Author Archive

Google Doodle History and a Nostalgic Showcase

The concept of Google has changed little since its inception. Google is a user-friendly and very useful tool for online searches. We know what to expect of Google already: a search bar to enter the necessary keywords and then in a single click, relevant results are returned. The site is simple and minimal, so it can get ho-hum every once in a while, until Google doodles are born.

Google doodles, in a few words, are modified versions of the classic Google logo. They are often seen on special holidays and or for memorable events. Google doodles are a fun and pleasant surprise, because you never know what you’re gonna get. But do you know the story behind Google doodles? Let’s explore them together, and look at the most memorable examples of all time.

Google Doodle History and a Nostalgic Showcase

The History of Google Doodles


The first doodle was actually in 1998, to commemorate the Burning Man Festival. There is a stick figure behind the ‘o’ in Google. This is to indicate that the founders of Google took part and attended the festival. The design was a nod to the users that the founders were ‘out of office’.

Google doodles became a huge hit, and appeared more and more on other holidays: Christmas, Valentines Day, Thanksgiving, Easter, just to name a few.

Google doodles during the Christmas holidays throughout the years

Soon doodles started to commemorate lesser known events such as: ‘Pi’ day, Hans Christensen’s birthday, the anniversary of Sesame Street, and even the invention of the barcode.

Google is a company with a great sense of humor. Every April Fool’s Day, Google makes hoaxes and pranks that are sometimes silly, sometimes absurd, and always hilarious.

One prank in 2007 was the introduction of the Google TiSP, which is a wireless router that runs through the toilets. Moreover, Google promised that the TiSP has 24 hour, on site technical support in case of backup problems, brownouts, & data wipes.

Another elaborate prank was on April Fool’s of 2006. It was published with the introduction: Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance’. The search engine tool is used for ‘Soulmate Search’ so users can have a ‘Contextual date’.

Interactive and Flashing Doodles


Recently, Google doodles have gone interactive, and thus, have become more fun. The first interactive doodle was a clickable slideshow of a Halloween candy.

Since then, there have been many unique doodles such as a game, a short film, and more, all on the Google page.
One example is the Google particle logo wherein the particles move away from the cursor every time it moves near.

The Pacman Google doodle is a fun game that celebrates the classic Pacman game. If you missed it when it was on the website last May 22, 2010, you can check and play the game here.

Google celebrated Jim Henson’s 75th birthday on September 24, 2011 with a really funny Google doodle. It’s a pretty nifty doodle, where you can create your own  puppet show. If you missed it, you can still see the Muppet Google Doodle here.

Probably my favorite of all Google Doodles is the Les Paul guitar one. The Les Paul doodle commemorates Les Paul’s 96th birthday. The doodle is extremely fun, it’s playable and you can create and record your own tunes with it.

Some of the Best Google Doodles throughout the years


Here are the best Google doodles from 2001 to 2011.

  • 5/24/2002

A tribute to Dilbert, a famous comic strip celebrating every working man. The Google doodle ran for five days, from Monday to Friday, with a funny comic strip feature everyday.




  • 3/13/2003


March 13 celebrates the 124th birthday of one of the world’s most lovable scientists, Albert Einstein.

  • 1/4/2006

Google in Braille for one day, in celebration of Louise Braille’s birthday.

  • 12/12/2006


The Scream logo was featured on December 12, also Edvard Munch’s birthday.

  • 5/6/2008


Celebrating the invention of the first laser

  • 6/6/2009


Creative Google Doodle with the ‘l’ still dangling on top. This was for the 25th Anniversary of Tetris.

  • 3/14/2010


March 14, or 3/14, is a big day for math nerds worldwide. It’s Pi Day– the celebration of the ‘perfect number’, which is 3.14 (or let’s be exact; 3.14159265).

  • 9/30/2010


Who can forget the Flintstones? On September 30, 2010, Google commemorated the 50th anniversary of this dearly loved classic cartoon.

  • 11/27/2010


Google celebrated Bruce Lee’s birthday with this special tribute.

