knee and pull towards you. Be sure to keep your back straight.

6. Back and Side Stretch

You can do this one standing up or sitting down. Interlace your fingers and lift your arms straight up over your head. Slowly bend side to side, feeling the stretch.

7. Seated Spinal Twist

Sit sideways in your chair for this one. Put both feet flat on the floor and, while holding the back of the chair, twist. Turn the chair around to repeat. If you hear cracking in your back, congratulations! If not, that’s ok too. Not everyone’s bones and joints need to make noise.

If you type as much as I do you either have carpal tunnel syndrome or strong arm muscles. Sometimes I don’t even realize how tight my forearms get during the day.

8. Forearm Stretch

Stretch your arm out in front of you with your hand turned down, fingers pointed towards the floor. Use your other hand to gently pull the fingers towards your body.

And if you sit as much as I do during the day, your hips probably feel cramped and closed up.

9. Seated Hip Stretch

I love this stretch because it’s so simple yet makes such a difference. While sitting, cross one ankle over the knee on the other leg. Sit up tall and gently lean forward. You should feel a stretch in your glute and hip. Want a deeper stretch? Push down on the hanging knee. Oh yeaaaaaah.

10. Cat-Cow Stretch

Put both feet flat on the floor and put your hands on your knees. On your inhale, arch your back and look at the ceiling. On the exhale, round your spine and let your head drop forward, your chin to your chest. Repeat until you are satisfied.

11. Seated Forward Bend

This is a nice rush of blood to the head. Push your chair away from your desk to avoid giving yourself a concussion. Put both feet flat on the floor, interlace your fingers behind your back and straighten out your arms while folding at the waist. Bring the hands over your back and stretch. Rest your chin on your thighs and release your back. Don’t forget to breathe!

Do you have any other desk exercises that you do? Let us know in the comments.

In India, we don’t have many conference’s but there are a couple of them like the OSSCamp and Linux related conferences. I am a part of AIESEC too and these guys have a lot of conferences every year thought not related to tech but they are still interesting.

There is a lot of excitement about these conference but amidst that we can forget the strategic plan of action. So these tips might help you through the next one.

Do your homework

We are excited about the conference and we tend to forget to do some recon before the event. This can be a huge advantage as we can know the exact date’s, location’s, event’s and then plan, pack and travel accordingly.

Be Flexible

Allow some time for those unexpected detours for networking or connecting with someone offline that you may have a friendship with online. Individual’s are the best assets a person can have.

Use Social Media – Before, During & After

Use social media services like twitter, facebook, foursquare to know more about the event. Connect and get to know some of these folks before the event. Start monitoring the hashtag streams a week before the event. During the conferences people share there views on social media, you can know what others are thinking and participate in discussions later.

Bring along personal or business cards

Even thought most people there, would be constantly connected to the web with their hand held devices but nothing beats a personal card in the end. You can have your twitter, facebook, email, blogs and website’s links on it even a photo of you so people can remember better. You can even make specific event card’s like “we met at wordcamp 2011” written on the back of the card.

Travel Light

We have so many gadgets these days – camera’s, phone’s, laptop’s, tablet’s, charger’s, pen’s and pad’s. It can get tiresome to lug these around in your bag everytime. For the ladies this gets tougher because they need their makeup sets, girl stuff and god knows what else. Only carry the absolutely necessary, stick to the bare essentials. You’ll be hot and sweaty and before you know it, you are a storage unit.

Dress Comfortable but look nice

So, you’ll be moving around a lot, walking all the time checking new stuff and interacting with people. Wear something that looks good and feels comfortable. Don’t ignore looks completely, you don’t want to be the guy from Mars.

Don’t be a tool when networking

How many times have you noticed while talking to someone, the guy is looking at you but also right past your shoulder scanning the room for better networking candidates ? Don’t be a networking tool, be friendly and give undivided attention to the person or the group you are conversing with.

Post Conference Stuff

As you talk to new people, if they give you a card, write something on it that may remind you of the person later in the coming weeks. You can email them or add them on your facebook and twitter, tell them that it was nice getting to know them and discuss your experience or whatever you want to ;)

Conclusion

I hope these tips help you in your next conference. Please share your tips and your views in the comments below.

