Some time back we saw Facebook celebrated its 6^th birthday, Digg was 5 year old, and our lovely Internet celebrated 40 years, but today is a very special day in the entire web world. The .com domain name is 25 years old today, with March 15, 1985 marking the date of the first registered domain called Symbolics.com. Today, there are tens of millions of .com domain names, but things didn’t move too fast at the very beginning. In fact, for the full year of 1985, only six .com domains were registered as compared to the 100,000 now registered every day.

The domain .com is one of the first five top level domains (TLDs) launched in 1985, and soon became greatly popular. The other primary domain names are edu, gov, mil, net, and org. It took two and a half months before the first company registered a .com domain name after it was available. A Massachusetts-based computer systems company, Symbolics, registered its name under a ‘commercial’ domain name, though the event was hardly regarded as remarkable at the time.

Symbolics happily shares some info -

25 years ago, today, the Internet received it’s first .com registration, when the Symbolics Computer Company registered Symbolics.com. Nearly 200,000,000 registrations later, the Internet thrives as the world’s network for entertainment and business. In 2009, Symbolics.com was sold to it’s current owner, Missouri based XF.com Investment Company.

Today people can’t imagine of being without a domain name, and now we have 84 million .com domains names registered so far and the number is still augmenting. It is of course a special day in Internet’s history and the difference is clearly visible about where it was 25 years ago and what it is today. And Of course the future is bright without a doubt!

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With more than 10 years blogger obviously know what users expect and really need in the platform. Apart from valuable content and new features, one important factor that has be considered is themes. There might be plenty of stock themes to select from, but, with millions of users, you could ensure that plenty of other people might sue the same. Of course, you could yourself add new themes or customize the available ones, but it’s not a choice for most of the users. The ability to customize the colors and fonts of your blog helped, but this is nothing compared with what Blogger is exposing now, a full-blown and highly customizable template designer.

Pete Hopkins, Tech Lead, Blogger wrote -

Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the Blogger Template Designer on Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where you can try out the latest features Blogger has to offer. Instead of creating a lot of new templates that will grow stale over time, we decided to go beyond static templates and reinvent the whole process of designing your blog, making it even easier to express yourself online.

If you try out the Blogger Template Designer, you’ll find:

• Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way).
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns.
• Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace.
• Customizable colors, fonts and more.

Of course sounds interesting for users of bloggers, but quite surprising on such a late release!

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It created a buzz when appeared and soon left many with the question of where Google Wave is. Yet, Wave is doing its part and still trying to impress users with one way or the other. One of the impressive prospects of Google Wave is that the ability to make embeddable widgets letting users to extend the functionality and add new features that required. With Google Wave there was always a need to find these extensions easier and for developers to get more contact. With that in mind, Google is now launching the Google Wave Extensions Gallery, an online repository of useful add-ons for the communications platform.

Dan Peterson, Google Wave product manager, wrote.

We’ve just rolled out an initial version of our extensions gallery: simply look for ‘Extensions’ in the navigation panel of Google Wave. The gallery is intended to make it easier for users to discover the fun and useful extensions you all are building with the Google Wave APIs,

There are two types of extensions for Google Wave, robots and gadgets. Robots are actual participants to a wave and are meant to automate tasks and counter to certain events or conditions. Gadgets are more like traditional widgets, they are stand-alone apps that live inside a wave.

The gallery is simply a set of waves containing extension installers (the puzzle pieces). The first wave, ‘Read me first’ contains an introduction to extensions and how to use them,” Peterson explained

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digg

From last six months Digg has been working to switch from the MySQL environment to a NoSQL BigTable solution. And now along with rewriting the majority of their site’s code using Cassandra DB, they are also rolling out a new client and server architecture. Cassandra is selected from other open-source NoSQL solutions, comprising CouchDB and MongoDB. They have replaced their infrastructure components and moving away from LAMP, which is quite a challenging task.