  • 4/3/2011


Celebration of the invention of the ice cream sundae, made on the same date exactly 119 years ago. Yum!

  • 2/14/2011

The Google doodle for Valentines day of 2011 is inspired by Robert Indiana’s renowned LOVE sculpture. The original sculpture has been on exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art since the 70s, but now the sculpture has been reproduced in all types of media and colors and is on display around the world.

  • 08/06/2011


In honor of the Chinese Valentines Day in 2011, Google featured the doodle in selected countries celebrating the holiday: in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brunei and Taiwan.

  • 12/23/2011


During the holidays, Google made another really great interactive doodle. The doodle is inspired by string lights, carols and popular Christmas icons. Ho, ho, ho!

  • 1/7/2012


A Google doodle in honor of the famous and creepy Addams family, in honor of Charles Addams’ 100th birthday.

Doodle your Google Now!


Google Doodle is currently accepting submissions until March 23, 2012. This time there will be winners for all States!

Google Products that have Failed to Impress

 

Google servicesGoogle – the more I pronounce the word, the greater is my feeling of honor for it. Sometimes it makes me wonder what it is that Google cannot accomplish. Another question that constantly peeps into my mind is – Has any of its services / products so far failed to impress? Well the answer is, yes.

While the first question can hardly have any answers, the second is an interesting one. This world-class search engine has done wonders to the internet world. It has been a friend, philosopher, guide, instructor and many more to billions of internet users across the globe.

What it has done to the world and the people in it are many. That can hardly be put in words. On the contrary, let us here, discuss briefly on those few Google products that have failed to impress the world.

1. Google Buzz

google buzz Google Products that have Failed to Impress

Google Buzz had come and gone without being noticed by many. The service was supposed to help people share photos, videos and conversations. A series of drawbacks had stopped this service from being popular. One major recede about the product was its inability to maintain privacy. The status indication / message go public and are integrated with Gmail.

The ‘Google Keyword Search tool’ itself tells you that Google Buzz is more often surfed with the keywords “disable Google buzz, delete Google buzz, remove Google buzz” etc. This naturally shows that Google Buzz tool has failed miserably. Moreover, Google itself has withdrawn the service months after its launch.

2. Side Wiki

google sidewiki Google Products that have Failed to Impress

Google Side Wiki, a tool used to share public opinion on particular websites and other site pages has failed miserably. Google promoted this product with a big hype but it ended up being a favorite service only to those that love to spam around heavily, creating an unjust favor to themselves.

3. Google Wave  

wavelogo Google Products that have Failed to Impress

The tool was initially launched for blogging on different topics, sharing information and much more stuff. Though this service was promising, it finally ended up in the wrong side. There are number of reasons owing to its failures like lack of innovativeness, a lot of options with complex operations and many more.

4. Google Knol

google knol Google Products that have Failed to Impress

Google Knol was Google’s answer to Wikipedia. This is the first time Google attempts to copy a concept from others without any refreshing changes. The project quickly kissed the dust as expected. Though the failure of this product has not been announced officially, it was clearly observed that people have stopped showing enthusiasm on it. Another reason for its failure is the quality of its articles. They are so poorly written and organized that people may not visit them again.

5. Google Plus

Finally, this might be awfully shocking to you. I am in no way an Anti-Googlist, if I may call it that way. Google Plus is known to be Google’s answer to Facebook. Some of the experts so far, have turned their backs to it, claiming that Google Plus is in no way as impressive as the Facebook. To start with, they lack enough innovations. Some opinions say that they might have been developed only to put up a threat to Facebook, Google’s rival.

Google plus e1323980917573 Google Products that have Failed to Impress

Interestingly, the number of followers on Google Plus has increased considerably over time. But it has been frequently complained of giving a not-at-home feeling. The service lacks the mass appeal and the home-like feeling of Facebook. Though it would be too early to call this product, a failure, it does not effectively show a promising future. Hence this could end up as another half-hearted appeal from Google.