A hacker is someone who can make a computer do what he wants whether the computer wants to or not.

A few years ago I also believed this and thought of hacking as bad and every hacker a computer criminal. At first, “hacker” was a positive term for a person with a mastery of computers who could push programs beyond what they were designed to do. Later it became associated with computer vandals intent on harming systems and this is where it stands today.

The word “Hacker” is subject to a long standing definition controversy.

Types of Hackers

1) Hobbyist Hackers – They are people who hack for fun and they make computer’s do new stuff. They do not want loss or destruction of information. They use hardware and software (programming language’s) to do their work.

Acc. to Wikipedia ”Hacker is a person who heavily modifies the software or hardware of their own computer system. It includes building, rebuilding, modifying, and creating software or electronic hardware, either to make it better, faster, to give it added features or to make it do something it was never intended to do.”

An excellent example of hobbyist hacking was the “Blue Box”, it was created by the Co-founder of Apple Inc. – Steve Wozniak. The Blue Box was a small electronic device which could place free long distance phone calls. Blue Box led to the term “Phreaking” which is Phone + Freak. They were primarily used by pranksters while others used it solely to make free phone calls.

In the computing community, the primary meaning of hacker is a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert. (For example, “Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is considered by some to be a hacker.”)

2) Computer Security Hackers – They are people who work with security side of the computers. It might be securing up the computers/networks or breaking into them.

So computer security hackers can be distinguished by the way in which they use their extra-ordinary computing skills.

White Hats : White Hat hackers are the good guys who use their hacking skills to protect computers/networks. A lot of demand for these hackers, companies pay them high salaries for securing their systems and networks from getting hacked.

Black Hats : Black Hat hackers are the bad guys in the game. They want to intrude security and make money. They take down networks and install backdoors. They use hacking for criminal purposes.

Grey Hats : Grey Hat hackers work for offensive and defensive purpose depending on the situations. They are hired by people to intrude and protect systems. They can be hired for any type of hacking.

Hactivists : Hactivists aka cyberpatriots hack to bring out a social change. They hack government and organizations to announce social, ideological, religious, or political message’s. Hackers fighting between countries are hacktivists. Like hackers of india and pakistan have been fighting for a long time, one side hacks the other sides website’s.

Script Kiddies : A Script Kiddie is a person who boasts breaking systems using scripts and codes which are written by other hackers. They hardly know what the code does. They engage into easier techniques of hacking as phishing and using exploits.

Conclusion :

So hackers can be good or bad people using their extra-ordinary computing skills for good, evil, business or just plain simple fun.

1) Metal surfaces cause interference, so it is advisable to put your wifi router on a wooden or non-metallic surface.

2) Place the wifi router in a central location atop furniture because radio waves spread best sideways. The router should never be placed on the floor.

3) Signal strength reduces when waves need to pass through any metal surfaces, aquariums, thick walls. (that’s why Japanese folk have cardboard walls, they want their wifi networks to be awesome all the time.)

4) Place wifi routers far from other devices that can cause interference, like cordless phones, microwave ovens, halogen lamps.

5) To use wifi with its full strength on different floors you should either home wire your internet to the basement or connect another wireless router at the basement to get the best signal strength, more access points are always better.

6) The Username and Password to access your wifi network and router page are two different things. The wifi’s username and password is use to connect to the wireless network whereas the router’s username and password are used to access router’s backend panel and change settings even password’s. So keep both of them secure, wifi username and pass can be shared among users but the router’s username and password must only remain with the admin/owner.

7) Change your wifi routers default signal channel (usually set to 6) to avoid interference with your neighbor’s network device. Tutorial : Change Your Wi-Fi Router Channel to Optimize Your Wireless Signal (How-to-Geek)

8) Turn off your wireless device when you are not using it. Save electricity and prevent overheating of the device.

9) If you are sharing files between two computers then make sure that the file sharing is only limited to those two computers. You don’t want other people to have access to your files.

10) You can replace your regular router’s default antennae with a more powerful high-gain antennae for cheap.

