A Software Engineer's Diary...

A 101-year-old woman from the American state of California is Facebook's oldest official registered user, the social networking giant has revealed. Florence Detlor recently paid a visit to Facebook's headquarters in the Silicon Valley and met founder Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of the site. According to The Telegraph, Sandberg later posted a photo to Facebook of herself with Detlor and Zuckerberg. It was accompanied by the caption, 'Honored to meet Florence Detlor, who at 101 years old is the oldest registered Facebook user. Thank you for visiting us Florence!' According to her profile Detlor graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1932, and joined Facebook in August 2009. She lives in Menlo Park, California, where Facebook now has its headquarters.

Date of Interviews:  26th July 2012 No of Rounds:  1 online exam + 4 PI Type of Interviews:  Campus Interview for freshers Online test(Time): 90 Minutes 20 Objective Questions:  Aptitude and basic C objective problems. 2 Subjective Questions: I.              Given a linked list containing character in each node, segregate its nodes in such a way that all nodes containing a vowel are moved to the end of the linked list. We will have to maintain the order. II.            Parenthesis checker. Interview Round 1(30-40 Minutes): Technical Interview Question 1:  You are given a linked list and a parameter k. You will have to swap values in a certain fashion, swap value of node 1 with node k, then node (k+1) with node 2k and go on doing this in the similar fashion Question 2:   For the above question, do it without swapping the values. If you want a swap to occur between two nodes, then you will have to move the nodes itself. Interview Round 2(50-60 Minutes): Techn

Social networking giant Facebookhas unveiled a new look for its messages service, which according to some users looks 'very similar' to Apple's iPad mail software. The new design places a list of a user's friends on the right side, and the message content on the left. According to the Daily Mail, some users have accused the firm of simply copying Apple's two-pane design. The social network giant hopes it will attract more users to the service, and will make its system more reliable. "A lot of thought and care went into this new version of messages, and we hope you'll like it," Facebook said in a statement. "There's so much more we can do to make the world more open and connected, and to make our messaging system more reliable and more flexible," it added. According to the paper, Facebook has also overhauled the way users can share pictures, and added emoticons in a bid to attract people to the service.

Facebook has reportedly been sued by a Chinese technology firm that claims the social networking giant has stolen its Timeline feature. Facebook recently made it mandatory for people to use Timeline, the new-look profile, which allows people to tell the story of their lives on a single page. Cubic Network, a four year-old Chinese technology company, however, claimed the Timeline feature is their own, The Telegraph reports. The network claimed they launched the same layout in 2008, which shows people's activity in chronological order. Xiong Wanli, the founder of Cubic Network, conducted a talk about the Timeline feature atStanford University, which Facebook founder and alumni of the American university, Mark Zuckerberg, is believed to have attended. Zuckerberg unveiled its 'Timeline' in 2011, some three years after Cubic Network showcased the feature. The Chinese firm is now suing Facebook for potential patent infringement.

You can never have too many backups of your data. Unfortunately, when it comes to web-based e-mail like Gmail, backing up your mail isn’t always the easiest thing to do. The web is littered with tales of lost Gmail, whether because Google shuts down your account, an attacker destroys it or something else that’s never even crossed your mind happens and then — poof — your mail is gone. That’s where  Gmvault  can help. Gmvault will help make sure that even if the unthinkable happens and your Gmail data is suddenly gone, you’ll be able to recover thanks to a solid backup system. Gmvault is a simple-to-use command-line Python app that will login, sync and back up your entire Gmail account on your local machine. Currently Gmvault is beta software. I’ve been using it for nearly a week and haven’t had any problems, but bear in mind that there may be some bugs. You can accomplish the same thing with a desktop e-mail client, provided you remember to open it every now and then. But with Gm

Microsoft will use a new logo for the first time in over two and a half decades. The software titan has created a new logo which has been heavily inspired by the emblem of Windows operating system. This change in the logo also shows the company's focus on the tile-centric Metro interface, which it uses in the Windows Phone platform, XBOX 360 and the upcomingWindows 8 and Office suite.  On the Microsoft Blog on TechNet, Jeff Hansen, the general manager of brand strategy at the company, said that this step will ensure that a consistent user experience can be delivered across all platforms, from PCs and phones to tablets and television.  Rather than the previous emblem, which only had the name of the company, this new logo has 'Microsoft' written in Segoe font on the right and square with four tiles, reminiscent of the Metro UI, on the left.  The new Microsoft logo is already on the company website and in retail stores in Boston, Seattle and Bellevue. It will be seen heavi

