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