“The absolute fundamental aim is to make money out of satisfying customers” ~ Sir John Egan, A British Industrialist. Google has been awesome in doing it for years now. If some of these rare failures could be avoided, this giant body is bound to become stronger and greater in future.

Enable facebook timeline!!!

Facebook, the famous social network with 800 million members, unveiled a major update of the profile, as everyone calls it a Facebook Timeline. Facebook Timeline is an important feature that is going to change the entire facebook experience here after.

How to enable Facebook Timeline :

Step 1: First, log in  Facebook.

Step 2:  You will need to enable developer mode if you haven’t already. Simply type “Developer” in the search box and click on the top result. Or Enable developer mode via this link.

Step 3: Click ‘Create New App‘ in the top right, provide a display name, app namespace and click “Continue”. Don’t worry, here you can provide any names.

Step 4: Now you will be taken to your app’s main settings page. On the left sidebar, click the “Open Graph” link.

You have to enter the action and object in order create a test action for your app, like “watch” a “movie” or “read” a book” or “eat” a “sandwich”.

Step 5: On the next page you’re presented with a form. Ignore all of this scroll down and click through each page.

Step 6: After processing that, Facebook will flip back to the Open Graph page but you can now ignore all of that and open a new tab and go back to your Facebook profile.

And you’re done! An invite to try Timeline should be waiting at the top of the page. Once you click on Get It Now, you will then be redirected to your new Timeline. Your Timeline is private, by default, for the time being. You can either edit it until you are ready to publish it.

Enjoy this new feature before official release.

How to delete spam messages automatically !!!

Email and spams are two brother’s from same mailing service, one is good and other is bad or simply waste (and some times dangerous too). For your safety what Gmail and other good mailing services do, they automatically classify the emails as spams which has came from unknown source or have malware links or content. But these are still in your email storage which sometimes can be dangerous as nowadays hackers sends bot-nets through email spams which trigger the bot attack or sometimes DDOS attack and your machine becomes one of the peer in their network which help them to boost their DDOS attack. Because of this reason, all email services advice its users, not to open unsolicited emails (emails received from unknown email address) and delete the spam emails on regular basis. But i know, none of us care of spam emails and even never deletes these emails.
For lazy peoples like me i come up with my new post, how to delete spam emails without any effort just requires one minute configuration and then spam emails will get deleted automatically. So lets learn how to delete spam emails automatically in Gmail.

Steps to delete spam email in Gmail automatically:

1. Sign in your Gmail account.
2. Select the Create a Filter as shown below:

3. When you click on create filter, a frame will open for creating a filter in Gmail. Now enter the text exactly as show below:

4. Now a warning pop up will come as shown below, just click on OK.

5. Now a new frame will pop up for choosing the action for such emails, just select skip the inbox and delete it ones as shown below:

6. Now you need not to take care about spams, it will be emptied automatically.

Note: If you send the emails from inbox to spam those will not be filtered using this method.

File System You Should Use for USB Drive!!

 

It can be tough porting your videos and music to every device you use. How do you know your Mac, Xbox, and Windows Machine can read your files? Read on to find your perfect USB drive solution.

File systems are the sort of thing that many computer users take for granted. But what are they, and what system supports what? It can be confusing, and a serious headache to deal with if you’re unprepared. Read on to see what will work best for you when you have to decide how to format your usb disk.

Understanding File System Problems

 

File systems are ways of organizing data, with each various file system usually associated with a specific operating system. Since only binary data can be written to hard disks, the file systems are a key part of the translation from physical recordings on a drive to the files read by an OS. Since these file systems are key to the operating system making sense of the data, an OS cannot read data off of a hard drive without support for various file systems, i.e. without the ability to translate from where the data is physically written to the hard disk. When you choose “format” on a disk, you’re basically deciding what devices can and cannot read it or write to it.

