…just another hippy blog

ITALY: WORLD CHAMPIONS 2006 - Celebrations in Pisa
Photo originally uploaded by PeSa’.

I still can’t realize it really happened.
Even if I have believed in it until the end.

No, our dear Mr. B., the Jesus Christ of politics, and his friends are not in jail yet, it may take some more time for it.

Italy won the World Cup! It took some time since the last one, in 1982, but here we are.
Usually I don’t give lots of credits to football, but the World Cup is the only occasion where Italians really feel Italians and realize to have something binding them together. It’s a nice thing…

Celebrations in Pisa were quite massive and there was still lots of people in the city centre at 4am! Yes… I know it because I was one of them.
This is the first Italian World Cup for me, if we except 1982 when I was one year old, so I really had to celebrate it

I finally found some time to take a look to the new Qt 4.2 technology preview (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.2/qt4-2-intro.html).

It seems like people at Trolltech are still doing a great work. I really love the Qt toolkit (well, I think you either love it or you hate it and prefer writing CLI apps or lisp powered GUIs and every release seems adding great new features, besides to usability and performance enhancements.

Here are just some of the new features:

• Desktop Services for accessing common desktop services
• Graphics View – A powerful 2D graphics area for highly optimized graphics development
• Widget stylesheets
• QWidgetAction allows to add QWidgets to menus
• Text completition framework
• Support for Inter-Process Communication (IPC) using the D-BUS protocol on Linux and Unix systems
• QNetworkInterface class for detection and reporting of network interfaces
• A new Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) icon engine
• Qt’s keyboard handling has been improved to support physical key recognition

The final release of Qt 4.2 is currently scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2006. As with Qt 4.0 and 4.1, I would prefer to wait for the first bug fix release of the Qt 4.2 series (4.2.1 or later) for production use.

This morning I had a job offering interview at Ask.com’s Italian R&D office in Pisa. Ask.com is a multi national company owning one of the most interesting search engines today, Ask.com.

Now, the meeting has been very interesting. The people working here in the Pisa office are really nice and they seem to know their job very well.

Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, was born to handle queries in human language. Now it is becoming a really interesting alternative to Google. Their engine has some really nice features Google is missing and the search results are often more interesting.
Now, Google is still the number one search engine, this is out of any doubt, but people at Google are no longer working to push their search engine to new limits. Or at least this my own impression. They are working on lots of interesting projects (Google Earth/Maps, GMail & GTalk, Google Pages, Picasa, and many, many more!), but their search engine doesn’t seem innovative any more.

Ask.com’s ExpertRank has proven to be more useful than Google’s old PageRank. Just try to search Google for "python". Found any snake in the first top 10 blue links? Now, look for "apache". What if you are looking for the native americans or for the helicopter? Now search Ask.com for these queries and take a special look to the right side of the results page

Well, I think we should take less things for obvious. People at Google are really doing a great job, but their search engine really needs to become more interesting or it won’t last that long