Saturday, June 17, 2006

WORKSHOP - DART '06 The Future of Search Engines' Technologies

I will participate as a speaker to the DART'06 conference. I will present a paper on my recent work carried out at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland together with my colleagues Amos Brocco, Dominique Guinard, Pascal Bruegger and Pedro De Almeida. A pre-print of the paper is available here .

Read more at www.crs4.it/ict/wsdart/...

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Me Like Turing: from infinite ribbons to infinite windows!

I am not so selfish to compare to Alan Turing , the inventor of modern computers. I have just discovered that "infinite ribbons" in Turing Machines have become obsolete.

This is something that never happened to me and I don't know how to deal with this new Windows bug (maybe it is new just for me; suggestions are welcome!).

As you can check from this screenshot:




There is a window with no right-side borders. No matter how much you drag the window on the left, the right side remains open-ended. This type of window appears when I select "properties" from the print dialog box, no matter of the application from which I am printing and the selected printer. This happened after I installed Adobe Acrobat Standard and after few automatic updates. I don't know if the two things are related, but printing from Acrobat or other applications make no difference and the "infinite window" always shows up. If you select one of the two tabs, the print monitor application crashes and sometimes also the Windows Explorer.

Needless to say that anyone I asked about it have no idea of what's going on. Moreover, my system is perfectly clean and no viruses are swarming around.

So what? Well, I think that we are in presence of an instance of the Vic_Peacock's Machine, which I proudly discovered! It is composed of a crappy operating system and at least one Infinite Window. It runs exponentially slow and makes exponential use of resources (whatever they might be). Its theoretical importance lies on the fact that it is difficult (or almost impossible) to debug and that the only programs that run well are viruses, troyan horses and spywares.

My overall life is degrading because of this machine and I am tempted to do what Turing did to end all this. Turing had two choices on how to suicide: eat a poisoned Apple or jump through a Window. He foresaw that he might have jumped through an "infinite window", hence never die and thus risking of being trapped in Windows for the eternity. He wisely chose a poisoned Apple that gave him a smooth, delicate and painless die!