Additional Resources :

How to Boost Your Wi-Fi Network Signal and Increase Range with DD-WRT

Easily Backup & Import Your Wireless Network Settings in Windows 7

Lighter and Thinner :

iPad 2 is 33 % thinner marking it at 8.8 mm, it’s even thinner than iPhone 4 which is 9.3 mm. It’s also 15 per cent lighter and will be available in white and the original black.

Back and Front facing camera :

The new iPad has the expected front-facing VGA camera (as well as one on the back). Like the iPhone 4 back camera, ipad’s back one shoots 720p video. A new app ‘Face Time’ has been introduced for video calling.

10-hours battery life :

iPad 2 has the same 10 hour battery life as before, with a month of standby time. Its quite impressive with the reduced size of the unit.

Same display :

It has the same 9.7-inch screen as before and no large-scale retina display as suspected.

Its dual-core

iPad 2 comes with a dual core Apple A5 chip, it’s based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 design and is clocked at 1 Ghz.

Better Graphics

As apple promised the ipad 2 has better graphic capabilities (acc. to Steve Jobs 9x more), thanks to the new A5 processor. It will make some serious gaming possible on the new tablet.

Loaded with iOS 4.3

The latest version of iOS ships with the iPad and will be available for iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch on 11 March. It means faster Safari browsing performance, iTunes Home Sharing and a lot more.

HDMI Out

You can connect your iPad to your HDTV and charge it while doing so. You can give presentations and play media at 1080p. Video Mirroring has been introduced which mirror’s your iPad’s screen on your TV.

Featuring HSUPA

High-Speed Uplink Packet Access is a 3G mobile protocol which gives faster upload speeds (around 5 mbps). This will only be available on iPad 2 3G + WiFi version.

Availabe on both AT&T and Verizon’s network

iPad 2 will be available on both AT&T and Verizon’s network. Alas .. !

The new multi-utility “smart cover”

iPad 2 will be coming with a new “smart cover” by apple. Seriously smart stuff by people at apple, it protects your display and can be used as a stand. It has magnetic clips so easy to attach and remove.

Release Date’s :

US – 11 March 2011

UK – 25 March 2011

we will try to keep you updated.

You can check out this video for more.

These ads are touching but I think only a few people may feel the problem after seeing these. It is proven that anti-smoking campaigns help some people quit, but the number is very low. We need to join our hands and control this menace.

via blog.reflexstock.com

via eatingtheroad & blog.sloshspot.com

In Cyberspace battles are fought in nanoseconds, Cyber attacks can be on a large scale(ddos) or may be discrete like the enemy has entered your system and manipulated your data and may have installed a backdoor, you come to know about it later. Sometimes the enemy hits you so bad that you become defenseless and are forced to surrender so precautions are necessary. Attacks can be made on Military as well as private networks, the target could be a Defense system or Air traffic control or may be a Power grid.

Governments all over the world are training cyber warriors and preparing them for the cyberwar. We all know about the US govt.’s hack attack’s along side the ground operations during Iraq war and the Russian cyber attacks on Estonia.

President Obama issued a cyber security plan to deal with cyber threats to the nation. Many developed and developing countries have recognized the power of the internet and are now securing their systems against security threats. US, UK, Russia, France, China, North Korea, Canada, Germany are reported to have been securing their systems. Analysts and former intelligence officials, say that China and Russia top the list of countries with highly developed cyberwarfare capabilities. They also named Iran and North Korea as countries with known cyber warfare aspirations.

In 2007 McAfee’s annual report stated that about 120 countries are trying to use the internet as a weapon to target their enemy nation’s financial market’s, Govt computer system’s.

Cyber Terrorism is a rising threat now. Intelligence has reported that there is a discrete threat that terrorist groups like ‘Al-Qaeda’ may plan to launch cyber attacks but currently they don’t have the infrastructure and expertise that may do more damage than guns and bullets. Terrorists can get ‘hired guns’ with the resource’s and motives they have. Terrorist’s main aim will be to make a chaos rather than destruction like terrorist may hack a bank and manipulate some accounts data, people will think they lost all their savings which will create a lot of ruckus.

