At Google, we like to reflect the ever-changing world of our users through the logo designs on our homepage. These ‘doodles’ celebrate scientists, artists, local events or special dates and are designed by our original doodler, 31-year-old, Dennis Hwang.

We’re now giving you a chance to design a doodle for us, through our doodle competition, Doodle 4 Google. If you are currently a student in any school in India (between the 1^st and 10^th standards), then this is your chance to have your doodle be displayed on the Google India homepage. The theme of this competition is 'My India'. We'd love to see what your country means to you when represented in a doodle. Whether it’s music or dance, famous Indian art, Mahatma Gandhi, the Taj Mahal, cricket, our scientific achievements or the Indian people as a community- we’re interested in seeing these representations of what India means to you and how you represent it using images.

The best doodles will be voted on by a panel of judges as well as by the Indian public, and the winning doodle will be featured on the Google India homepage for a day, to be viewed by millions of people. The final winner will also win his or her very own laptop (and a technology grant for their school)!

Just an FYI entry to encourage all students (1st – 10th standard) from India to submit doodles for Google!

Doodle Submission Deadline
30^th September 2009

Finalists Announced
21^st October 2009

Online Public Vote
Public votes for their favourite doodles
21^st October 2009 - 31^st October 2009

Visit: http://www.google.co.in/doodle4google for the official submission page and other details!

I was well delighted to see the doodles created by kids from USA, a contest held a few months back! Let’s see how Indian students think about their country! Hmm…

¶ 3:18:00 AM 0 comments

I love the talks from TED and it so happens that lately I am in urge to watch (almost) all the episodes on the website whenever I can get the time! So, be it a 20 minute ride home from office or just another boring wait for someone, I WANT to watch TED! Alright, that’s exaggeration!

To download the episode, I can either subscribe to the channel on iTunes and make 300+ clicks to download each episode or else, I can do this:

1. Open up iTunes and connect to the Store. Search for “tedtalks” and select the “telktalks (hd)” channel.
   

    

2. Download and open up “URL Snooper” (Snoopy fella!). Select “Multimedia URLs (Simplify all)” from the Protocol Filter dropdown and start the sniffer!
   
3. Now, go back to iTunes and subscribe to the “TEDTalks (HD)” channel.
   

   

   Soon enough when you switch back to URL Snooper, you can see the direct links for the video!
   
   

“Why the hell should I bother to do all this, just hand over the URLs that you have fetched?” – I’m sure this pod has already burst it's seed of thought in you!

The whole TED Talks thing is just an example to let you know how one can use this utility to trace messages from websites that might get difficult in handling. iTunes subscription URL is SSL encrypted and when you are using Fiddler to trace the messages, you will see that the iTunes fails to subscribe to the channel. This happens because iTunes forces a check on the certificate that it receives from the server and if its incorrect, an exception is thrown! URL Snooper does not provide a proxy for the application instead listens to the incoming data. A parser in the application matches URL like content and displays it on the list.

So, this is URL Snooper! Try it for yourself, by the way, here’s all the videos from TED Talk, since 2006 in a list !

¶ 7:36:00 AM 0 comments

Catching up with a previous post, I was again prompted to answer the same question.

Well, this time I choose “More than two flights (more than one return flight)” and this is what they got for me:

It’s like, I accepted the licensing terms without reading it and its mentioned there:

“WordWeb free version may be used indefinitely only by people who take at most two commercial flights (not more than one return flight) in any 12 month period.”

It may seem silly to you but these guys at WordWeb have an explanation for such a deal:

“…the WordWeb licensing is just reflecting the current huge under-pricing of air travel. Every time you fly you are not paying the cost to the environment (and hence other people); in economics terms climate-changing emissions are an important externality leading to a market failure. WordWeb is trying to slightly increase the cost of flying via its licence to correct for this anomaly. If and when air travel is charged correctly to reflect the total cost, which is much the most efficient solution, the WordWeb licence will be changed to a more sensible economic model.