John Quinn, VP of Engineering at Digg, wrote -

Digg is committed to the use and development of open source software and we’re keen to avoid the cost of proprietary large-scale storage solutions. We were inspired by Google and Amazon’s broad use of their non-relational BigTable and Dynamo systems. We evaluated all the usual open source NoSQL suspects. After considerable debate, we decided to go with Cassandra.

During this test period, a tool called Transcribe has been developed to migrate content from MySQL to Cassandra. This tool is expected to be launched as open source after Digg finishes its migration. However, MySQL would not be completely phased out during this process, being yet used in Digg’s small-scale projects due to its high flexibility and rapid prototyping.

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Our most favorite Internet is now officially nominated for the desirable Noble Peace Prize 2010. There have been many talks about the group sincerely considering the nomination and the BBC officially announced that the Internet has finally made it in the official short list which is picked out of 237 people or organizations nominated, a record number for the prize. The Nobel Committee does not actually release the names of nominated parties or the ones selected for the short list, though the relevant parties have rights to disclose the fact that they’ve been nominated.

The internet’s nomination has been championed by the Italian version of Wired magazine for helping advance “dialogue, debate and consensus”. The director of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, told BBC News that the organisation had received “thousands of nominations” for the coveted prize.

“The announcement of this year’s laureate will be made on the 8 October,” the Director of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, said. “The prize amount is very likely be the same as in recent years.” Last year’s prize, which went to the then recently elected US President Barack Obama, was of about $1.4 million.

That’s really nice to know and we hope Internet wins Noble Peace Prize 2010, But who will accept the prize?

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JavaScript performance is been taking hype for web-browser makers recently, but then while everybody is trying to make their browser faster they are intangibly losing focus on the fact that JavaScript has to be interpreted accurately, not just fast. Last year, Google launched an interesting set of JavaScript conformance tests packed under the name of Sputnik. Now, the developers are making it simpler for everyone to essentially use the tests by making the whole suite available inside the browser itself.

Christian Plesner Hansen, Software Engineer at Chromium wrote -

Last June, we launched the Sputnik JavaScript conformance test suite, a comprehensive set of more than 5000 tests. Today we’re releasing a test runner for Sputnik, that allows you to easily run the complete test suite from within your browser.

Sputnik touches all aspects of the JavaScript language defined in the 3rd edition of the ECMA-262 spec. In many ways it can be seen as a continuation of and a complement to existing browser conformance testing tools, such as the Acid3 test. While we are always focused on improving speed, Sputnik is not about testing how fast your browser executes JavaScript, but rather whether it does so correctly, he adds

According to Google’s own testing Sputnik on a Windows machine, it came up unbiased and interesting following results: Opera 10.50: 78 failures, Safari 4: 159 failures, Chrome 4: 218 failures, Firefox 3.6: 259 failures and Internet Explorer 8: 463 failures. The Sputnik test suite shows that Opera 10.50, the latest stable version of the browser, comes closest to hitting the mark of 0 failed tests, which was unexpected result. If you wish to run the test yourself then visit Sputnik.

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Today i came to know that Paypal India Required Your PAN Card Number as an account information so that RBI has an eye on your Paypal transactions (just like they do on indian bank accounts)

paypal-pan

What is a PAN number?

PAN or permanent account number refers to a 10-digit alphanumeric number issued in the form of a laminated card, by the Income Tax Department in India.

Where do you find your PAN number?

You can find the 10-digit number printed at the front of your card.

Why do you need a PAN number?

PAN number is compulsory for all financial transactions as per Indian laws and regulations.

PAN number provides you with a unique identification and makes it easier for PayPal to track your financial transactions.

You need to have a PAN number (made mandatory by the Income Tax Department) in order to file for return of income as well as on all correspondence with any income tax authority in the country.

How do you get a PAN number?

To apply for a PAN card all you need to do is submit the requisite application form number 49 A to the Indian Revenue authorities.

