What would you do if your home computer did not have Microsoft Word but you need to read a Word document sent from your friends? What would you do if you did not have PDF writer but you want convert your documents into PDF? You might have a number of solutions for these two problems. Here is a quick solution for you: use these two web-based services that quickly and freely convert your documents into PDF. You simply upload the document you want to convert and receive the PDF file.

• PDF Online ~ This free PDF conversion service supports a number of document formats including DOC, XLS, PPT, RTF, PPS, TXT, HTML, and PUB. You upload the document and receive the resulting PDF from your given email account.
• DOCTransformer ~ I know this web service via Robin Good. This web-based service allows you to upload a document file and to have it freely converted to PDF, RTF or to the OpenOffice Write document format.

There are two major standard APIs for processing XML with Java, namely, the Simple API for XML (SAX) and the Document Object Model (DOM). In addition, there are a few of other APIs that intend to address some of the drawbacks of SAX and DOM. The following lists the major websites about this topic. (more…)

I write this post in response to a query from my friend Herman on my post: Put a tag cloud in a WordPress post with ZoomClouds. (more…)

With ZoomClouds you can easily create a tag cloud that represents the contents of a RSS feed. ZoomClouds first intakes the RSS feed you gave, fetchs the content, and generates the tag cloud using both Yahoo! Content Analysis API as well as a custom ZoomClouds content analysis tool.

ZoomClouds then provides with a necessary CSS code and Javascript code for you to place the tag cloud in your website or weblog. The following shows you an example that I got based on the RSS feed of this weblog. The tag cloud that you see at that moment is based only on the feed content at that time.

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The following lists seven software configuration management tools. Some of them offer test drive to play with. Examples: BitKeeper’s 30-Minute Test Drive, Perforce’s Ten-Minute Test Drive.

CVS - Concurrent Versions System

CVS is a version control system, an important component of Source Configuration Management (SCM). Using it, you can record the history of sources files, and documents.

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The following four web software can help users create a short URL from a long URL. They exist to solve the various problems of posting a long URL in email message. I don’t think them very useful. On the one hand, in making an email it is trivial to embed a long URL into a more descriptive text. On the other hand, for those who don’t konw how, they may also don’t know these four websites.

My point is that the responsibility to solve the problem of long URLs should go to those websites that generate long and unwieldy URLs and those users who posting them directly into email messages.

Four web software to create a short URL from a long one:

1. TinyURL.com: “Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then you’ve come to the right place. By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires.”
2. SnipURL: “Website URLs are long and difficult to remember. SnipURL allows you to “snip” your long URLs into small, friendly and persistent links for sharing and remembering. Free!”
3. shorl.com: “To make a long story short: Shorl makes long URLs short.”
4. DigBig: “Shorten a long Web address.”