Infotix -- A Technology notepad

Now you can add comments in your friend's photo album like in Facebook or LinkedIn.

Orkut has recently added one of the biggest privacy feature that enables users to make their scrapbook visible to persons in contact list only.



I am sure this will certainly help in reducing the "unwanted friend requests" from spammers and profile surfers.This privacy feature has been extended to album,videos,testimonials and feeds.
To adjust your level of privacy, go to your settings page and click on "privacy".

[via Orkut blog]

It's possible to send email to anyone from anyone's mail id without hacking it's password.Technically,this is called as email spoofing.If you carefully notice your spam box I am sure you will get around 2-3 messages having id stevejobs@apple.com or gates@microsoft.com.At the end of this post you will find a widget from where you can send these types of spam mails.

According to Wikepedia Email Spoofing can be defined as " A term used to describe fraudulent email activity in which the sender address and other parts of the email header are altered to appear as though the email originated from a different source. E-mail spoofing is a technique commonly used for spam e-mail and phishing to hide the origin of an e-mail message."

These types of Spam messages are still can't be filtered out by using GMail filters. Therefore I am still searching to find out there filtering method.While googling about this topic I stumbled upon Funmaza.com which have a software that can send these spam messages.Just try their software to send spam mails.

For a long time I was wondering why GMail hasn't introduced Group chat feature but finally wait is over as Gmail added group chat feature which let you chat with many friends in a group.Though this type of feature was already embedded into Yahoo Messenger. But GTalk now has replaced YMessanger to some extent. The main reason for this trend is importing of all contacts of Orkut in GTalk and obviously good looks of GTalk interface.

To get started, follow these steps:

1. Start a chat with a single person in your Contacts list.
2. Once you've started the chat, click Options at the bottom left of your chat window and select Group Chat.
3. In the field labeled 'Add a person to this chat,' enter the name of the contact(s) you want to add to your group chat.

Since now Gmail account can be registered without any invitation I don't understand why there is still option of sending invitation at bottom left half of the main page in Gmail account.

You have many times seen ads displayed on sidebar or top of result page while searching on Google.These ads are one of the major source of revenue for Google but some times these ads get too much irritating.
So,if you want to not display such ads then Google has also provided this option. Just type google.com/webhp?output=googleabout instead of normal Google.com and continue as usual.

If you are also fed up with hundreds of spam messages in your Gmail account then here is a tutorial to remove them permanently.And this method is pretty effective since my spam box is now empty for last 2-3 days.

First of all locate this "create a filter option" at top of your account page and click on it.

After this a screen will be prompted like shown below. Leave From,To,Subject spaces as it is and type "in:spam" (without quotes)in " Has the words". If by chance any important mail has get into this spam filter than you can distinguish this by entering any personal information like name,address,phone no. etc. in "Doesn't have".



And finally click on " Delete it" and create this filter.

Last week one of my friend told me to read " 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google " by Philipp Lenssen . Since my end semester exams are approaching I completed this book last night after a span of almost 5 days.
Each chapter (some very short) in the book has a unique and interesting thing you can do with Google. And for most people, you will want to put the book down and go to your computer and try it after reading it. Some of those very interesting chapters include, "Googlebombing," "Googlepolls," "Growing a Google Word" and of course "EgoGoogling."This is an excellent read for both the geeky and the non geeky folks. I highly recommend to read these at least once.

Download links:
1) Rapidshare link
2) Direct pdf link
3) Zip folder

I dont know is this thing new to you or not but I came across while googling score of India v/s Pakistan Cricket match. I just typed " cricket" on google search bar and got the live update of all the matches taking place . By clicking on that first link you can get full match stats. Along with match stats over by over commentary is also displayed .

When I checked my mailbox 5 min back,I was shocked to see 243 spam messages. I checked my mails in morning that means 243 spam messages in just 8-9 hrs.

I read this interesting quote in "55 ways to have fun with Google" by Philipp Lenssen.

