A Software Engineer's Diary...

In 1997, making a website seemed like the simplest thing in the world. Of course, it wasn't — there was all sorts of HTML code involved, and making a professional-looking site took almost as much work then as it does now. But there were tools available to make it seem easy — Tripod and Geocities had templates and tutorials, and Netscape Navigator had a decent WYSIWYG web creation tool built in. Fast forward 15 years, and creating a website seems like an endeavor best left to the professionals. But Mozilla, carriers of the old Netscape crown, wants to change that perception with Thimble, a web-creation tool that promises to make the act of creating a website easier than ever. Aside from a basic page creation tool, Thimble has a number of interesting tutorials built in to help teach you HTML, and by extension, how to create your own page. One of the tutorials, called Hack a Map, gets you started by showing you some pretty advanced code. But the tutor...

Facebook Inc ( FB.O ) is paying $55 million to $60 million to buy Face.com, according to people familiar with the matter, acquiring the company that provides the facial-recognition technology used by the world's largest social network to help users identify and tag photos. The deal bolsters one of Facebook's most popular features -- the sharing and handling of photos -- but the use of the startup's technology has spurred concerns about user privacy. The No. 1 social network will pay cash and stock for Face.com, potentially paying as much as $60 million, two sources with knowledge of the deal said. Media reports in past weeks have pegged the transaction at $80 million to $100 million. Neither Facebook nor Face.com disclosed terms of the deal, which is expected to close in coming weeks. Facebook, which will acquire the technology and the employees of the 11-person Israeli company, said in a statement that the deal allows the company to bring a "long-time tec...

Google wants love. But so do six other companies. They are after .love, actually, a new "top-level domain" that could catch on as .com, .org and .net did. Love might not prevail, but chances are, at least one of the domains in 1,930 applications for new extensions will. The domains are the letters that follow the dot in Internet addresses, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as ICANN, revealed the new requests on Wednesday. Google  proved to be one of the more ambitious applicants. It spent almost $18.7 million applying for more than 100 top-level domains, some expected, some not. Not surprisingly, the search giant wants .google, .youtube, .goog and .plus. It was the only applicant vying for .fly, .new and .eat. But it is going to have to fight Johnson & Johnson for .baby, Microsoft  for .docs and .live, and  Amazon  for 17 top-level domains: .wow, .search, .shop, .drive, .free, .game, .mail, .map, .movie, .music, .play, .s...

Given a Directed Graph and two vertices in it, check whether there is a path from the first given vertex to second.  For example, in the following graph, there is a path from vertex 1 to 3. As another example, there is no path from 3 to 0. We can either use  Breadth First Search (BFS)  or  Depth First Search (DFS)  to find path between two vertices. Take the first vertex as source in BFS (or DFS), follow the standard BFS (or DFS). If we see the second vertex in our traversal, then return true. Else return false. Following is C++ code that uses BFS for finding reachability of second vertex from first vertex. // Program to check if there is exist a path between two vertices of a graph. #include<iostream> #include <list>   using namespace std;   // This class represents a directed graph using adjacency list representation class Graph {      int V;    // No. of vertices ...