 

There are myriad numbers of file systems,   many of them created for depreciated operating systems. Nowadays, many computer users will have multiple PCs in their home—some running Mac OS, some running Windows, perhaps even some running Linux. Because of this, it’s becoming more and more necessary to have portable disks that can move from OS to OS without issue. But to do that, we have to take a look at major issues that will cause you problems when porting drives from device to device. These are portability and file size limits.

Problem 1: Portability

The three most common file systems are NTFS (the Windows standard), HFS+ (the OS X standard), and FAT32 (an older Windows standard). You might think that modern operating systems would natively support each other’s file system, but they largely do not. Mac OS (even in Lion, the current version), will not write to an NTFS formatted hard disk. Windows 7 does not even recognize HFS+ formatted disks and either ignores them or treats them as unformatted.

Many distros of Linux (like Ubuntu) are prepared to deal with this file system problem. Moving files from one file system to another is a routine process for Linux—many modern distros natively support NFTS and HFS+ or can get support with a quick download of free software packages.

In addition to this, your home consoles (Xbox 360, Playstation 3) only provide limited support for certain filesystems, and only provide read access to the USB drives. In order to better understand the best filesystem for your needs, take a look at this helpful chart.

Windows XP Windows 7/Vista Mac OS Leopard/Snow Leopard Mac OS Lion/Snow Leopard Ubuntu Linux Playstation 3 Xbox 360
NTFS(Windows) Yes Yes Read Only Read Only Yes No No
FAT32(DOS, Windows) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
exFAT(Windows) Yes Yes No Yes Yes,with ExFat packages No No
HFS+(Mac OS) No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes
EXT2, 3(Linux) No No No No Yes No Yes

Keep in mind that these are native abilities of the OS to read/write to these file systems. Mac OS and Windows both have downloads that will help them read unsupported formats, but this article is more about what is natively supported, not how to get that support.

FAT32 has been around for so long that many devices and operating systems support it natively, making it a strong choice for a file system on a spectrum of devices. The major problem with FAT32 is that it limits the size of individual files, as well as the size of volumes. If you have to store, write, and read huge files, FAT32 may not be the clear winner. Let’s take a look at that now.

Problem 2: File Sizes and Limits

 

FAT32 was developed many years ago and was based on older FAT filesystems meant for DOS computers. The large disk sizes of today were only theoretical in those days, so it probably seemed ridiculous to the engineers that created FAT32 that anyone would ever need a filesize larger than 4 GB. However, with today’s large filesizes of uncompressed and high-def video, many users are faced with that very challenge.

Today’s more modern file systems have upward limits that seem ridiculous by our modern standards, but one day may seem humdrum and ordinary. When stacked up against the competition, we see very quickly that FAT32 is showing its age.

Individual File Size Limit Single Volume Size Limit
NTFS Greater than commerciallyavailable drives Huge (16EB)
FAT32 Less than 4GB Less than 8TB
exFAT Greater than commerciallyavailable drives Huge (64 ZB)
HFS+ Greater than commercially
available drives
Huge (8 EB)
EXT2, 3 16GB Large (32 TB)

Every newer file system handily whips FAT32, allowing for files sometimes ridiculously larger than 4GB. EXT, which supports 16GB files (up to 2TB files on some systems), has the second smallest individual file size on this list. The other file systems measure their maximum file sizes in Petabytes and larger, making them many thousands of times larger than FAT32.

The conclusion to draw from this is that FAT32 has its issues, and may be phased out as newer devices begin to support file systems like exFAT, Microsoft’s successor to FAT32. The basic rule of thumb is that FAT32 is the best but for most users, unless they have file sizes greater than 4GB, in which case, you have to think long and hard about what your specific needs are.

Formatting Your Drives

 

FAT32: It’s a myth that FAT32 drives are limited to ridiculously small sizes, like 32GB. Depending on the file system and software used to create the volume, you can create very large FAT32 drives, even up to several TB. Here are a few ways to format your drive with FAT32.

 

NTFS or exFAT: While it may one day eclipse FAT, exFAT is not as well supported as it could be. And NTFS is useful enough if you’re going to work only with Windows machines and Linux systems and newer versions of OS X, including a fully updated Snow Leopard with support for it.  Here’s two ways you can format NTFS or exFAT.

