“Today, we’re introducing a new feature that brings a whole new level of personalization to Google by letting you add a favorite photo or image to the background of the Google homepage. You can choose a photo from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery hosted by Picasa which includes a selection of beautiful photos,” said Google in blog post dated June 2.

To change the background image simply click on the “Change background image” link on the bottom left corner of Google’s homepage. A window will pop up letting you select a background image from your computer, Picasa account, Picasa’s public gallery or from Google’s selection of recommended images. You can change the image as frequently as you like by clicking on the “Remove background image” link in the bottom left corner of the homepage and adding a new image.

Happy Personal Googling to all…

This can lead to damage of important data ,or the whole network. So the solution isn’t to cut off the network from internet, Instead we can build firewalls to protect the network.

A firewall is a software running on  another computer. which inspects the network traffic through it, and denies or permits pasage based on a set of rules. A firewall’s basic task is to regulate some of the flow of traffic between computer networks.

A firewall can be implemented both in hardware and software, or a combination of both. Firewalls are frequently used to prevent unauthorized internet users from accessing private networks connected to the internet, especially intranets. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass through the firewall,which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specifies security criteria.

There are several types of firewall techniques:

• Packet filter: It looks at each packet entering or leaving the network and accepts or rejects it based on user-defined rules.
• Application gateway: It applies security mechanisms to specific applications such as Telnet servers.
• Circuit-level gateway: It applies security mechanisms when a TCP or UDP connection is established.Once the connection is made,packets can flow between the hosts without further checking.
• Proxy server: The proxy server is a application program which services the requests of the clients by forwarding requests to other servers. The proxy server hides the true network address.

The picture above shows some very basic techniques and styles. Of course, you get to choose from a wide range of colors and you get to adjust the saturation level and opacity of colors. Further, you can set the brush size and softness. And there are lot of other parameters, e.g. center, focus, chaos etc., so you can create any effect you want.  Also you can save your art work to your computers.

Recommended browser: Mozilla Firefox

The applet is tested and working in browsers with Java plugin:
- Windows – Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Internet Exporer (allow popup)
- MacOS Snow Leopard (10.6) – Firefox, Safari (allow popup)
- Linux (tested on Ubuntu) – Firefox, Chrome

You can try your hands at this amazing and unique application here.

With IE9, though, Microsoft is trying to rebuild the browser for the Web that’s to come through new standards such as HTML5 and CSS3, updates to Hypertext Markup Language for describing Web pages and Cascading Style Sheets for formatting.

1^st developer preview of IE9 was launched on March 16, 2010.

The preview is bare bones and doesn’t have much in terms of user interface. Still, it provides a good glimpse into what we can expect from IE9: a complete reboot. It supports HTML5, the new version of the mark-up language that supports more dynamic webpages, video embedding, and geolocation. Microsoft also focused on adhering to web standards. IE9’s Acid3 test — a measure of how well a web browser follows certain web standards — achieves a score of 55/100. Microsoft also shows off its improved compliance with CSS, including rounded corners (if you’ve ever developed for previous version of IE, this is definitely a sore spot). Microsoft also seems intent on being compatible with CSS3, which is currently under development. However, IE9 will not support Windows XP. But it could prove to be a smart move, as it might help push more people to upgrade to Windows 7.

May 5 2010: 2^nd developer preview of IE9 released.

The new preview offers a higher ACID 3 test score, 68 out of 100, and there’s a 117-millisecond improvement in speed according to Webkit.org’s SunSpider benchmark tests. Microsoft didn’t provide exact numbers for context.

Webkit.org's SunSpider Performance Update

Microsoft promised improved performance and graphics support, and the company said it’s been working closely with standards bodies. It submitted 79 new tests to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) responsible for HTML 5 compliance, bringing the total to 183.

The 2^nd release builds on the first Platform Preview, delivering improvements to IE9’s performance, support for standards, and hardware acceleration of HTML5.

Another headline element for IE9 is a new JavaScript engine. When it comes to these engines for running Web-based programs, Chrome has V8, Opera 10.5 has Carakan, Safari has Nitro, and Firefox has the new JaegerMonkey.

Now Internet Explorer has its own new name for a JavaScript Engine: Chakra. One big change in the JavaScript engine is its multicore support. As soon as a Web page is loaded, Chakra assigns a processing core to the task of compiling JavaScript in the background into fast code written in the native language of the computer’s processor.

Microsoft has also updated the test drive site with a new set of developer samples to show what developers can do with GPU-powered HTML5. As part of its commitment to enabling developers to use the Same Markup – the same HTML, CSS, and script – on the web, it has contributed many new tests to the W3C for HTML5, as well as CSS3 Media Queries and DOM. The Developer Tools in this preview include some new features to make finding and fixing markup issues easier.

The IE9 Platform Preview itself is a change, too. Previously, Microsoft delivered a more finished product to the world. Now it’s trying to get feedback at an earlier stage of development. And it’s explicitly seeking comment on a wide range of elements.

The platform preview installs side by side with Internet Explorer 8 so that you can try it without replacing the full IE that comes with Windows. This second release of the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview will install over the first version. There is no need to uninstall the first Preview before installing second.  You’ll also find more information on what’s included in this release of the Platform Preview in the Release Notes, including known and resolved issues.

You can download the 2^nd developer preview from here.

If you hover over the Chrome icon in the taskbar you will see previews for all the open tabs as seen in the screenshot below.

You can also see new type of tabs when u Press win key + d (shortcut for showing desktop).

You can downlaod the latest dev version of chrome from here.

Wating for the reviews of this version…