But Internet connection that makes gaming so much fun also serves as a doorway through which nefarious hackers can send malicious code, causing havoc with your computer. Broadband users are especially fertile targets for bad seeds. That's why a firewall is so important. A good firewall, such as Internet Connection Firewall (ICF) that comes with Windows XP, protects your computer from attacks.

A firewall works by blocking communication ports that are used to transfer data to and from your PC. However, games (and all applications that work over Internet) use those ports to communicate. This raises some questions that we frequently encounter on message boards and in Usenet: how does a firewall affect performance of online gaming? What do you have to do to enjoy online gaming with a firewall in place? I'll answer these questions in this article.

How Ports Work To get most out of online gaming through a secure connection, you have to have some idea of how games communicate over Internet and how a firewall works. Don't worry; this discussion won't get inaccessibly technical. I'll stick to layman's terms. To start with, let's look at how programs talk to each other over Internet. All Internet-aware programs communicate with each other through ports. What, exactly, is a port?

Think of your Internet connection as a water conduit. But instead of thinking of it as one big pipe, picture it as a conglomeration of thousands of small pipes: 65,535 of them, to be exact. That is number of Internet ports through which communications can take place.

Different services use different ports—the assignment of which service uses which port is more or less arbitrary. For example, World Wide Web communi- cations use port 80. Why port 80? Because a few years ago, a bunch of Internet-related people got together and decided that that's how it would be. Similarly, SMTP e-mail traffic uses port 25. Those same people decided that that's how that would go, and so on. These and other services use protocols to transmit and receive their data through these ports. Two protocols that they use are Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP).

The 65,535 ports are divided into three groups: Well Known Ports (ports 0 through 1023), Registered Ports (ports 1024 through 49151), and Dynamic or Private Ports (all rest). A list of port numbers and what services commonly use them is kept up by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

Like other services, Internet components of games use ports and protocols to communicate over Internet. When you play Halo online with a bunch of other people, it has to transmit your keyboard and mouse-click data to server so it can tell when you move around or fire your weapon. In turn it has to transmit world data back to your computer so you can see where other people move so you can aim at them and chase them around. Halo and other multiplayer games like Quake family, Half-Life and mods such as Team Fortress Classic and popular Counter-Strike, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Battlefield 1942 send their data down ports and listen for data from same or other ports. Game matchmaker services like GameSpy Arcade also use ports to communicate.

Easy That's how you'd like life to be, right? Especially when you're creating a website on your own. But that doesn't mean you want site to look severe and just functional. you want it to be pretty , smart and also respond and move when you interact with it, while saying all that you want to say to its visitors . There are little tips and Features incorporated into software just for people like you .

Love what Flash can do but don't know how to use it ? Macromedia thought of you and built a feature into Dream weaver that lets you create cool animated Flash buttons just by entering parameters. Want to have button respond to a mouse-over but have no idea or patience to create one with graphics software? You can make a quick and easy mouse-over button right from within FrontPage. What do you do if you need to optimize 150 images within an hour? No need to panic, image ready can help you out with a little droplet. Check out different tips that make life easier or better for you as a Web designer.

•Animated Flash Button & Macromedia Dream weaver:

Dream weaver lets you create some custom vector graphics from within software. You can make Flash and embed them into your Web pages. There are different kinds of style that you can choose for these from available set-play back type of buttons .Arrow shaped button, shopping cart button And so on, or make some of your own.

Making a smart interactive button is simple in Dream weaver, select insert-interactive Image-Flash Button. Form window that opens select different button style by looking at preview image below. Customize button way you want it by adding name of button, Font color and font size , then specify URL that button has to link to . The button is saved with SWF extension you can preview button in your browser to see if it looks way you want.

•Easy Mouse-Over Buttons :

Mouse-over and Front Page? Oh Yes. The software has quit a few convenient features up its sleeve, one of which is "Hover buttons." Granted, these buttons don't have snazzy graphics they look like typical button blocks, but they react to mouse-over and you can archive it very simply. Here's how.

Select Insert -Web component. in window that opens , select Dynamic Effect in component type and select Hover Button effect on right . Type in text that should appear on button, choose a font for text, specify URL to link to on clicking, and select size and color of button. In drop-down menu for Effect, Glow is default selection. Try it - you can select color of glow-check button in preview mode-the button light up when you move your mouse over it. There are several other effects available that are worth checking out, especially bevels quite neat!

•Cool Effects With DHTML :

DHTML or Dynamic HTML offers some cool effects that could make your Web pages stand out click? Or your page to load with a transition Effect? DHTML will do this for you along with other little tricks. After you've built your Web page, from menu bar, select Format-Dynamic HTML Effect. A tool bar appears in work area. Choose an event from first drop down list. This could be on ‘click' double-click.' Mouse over or page load. Depending on event selected here , next Drop-Down list offers possible effect that can be achieved , This could be a change in color and style of font if it is text, a border added around it , or in case of an image , you can replace image with another one by a swap .

Most of effect toggle Meaning if there was a font change on click, another click will change font back to what it was before. However, some effects are one-time like disappearing act of an image or button .you select ‘fly out' from effects list for this . On ‘page load' you could have selected text drop in word by word, or hop in, spiral in, zoom out, and so on. This is especially useful for advertisements or parts of page that you want to draw user's attention to.

•Animation In Reverse :