To download PAN application forms or to learn more, visit http://india.gov.in/outerwin.php?id=https://tin.tin.nsdl.com/pan/form49A.html

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Pretty long waited Google App Marketplace is now officially live with about 50 companies registered as partners during launch. It is actually an online store for business apps especially designed for third-party developer providing a cloud app with some kind of incorporation with Google Apps. There are various apps accessible in a variety of categories, some free, some paid, and these numbers are likely to grow fast.

Chris Vander Mey, product manager for Google Apps Marketplace wrote -

Today, we’re making it easier for these users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses

Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity,” he adds.

The idea behind launching this Google Apps Marketplace is to offer any company, big and small, to potentially reach millions of people and the augmented visibility could further mean a big uptake in users, particularly for smaller companies. One big advantage is that the Marketplace is essentially quite open and very flexible for developers to work with. Google then plans to enlarge the Marketplace, apart from adding new partners/companies, by introducing more advanced payment options.

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Google does like statistics and to share the love with users, it recently launched a brand new Public Data Explorer Tool that offers a way of visualizing number of data sets the search engine has been including. The public data explorer tool adds additional more data sources to the ones Google had already been using, for example World Bank.

Jürgen Schwärzler, Statistician, Public Data team wrote -

Today we’re also releasing the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs, a new experimental product designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog.

Last year, Google released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. And with this tool there are quite a lot of people that could find some of the data very useful. That’s because Google has found, people really search for a lot of statistical information even without knowledge. In order to know which data sets to comprise first, Google made a plenty analysis of people’s searches to find which statistical data was the most sought after, with the top 10 results below:

1. School comparisons
2. Unemployment
3. Population
4. Sales tax
5. Salaries
6. Exchange rates
7. Crime statistics
8. Health statistics (health conditions)
9. Disaster statistics
10. 10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

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The popular World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) gave a chance for the developers to learn more about the cutting edge new standards of HTML 5 and CSS 3. While the company has been working on drafts for a quite some time, but they were just few of the standards. But recently, the W3C released seven important documents, while six of them concerning the HTML specification, which are quite interesting to read about HTML 5 and last one contains proposals for features to be added to HTML to support bidirectional text in various languages such as Arabic, Thaana, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, etc.

The list of documents includes the following files:

HTML: The Markup Language

This document describes the HTML markup language and provides details necessary for producers of HTML content to create documents that conform to the language. By design, it does not define related APIs, nor attempt to specify how consumers of HTML content are meant to process documents, nor attempt to be a tutorial or “how to” authoring guide.

HTML5

This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability.

HTML5 differences from HTML4

HTML5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. “HTML5 differences from HTML4″ describes the differences between HTML4 and HTML5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes. This document may not provide accurate information as the HTML5 specification is still actively in development. When in doubt, always check the HTML5 specification itself.

HTML Canvas 2D Context

This specification defines the 2D Context for the HTML canvas element.

HTML Microdata

This specification defines the HTML microdata mechanism. This mechanism allows machine-readable data to be embedded in HTML documents in an easy-to-write manner, with an unambiguous parsing model. It is compatible with numerous other data formats including RDF and JSON.

HTML+RDFa

This specification defines rules and guidelines for adapting the RDF in XHTML: Syntax and Processing (RDFa) specification for use in the HTML5 and XHTML5 members of the HTML family. The rules defined in this specification not only apply to HTML5 documents in non-XML and XML mode, but also to HTML4 and XHTML documents interpreted through the HTML5 parsing rules.

Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML

Authoring a web app that needs to support both right-to-left and left-to-right interfaces, or to take as input and display both left-to-right and right-to-left data, usually presents a number of challenges that make it an especially laborious and bug-prone task. Some of these are due to browser bugs, but some can be traced to a gap in the specification of the bidirectional aspects of a given HTML feature. And some of these challenges could be greatly simplified by adding a few strategically placed new HTML features. This document proposes fixes for some of the most repetitive pain points.

You may not find any ground breaking changes when compared to the previous drafts that were released, yet it comes with more documentation and examples that offers much deeper insights of HTML5 than earlier!

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