Peerside

Recently I've been combining one of my passions, cooking, and my wifes passions, France, by reading Culinaria France and amongst the many obscure and nostalgic details it presents about regional french food it also contains a piece on Pastis ( see my earlier post on pastis to see why that should interest me ) 

A familiar sight in the bistros of Marseille in the 1920s was a young salesman seeking customers for his wine. The label, painted by himself, showed vines, olive tress and the bright sun of Provence, his homeland. Paul Ricard dreamed of commercial success and the freedom it would bring him to do what he really wanted. His ambition was in fact to study painting, but his father would not allow it, so he started work in his father's business, selling wine. He dealt with deliveries, learned bookkeeping and racked his brains to find a way forward. Vin Ordinaire was not the answer.Neither his wine or his own brand brought him that sort of success, but he did notice on his frequent visits that people most liked to drink: pastis.

As anyone who reads here regularly probably already knows I've a firm believe that simple solutions glued together with a healthy dose of pragmatism will more often than not deliver applications that are more scalable, flexible and resilient to change.

Recently I spent time researching address linkage and data mining problems and my poor aging brain cells can only handle so much math and dry academic papers. While academia do get a hard time for being too "ivory towered" in their thinking it surely doesn't say much for an area of research of the researcher doesn't feel that wider public would benefit from easier access to the results. Ideally academic papers should come packaged with an associated tutorial or "this paper for dummies" which starts from the assumption that the reader does not have 10yrs research background in "discipline X" (and no, the "abstract" does not count)

You can imagine my relief when I discovered a worked and very clear example of the Boyer-Moore fast string algorithm presented by no more than Mr Boyer himself on his web page: Boyer-Moore Fast String Searching Example . It's simple, to the point and it doesn't try and make something that is actually quite simple ( albeit ingeniously clever ) any harder than it needs to be which I think is often unfortunately the case when people showcase their work.

Congratulations to An Post for finally putting their TV license service online

but ... Windows Explorer only ??

Here's hoping that the development team are doing agile and the next story is to support Firefox.