Your collection of Yahoo! Messenger avatars

Did you know that Yahoo! Messenger saves your friends’ avatars on your disk and forgets to delete them? And now you probably have an impressive collection of avatars. They’re in %MessengerFolder%\cache\Icon\ folder, but they have no extension (they should be .png), and are pretty hard to browse.

So, I’ve made a little perl script that shows them in your browser (tested with Internet Explorer and Firefox), sorted by date, so you can now view your friends’ avatar history, and easily save them if you want to use one (just right click and Save image as…, as you normally do on a web page)

Here’s a sample screenshot from my collection:

The .pl script requires Perl installed on your system, BUT i’ve compiled it with perl2exe, and now everyone can use it.
Should work on all windows versions (including Vista)

Download .zip file

Enjoy!

Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest

As you can see on the About page, I’m a student at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science.
Here are a few words about how I see this school..

Yahoo! Messenger Archive Decoder

Using the same approach as others did (see notes at the bottom of this page), and doing some reverse engineering of my own, I’ve created a little script in C that decodes all the messages (chats are ignored) in a yahoo profile directory.
I’ve made this because i wanted to merge my Yahoo! Messenger logs and Pidgin logs (I am also using Linux) in one common place.

It doesn’t have any interface.. it works like this:
Method 1: Just drag and drop the user profile folder on the exe. The user profile folder is, for example
C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\pufuletz_roz
Example:

Method 2: From the command line, run YM_decoder <user_profile_folder>

The decoded logs are put in a “Decoded_Archive” subfolder of the target profile.

Download .zip

Notes
Some reverse engineering for finding out the format of the archive I did my own, but I was also inspired by:

• Venkydude
• www.0xcafefeed.com
• shinkaiho.com

Good luck!

Back from the summer

I have been away for a few months, because a lot have happened and I didn’t have time for research and for writing.
Now things have settled, and I hope I can open a new section about security and continue writing.

Let’s code!

[Windows] Run multiple applications from one command

I was in the need for running multiple commands with one single command line.
In the command line, that was as easy as “notepad & notepad”, but for the windows version i couldn’t find an alternative, no command separator.
So I wrote one.. It’s a small program that works like this:

run_combo application1 [@@ application2 [@@ application3 [...]]]

(for example: “run_combo notepad @@ notepad”)

You can download the source code / exe from my google-code page, or access this download link.

I used the MinGw compiler from Dev-C++ package to compile it.

Generic string TRIE implementation

This is an implementation of a generic TRIE data structure that holds strings (of any characters except 0, which means the end of the string). You can attach some application data to each string in the trie, so it can be useful for example in a Property/Value implementation.

Video Buzz for linux

Here’s a little C program that sends a visual notification.
It can be used to be triggered at an event and notify you of something, without any window to pop up

A generic int HEAP implementation with custom compare function

I would like to share a generic HEAP implementation (heap_int.h / heap_int.c) for C.

My google-code account

I’ve created a google-code account in witch i will store little educational projects such as a generic heap implementation and other data structures, file compressor using huffman trees, working with linux forks and pipes, and other useful and educational material, especially for beginner and medium developers.
All the packages on my google-code account are and will be released under GPL license. That means you can modify and redistribute the source code, and not use the source code in a closed-source program.

The project page is http://code.google.com/p/srsc.
I will write a blog post for each new package.
Stay tuned..

Hello world!

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
  printf("\a");
  return 0;
}