  • Computer Management (Windows 7): Go to your start menu and type “Computer Management” to bring up that tool. From there you can use “Disk Management” to navigate to drives and right click to format them. You should be able to choose between NTFS and exFAT. This can be useful, as uninitialized, unmounted drives appear here, when they don’t appear in “My Computer.”
  • Quick Format (Windows 7): Simply look at all the drives mounted under “My Computer,” then right click and choose “Format.” You should have the choice between NTFS and exFAT.

 

HFS+: You won’t likely need HFS+ unless you’re doing a lot of work with Macs. In that case, Mac OS’s Disk Utility will do the trick again. Simply choose “Mac OS Extended” with or without Journaling.

EXT 2 or EXT 3: In addition to offering native support for FAT32 and downloadable support for NTFS and HFS+, GParted will create and manage partitions, and is pretty much the best game in town for creating Linux EXT volumes.

EXT 4: The ext4 filesystem can support volumes with sizes up to 1 exbibyte (EiB) and files with sizes up to 16 tebibytes (TiB).The current e2fsprogs can only handle a filesystem of 16 TiB,but support for larger filesystems is under development.


That, in a nutshell, is what you should know about the most common file systems. Think, i’ve left anything important out? Feel free to tell me about it in the comments, or tell me about how you use your own USB drives.

Bypass 404 Error While Browsing Internet

Sometimes you face some error called 404 while browsing internet or like file not found as maybe its removed or page expired but that thing annoys you very much. Well we have a simple fix to that thing through which you will not get any errors in future while browsing that website.

Well this simple fix works with Firefox and its simple 404 Error Bypassing Add-On, so how this add-on works well it simply fetched that websites archived page from archive.org and show that to you instead of the original page.

Original lined written by the Add-On developer .:

Ever been annoyed by the ‘404 Error’ or a more understandable one ‘File Not Found’? Ever bookmarked your favorite page but few months later when you finally had time to read it in detail, you couldn’t find it? If a page was (re)moved and now shows ‘404 Page / File / Site Not Found’ error, this tiny extension uploads archived version of a page (IF archived page exists in wayback machine at archive.org)

So install the 404 error add-on from the official Mozilla Add-On website and browse internet error free.

How to Bypass Software Trial Period Manually in Windows

I am going to show you how you can bypass software trial period manually and use that again and again.

Follow the below steps .:

1. First you have to uninstall that application whose trial period is over and you wanna use it again.

2. Now open the “Regedit” you can open it by going to Start > Run > regedit.

3. Navigate to HK Local Machine > Software > Your Software name.

4. Now simply Delete the Key.

5. You have to do this for HK Current user if key is there too.

6. Now go to Run and Type “%temp%”.

7. Delete all files in temporary folder, these are all the files created by software temporary installation and de-installation.

8. Go to C:// Users > Username > App-data ( Check all 3 directories “Local”, “LocalLow”, “Roaming” for your software entry there might be a folder for your software, if you find one Delete that.

9.Now every main step is done you can restart your computer and then Reinstall application.

That’s it now you will get your software’s trial period back, well yes steps are long but it’s the manual way you can bypass the trial period of your software and you can perform this everytime your software expires.

Well this trick works for most of the software’s not all of them.So try the trick on them and enjoy.

How to Embed URL Address Bar in your Taskbar

How to Embed URL Address Bar in your TaskbarSo you browse internet on a daily purpose and sometimes you feel really lazy opening browser than typing a URL to open that website and than browsing that website, well what if you get a URL Address bar right in your Task Bar that will be awesome like Entering URL you wanna browse right in your Task Bar and than browsing that in a browser.

So if you are not getting what I am saying than check an example below .:

So you can see how we got an address bar to search any URL right from your Taskbar, of now you do not need any software to apply this tweak and this a inbuilt tweak given by windows so to get Address Bar in your Taskbar follow the below steps .:

1. Right Click on your Taskbar and then hover on Toolbars and choose Address like below .:

2. Now that’s it you will get Address bar Like Below, now simply enter the URL and Enjoy faster browsing from your Taskbar in this fast world.

