Peerside

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.