With a chilling hint of the not-so-distant future, researchers at the Usenix Security conference have demonstrated a zero-day vulnerability in your brain . Using a commercial off-the-shelf brain-computer interface, the researchers have shown that it’s possible to hack your brain, forcing you to reveal information that you’d rather keep secret. As we’ve covered in the past, a  brain-computer interface  is a two-part device: There’s the hardware — which is usually a headset (an EEG; an electroencephalograph) with sensors that rest on your scalp — and software, which processes your brain activity and tries to work out what you’re trying to do (turn left, double click, open box, etc.) BCIs are generally used in a medical setting with very expensive equipment, but in the last few years cheaper, commercial offerings have emerged. For $200-300, you can buy an Emotiv (pictured above) or Neurosky BCI, go through a short training process, and begin mind controlling your computer. Both o

Want to test the wild new waters of  Windows 8  but don't want to lose your current Windows setup? You can do this with the Windows 8 installer, which can create a multi-boot setup. I've been running one of my test PCs at PCMag this way for several months, and the clear new-style (we can't use the term  Metro anymore) multiboot menu dutifully appears whenever I restart the system. Setting up such a system isn't hard at all, as long as you prepare for this kind of installation. One note off the bat though: The multi-boot setup only works with Windows 7 and Vista: You can't set up a multi-boot system with Windows XP, let alone Ubuntu. There are any number of third-party multi-boot tools, such as the excellent  EasyBCD , which may work with those, but we'll stick to the built-in way of creating multi-boot with Windows 8. STEP 1: BACK UP! Before you attempt this, however, you should back up your existing Windows PC. You never know what will happen when instal

A new computer virus, dubbed Gauss, has been discovered in the Middle East. Researchers say can it steal banking credentials and hijack login information for social networking sites, email and instant messaging accounts. Cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab said Gauss is the work of the same "factory" or "factories" that built the Stuxnet worm, which attacked Iran's nuclear program. Here are some key facts about Gauss, according to Kaspersky Lab. What is its purpose?  Gauss is a surveillance tool. It steals credentials for hacking online banking systems, social networking sites and email accounts; it also gathers information about infected PCs, including web browsing history, system passwords and the contents of disk drives. Can it do anything else?  There is a mysterious module, known as Godel, that copies malicious code onto USB drives when they are plugged into infected PCs. Godel's purpose is unknown because some of its code is compressed and scrambled usi

A new computer virus, dubbed Gauss, has been discovered in the Middle East. Researchers say can it steal banking credentials and hijack login information for social networking sites, email and instant messaging accounts.  Cyber security firm  Kaspersky Lab  said Gauss is the work of the same "factory" or "factories" that built the Stuxnet worm, which attacked Iran's nuclear program. Here are some key facts about Gauss, according to Kaspersky Lab.  What is its purpose?  Gauss is a surveillance tool. It steals credentials for hacking online banking systems, social networking sites and email accounts; it also gathers information about infected  PCs , including Web browsing history, system passwords and the contents of disk drives.  Can it do anything else?  There is a mysterious module, known as Godel, that copies malicious code onto  USB  drives when they are plugged into infected PCs. Godel's purpose is unknown because some of its code is compressed and s

Google's Internet search engine is getting more personal by highlighting information drawn from its users' Gmail accounts on its main results page. The feature announced Wednesday marks Google's latest attempt to deliver data that people are seeking more quickly as it tries to maintain the dominance of its lucrative Internet search engine. Google Inc. is initially testing the feature with 1 million Gmail users who must sign up to participate. Gmail's more than 425 million users already can search within their e-mail accounts to find something they need, such as an order from Amazon.com or an airline reservation. Now, Gmail users who join the trial will be shown a list of relevant e-mails on Google's main search resultspage if the correspondence contains a word entered in a search request.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's sister has joked that with Google's acquisition of the social media marketing firm Wildfire, there are now more Zuckerbergs working at the internet search giant than at the social networking company. "There are officially now more Zuckerbergfamily members working for Google than Facebook! #awkward," Randi Zuckerbergtweeted. Randi's tweet came as her sister Arielle Zuckerberg is now an employee of the rival firm Google, which announced the acquisition of California-based Wildfire, the New York Daily News reports. Arielle, one of Mark Zuckerberg's three sisters, had recently joined Wildfire as a product manager. According to the report, there was no immediate comment on how many of those employees will be making the jump, but Arielle Zuckerberg confirmed she would be one of them in a post on Facebook. She even hinted the move might cause some sibling rivalry, the paper said. "Not gonna lie... This feels pret

It  is possible for an adversary or a group of hackers to cripple India's power grids through a cyber-attack, although this is an unlikely reason for the recent power outages that crippled much of north, east and north-eastern India.  Since the first power trip up on Monday, there have been discussions within the security establishment about the possibility of entities trying to carry out a sophisticated cyber-attack to cripple the grids.  Officials who carried out an audit of critical information infrastructure admit it is "theoretically possible" to cripple India's power grids through a cyber-attack.  Despite such a possibility, the shutdown did not seem to have led to a crisis management procedure that aimed at ruling out or confirming a cyber-attack.  "Given the fact that our grids are vulnerable to a cyber-attack, those responsible for managing grids should have a proactive policy to rule out cyber-attack as part of their crisis management procedures,"