Reflections of a scattered Mind !! » google

Display Images in Instant Messengers

Sai Prasad — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:54:34 +0000

Have you ever felt while chatting that your friend’s display image is awesome ? If you ever felt so, the most obvious thing you’d try to do next is save the image [so that you can use it later on some purpose]. But, in general, the messengers do not support saving the display images [No, you can't just right-click on the menu & select Save]. Well, I just explored & experimented a bit with Google Talk & Yahoo! Messenger to check how to access the display images through an http url? So, here are my results:

Yahoo! Messenger: The display image of all the users are publicly available on the web. To access the avatar / display image of a user whose Y! Id is yid, then just navigate to:
http://img.msg.yahoo.com/avatar.php?yids=yid

Here comes a shock now !! All images are publicly available, meaning that everyone has permissions to save your image onto their disk.
Google Talk: I’m not really sure where the images get loaded from on GTalk, but on the GTalk plugin available on GMail, the images are loaded from: https://mail.google.com/mail/photos/username@gmail.com, where the username is the user’s Google username. On contrary to the Yahoo! Security Settings, these images are NOT publicly available. You cannot access the images of users who are not in your friends list. Also, this URL checks for your valid session, meaning that you need to be logged into GMail to access these images.

I was actually wondering if there is any tool which can list me all the data-transfers happening b/w my IMs & the host sites? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we know all the endpoints of an IM server, the message formats etc. [We can probably develop our custom messenger for that IM service, if we get to know those details ]

Well, now girls [especially Indians, who are conservative] should give a thought before uploading their display image, if they do not want their pictures to fall into wrong / unwanted hands.

Now, its time to have fun by tricking your pals by their own display images as yours..

Google visit to NIT Warangal

Sai Prasad — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:56:00 +0000

Sub : For the selections of 1) Campus Ambassador, 2) Women in Engineering Award

Campus Ambassador :

Date : 4th September, 2008 2:00 PM IST
Venue : Conference Hall, NIT Warangal
Duration of Selection Process : 4 hours
Process :

Presentation on campus
Application + Resume Screening
Group Discussion.
Personal Interview

Ambassador Requirements :

3rd and 4th year students from Computer Science Stream only
CGPA of 7.5 and above
Involvement in various co-curricular activities on and off campus

Ambassador Responsibilities :

Serve as strategic link between the campus and Google India
Identify mutually beneficial sponsorship opportunities
Maintain open and regular communication with the student council and career placement cell; help enhance Google’s visibility on campus

Women in Engineering Award :

The Google India Women in Engineering Award is aimed at recognizing and rewarding deserving women students in Computer Science, inspiring them to become active participants and leaders in the field of technology.

The award will be given to deserving students based on demonstrated leadership, academic excellence and thought. A group of female bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. The award recipients will each receive a sum of INR 75,000.

Eligibility criteria for the award :
Candidates must -

be enrolled as full time students in a recognized university.
maintain a CGPA of at least 8.00
be enrolled in 2nd, 3rd or final year if applying during their bachelor’s degree, 1st or 2nd year if applying when pursuing a master’s degree, or be PhD students in a related field.

Duration : 1 hour for the presentation

NOTE : Eligible and interested students are requested to submit the hard copies of the resumes to the T & P office on or before 2nd September, 2008.

Got the ‘App’titude Challenge from Google, India

Sai Prasad — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:37:00 +0000

Google India and Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhi has come forward with “Got the ‘App’titude Challenge”. This unique, first time effort is looking for student, faculty and alumni leaders to implement Google Apps within their respective campuses, with the objective of providing access to powerful communication methods, and improving collaboration capabilities through tools like Gmail, shareable calendars, online spreadsheets and online documents.

In addition to the challenge being unique learning opportunity for students, it will also show them to exercise and hone their research, communication and negotiation skills in a real time situation, since they will be required to develop and execute a product positioning and marketing plan for a targeted audience in order to implement Google Apps at your campus.

In order to participate in the challenge, students, faculty and alumni are encouraged to form teams and follow the guidelines mentioned below:

Sign up for the challenge by September 15, 2008.
Get approval from the college’s administration to implement Google Apps by October 15, 2008.
Work with the college IT department to implement Google Apps by December 15, 2008.
Achieve the highest level of Google Apps usage among all participating colleges by January 31, 2009 to be declared the challenge winner!

In case of any queries please visit the Got the “App”titude website or feel free to write into the team at admin@GotTheAptitude.com.

Regards,
Sai Prasad Ch
saiprasad.ch@gmail.com
http://csprasad.blogspot.com