Protection against SQLi

What is SQL Injection?

SQL stands for Structured Query Language, and it is the language used by most website databases. SQL Injection is a technique used by hackers to add their own SQL to your site’s SQL to gain access to confidential information or to change or delete the data that keeps your website running. I’m going to talk about just one form of SQL Injection attack that allows a hacker to log in as an administrator – even if he doesn’t know the password.

Is your site vulnerable?

If your website has a login form for an administrator to log in, go to your site now, in the username field type the administrator user name.

In the password field, type or paste this:

x’ or ‘a’ = ‘a

If the website didn’t let you log in using this string you can relax a bit; this article probably doesn’t apply to you. However you might like to try this alternative:

x’ or 1=1–

Or you could try pasting either or both of the above strings into both the login and password field. Or if you are familiar with SQL you could try a few other variations. A hacker who really wants to get access to your site will try many variations before he gives up.

If you were able to log in using any of these methods then get your web tech to read this article, and to read up all the other methods of SQL Injection. The hackers and “skript kiddies” know all this stuff; your web techs need to know it too.

If you were able to log in, then the code which generates the SQL for the login looks something like this:

$sql =
“SELECT * FROM users
“WHERE username = ‘” . $username .
“‘ AND password = ‘” . $password . “‘”;

When you log in normally, let’s say using userid admin and password secret, what happens is the admin is put in place of $username and secret is put in place of $password. The SQL that is generated then looks like this:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘admin’ and PASSWORD = ‘secret’

But when you enter x’ or ‘a’ = ‘a as the password, the SQL which is generated looks like this:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘admin’ and PASSWORD = ‘x’ or ‘a’ = ‘a’

Notice that the string: x’ or ‘a’ = ‘a has injected an extra phrase into the WHERE clause: or ‘a’ = ‘a’ . This means that the WHERE is always true, and so this query will return a row contain the user’s details.

If there is only a single user defined in the database, then that user’s details will always be returned and the system will allow you to log in. If you have multiple users, then one of those users will be returned at random.

How to resist against SQLi

Fixing this security loophole is not so difficult. There are several ways to do it. If you are using MySQL,, the simplest method is to escape the username and password, using the mysql_escape_string() or mysql_real_escape_string() functions, e.g.:

$userid = mysql_real_escape_string($userid);
$password = mysql_real_escape_string($password);
$sql =
“SELECT * FROM users
“WHERE username = ‘” . $username .
“‘ AND password = ‘” . $password . “‘”;

Now when the SQL is built, it will come out as:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ‘admin’ and PASSWORD = ‘x\’ or \’a\’ = \’a’

Those backslashes ( \ ) make the database treat the quote as a normal character rather than as a delimiter, so the database no longer interprets the SQL as having an OR in the WHERE clause.

This is just a simplistic example. In practice you will do a bit more than this as there are many variations on this attack. For example, you might structure the SQL differently, fetch the user using the user name only and then check manually that the password matches or make sure you always use bind variables (the best defence against SQL injection and strongly recommended!). And you should always escape all incoming data using the appropriate functions from whatever language your website is written in – not just data that is being used for login.

THOUGH NOT VERY DETAILED , THIS TUT COVERS THE BASICS OF HOW TO RESIST SQLi.

Advance SQL Injection

According to OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities of 2010, SQL injection is the most dangerous and most common vulnerability around, A SQL Injection vulnerability occurs due to improper input validation or no input validation at all, what I mean by improper or no input validation is the user input is not filtered(for escape characters) before it gets passed to the SQL database, A Sql injection attack can be any many forms, but it’s usually categorized into 3 types:

1. Inband
2. Out of band
3. Inferential

In this presentation john McCray discusses some of advanced SQL Injection methods and topics such as IDS evasion, filter bypassing etc.