The licence also has the advantage that people who cannot easily afford to pay can use the program for free. If you can afford to fly, so that you do not satisfy the licence, you can afford to buy the program.”

Nice thoughts, but still makes me realize the number of software applications that I have installed without reading the license! Hmm…

¶ 8:38:00 AM 0 comments

This is so unacceptable.

I generally don’t share my rant for the application that I use often but what Facebook showed me today, is totally unacceptable.

Very recently, last month?, I happen to have used the “Friend Finder” utility from them, I guess its called “Contact Importer” now; So anyways, its like this, I use the utility and find many many of my contacts on Facebook, and using the brilliant list selection web control, I choose whom I like to add on Facebook!

Now, it’s today, I log to my work mail and I see this message. Wtf, seriously Wtf, does “Find your friend” means “Invite your friend for we love spamming?”? My understanding prefigures, Facebook sent a mail to all the “non-friends” on Facebook, inviting them instead of just looking up the email addresses on its server.

The next thing, I like to know is that why did they mail the contacts after a month or so? Did they store my Google credentials even though they fruitfully said: “We fuk whores love to say that we don’t save your password"? You know my say, you “fuk whores” bitch me!

My guess is that it’s in the new “Contact Importer”, they accidently mailed every other left out contacts. The mail is not a spam, but I’m unsure about who sent the mail, the Facebook or it’s thirty-party applicits!

So here it is, my apologies to any of my contacts who got the mail from my address, this was just something that I did not expect.

Off you go all, all the additional permissions!

Here’s a copy of the mail header, in case you are still considering Facebook clean and taking the side of the my unwanted.

¶ 3:00:00 AM 0 comments

Dezi is a collection of online media streams (most of them live) that lets one have TV experience via the Internet! I used .NET 3.5 for the development ‘cause of the ‘Media Element’ that comes with it and also I wanted to do something with WPF! So anyways, I will chatter on how I coded the application later, but as for now, the working and usage style is unofficially documented!

The application acquires the channels at startup from a Web Service! For now, most of the channels present on it are the ones broadcasted on Indian networks. I will adding more this weekend – German ones, I dunno, lets see!

I also included the keyboard shortcuts in the application and are worth noting as below:

Install the application by downloading the zip content attached below and then by running the setup.exe. If .NET 3.5 runtime is unavailable on your system, you should download the same from Microsoft located here. Don’t ya worry, it take about 5-7 minutes to install .NET 3.5 framework.

Forward all your comments and suggestions to shauryaanand@gmail.com. In about two weeks (i.e. after your feedbacks), I will release the product with support.

Tschüss! :)

¶ 10:11:00 PM 0 comments

I was pretty excited to try Live Mesh my self that I had to try a workaround to get my hands on it. None the less, the Mesh is an excellent application, but it really didn’t touch my heart.

The main reason for me to disown this is that it doesn’t support remote desktop via a firewall. I had installed Mesh on my Home PC, my Notebooks and then on my Workstation. My company uses both a hardware and software firewall and the Mesh would not connect to it. A bummer!

Anyway, I switched my self back to how I used to work with remote desktops and file collaborating. Here are the alternative approach I used to get things done.

Remote Desktop

I would suggest LogMeIn. This application works great even with firewalls and is totally free. You can access all your computer via a single page and even create shortcuts to directly remote control the computer in just a click.

File Collaboration

I use the Microsoft’s lost love for FolderShare. This can let you access all your files on the remote computer that you have added. Browse the directories, stream media files, access your documents on road. You can also synchronize files between the computers in share.

Online File Storage

I use again Microsoft’s web application SkyDrive to store files online. Though this is one extra task that has to be done because unlike Live Mesh, synchronization of files can’t happen between an online storage device and desktops. Anyway, I readily upload only the important files to the SkyDrive and share those that need a public view.

¶ 3:45:00 AM 0 comments