I came across a blog - No2Google where an ex-Google employee who is now at the MS camp or an MS employee trying to bring down Google. In his post "Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective" he says Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company,Google is not. Any peek is a good peek. Though it's not quite clear about the originality of his/her post but definitely that post has acquired almost 550 comments .

I have been wondering for quite while about this beta thing all over.
The definition for Beta as given in wikipedia on the above link is, " A beta version or beta release usually represents the first version of a computer program that implements all features in the initial software requirements specification. It is likely to be unstable but useful for internal demonstrations and previews to select customers, but not yet ready for release. Developers release them to a group of beta testers (sometimes the general public) for a user test. The testers report any bugs that they found and sometimes minor features they would like to see in the final version."

What the releasers get: Less stable product is made available to general public and the releaser doesn't assume any responsibility whatsoever. The creators of these Beta releases make their product available to general public and the technology savvy people test it. Finally they get the bugs reported by the general public free of cost and their own developers are just fixing those bugs.

What the Beta-testers get: Quote me if I am wrong, this all testing is done free of cost by the so called beta testers. They even don't get the final version free of cost. But in turn they are providing full support to the Beta releaser by reporting bugs and the problems with the code or by providing information about the new features which might be included in the final releases. In turn they are just getting free copy of UNSUPPORTED BETA VERSION OF SOFTWARES WITH BUGS AND LESS FEATURES.
Few examples of the Beta releases are : Gmail Beta, Picasa Web-album Beta, Google Earth Beta, Blogger Beta & recent Window Vista Beta 2 and so on and so forth.

There seems no deadlines for these Beta releases to be over.
Now lets consider this Beta thing in other areas. Let's say Car manufacturers come up with Beta cars. They say we have made a car which can fly in the air but if it loses power in the air and drops down to earth, report it as a bug. What happens if a doctor says this is my beta operation, report to me as a bug if you lose breath sometime. Isn't it funny? It is but they have to do their work honestly and perfectly. They will never have any Beta releases in between. Every release is a final release.
Now my question is: Do the releasers not have required talent to fix the bugs? Or is it like they don't have the guts to come up with something flawless? Or is it like they are afraid to leave Beta status altogether?

The WorldView-1 satellite was launched on Tuesday, September 18, 2007, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. WorldView-1 is the first of two new next-generation satellites DigitalGlobe, a leader in the global commercial Earth imagery and geospatial information market, plans to launch. Boeing Launch Services has been contracted to provide the end-to-end launch services for DigitalGlobe.The new satellite will also provide far more accurate data, including the ability to pinpoint objects on the Earth at three to 7.5 meters, or 10 to 25 feet.
DigitalGlobe, provider of imagery for Google Inc's interactive mapping program Google Earth, said it's going to use a new high-resolution satellite - WorldView I - to boost the accuracy of images. Together with the company’s existing Quickbird satellite, it will offer half-meter resolution and will be able to collect over 600,000 square kilometers of imagery each day.

Google's homepage is showing a new logo today indicating the celebration of its 9th official birthday. It is understood that the domain was registered on 15th September 1997 but the actual company came into existence on 27th September 1998. So basically Google celebrates its 9th birthday today.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOOGLE.

This competition calls upon teams to create autonomous rovers that could land on the moon, travel at least three-tenths of a mile (500 meters) and send video, images and data back to Earth.As the name suggest brought you by Google this competition has got lot of prizes.
The first team to succeed would win $20 million - that is, if the job is done by 2012. After that, the prize drops to $15 million, and if no one is successful by the end of 2014, the money could be withdrawn. If a second team succeeds before the deadline, $5 million would be given as a runner-up prize. Another $5 million would be reserved for bonus tasks - for example, roving for longer distances, taking pictures of old lunar spacecraft, finding water ice or surviving the long lunar night.

Take a look at this video. It has some very interesting information about how Google developed into the company that it is today. Along with some useful information about Google, the author of this video has come up with some interesting ideas about Google's "master plan".