Cyber Terrorism

You must have read about the iranians hacking into the US drones with a 25.95 $ software and viewing their live feed, this can be pretty dangerous to US security. The lame engineers who made the predator drones didnt even encrypt the data huh.. Iranian hackers recently hacked twitter by compromising with some DNS stuff and Google Morroco was also hacked by Pakbugs (Pakistani Hackers).

This is exactly why a great number of non-partisan computer security experts are warning of the danger of Internet voting. Basically, they say that there is no way to secure Internet voting. Yet, there is a move to make that happen in the U.S. First, the overseas military, next the overseas ex-pats, and finally the rest of us. And, we never saw it coming. If and when it becomes the method we use to cast our votes, we will have given up our democracy.

Internet is getting better by the minute as new technologies enter it. So, we will be discussing about the one’s which will have an impact.

A New Internet Protocol System : IPv6

Since 1981 the internet has been working on TCP/IP, which was IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4). IPv4 gave us around 4.3 billion IP addresses (Theoretically 2^32 or 4,294,967,296 unique addresses) to use, which sound a lot. But with the rate of growth these addresses are quickly running out, means that new devices cannot be assigned new “addresses” on the internet except via a technique called Network Address Translation (NAT) which can put multiple device behind the same IP i.e. sub-allocation of an IP.

IPv6 or Internet Protocol version 6 is the solution to the problem. IPv4 used a 32-bit addressing scheme instead IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, giving users a maximum of 2^128 available addresses (4x more).

IPv6 looks significantly different from IPv4 as there is a lot more data to convey in each address. It uses hexadecimal numbers (case sensitive) for addressing so you will see both letters and numbers in the address. It has 8 fields each containing 16 bits of data (8 x 16-bit = 128-bit), divided into two logical parts: a 64-bit network prefix and a 64-bit host address part. It is separated by colons instead of dots, and leading zeros can be left out of each field. A double colon (::) can be used once in an address to replace multiple fields of zeros (0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 or ::1, 2a00:1450:8006:0:0:0:0:63 or 2a00:1450:8006::63)

Lets do a quick comparison between IPv4 and IPv6

Today, most websites including this one are available only on IPv4.

You can test out if you have IPv6 connectivity in one way or another by connecting directly to Google’s IPv6 address, which is http://[2a00:1450:8006::63].

Update : Only 1,104,584 IPv4 addresses available on 4 Feb. 2011

The Rise of HTML5

HTML 5 is a new version of HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 focusing on the needs of Web application developers. HTML5 introduces some new elements but also drops some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01.

HTML4, the last major iteration of the language, has been around for over a decade, and we can all agree that the Web has undergone tremendous changes during that time. What was originally used mostly for displaying static information, the Web has evolved into a dynamic environment where users are constantly exchanging information, communicating and collaborating in real-time. When multimedia was introduced to the Web, plugins had to be created to ensure proper functionality.
Now HTML5 introduces a number of new features that reflect typical usage on the modern Web.

• Multimedia – tags that allow multimedia to be directly embedded without any plugins
• Offline & storage – ability to store offline data for Web apps
• Semantics – a richer set of tags, along with RDFa, microdata, and microformats
• Device access – geolocation API allows Web apps to present rich, device-aware features and experiences
• 3D, graphics & effects – natively rendered visuals in the browser
• Interactivity – drag & drop and other desktop-like features

Does this mean HTML5 will kill Flash, Silverlight and the like? Probably not. But it will definitely play a helping hand when it comes to developing Web apps when mobile compatibility is a concern, now that certain plugins that aren’t supported by many smart phones are no longer needed.

HTML 5 will mark the future of the web but it might take some time to mature.

The Cloud Transformation

“we can access everything from everywhere using anything” – me

It involves the interaction of several virtualized resources which implement processes online instead in your local gadget’s. Data and processes could be done online without the need of any local software or client. As long as the user knows the process and have the right security credentials, he could access the system and make the necessary changes. Your applications take advantage of the seemingly limitless processor cycles, memory storage, and network bandwidth along with extensive software capabilities.

Cloud computing is often provided “as a service” over the Internet, typically in the form of software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

Gmail, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Dropbox, Amazon’s EC2 and S3, Google’s App Engine, Microsoft Azure Platform are some famous examples.

Changes are under-way, to make the web a better place.

Images by : gmurray96 , Rackspace