A River of Words

Looking online for articles on how to write Executive Summaries (for the content of the previous post), I came across a lot of references regarding the “Executive Summary” section of Business Plans. I’ve included some of them below for future reference:

captureplanning.com had a couple of articles that seemed useful:
‘Executive Summary’ Category at captureplanning.com
The Three Uses of Executive Summaries
Questions to Answer

Executive Summaries in a Nutshell

The one that I finally ended up using to frame my own summary:
How to Write an Abstract

Perhaps the most amusing part about the whole thing is that, upon delivering the 8 page article and the summary I had just sweated over, one member of the audience glanced at it and then said “give me the highlights” – at which point I condensed it even further to the point of a single, spoken paragraph. On the one hand, it made me feel as if I may have wasted some time writing the summary – on the other, if I hadn’t just spent that time putting the summary together, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to summarize the article on-the-spot as well as I did.

The always entertaining Paper Trail recently did a write up deciphering the Google paper describing the Google File System – a great read if you’re at all interested in file systems and “How Google Works”

proggit led me to this post by what appears to be a member of Google’s Chrome team, regarding the Squirrelfish Extreme engine’s performance on regex. There’s some fascinating stuff here, including the following gem:

WREC doesn’t save the intermediate matches, it just keeps track of the length of the text matched against /a*/ (repeatCount in my code) and decrements the position and count in order to backtrack. This is great, because it uses only two words of memory for state (instead of N million) but can find the next longest match very quickly (just 4 instructions).

If you’ve never read Mastering Regular Expressions, by Jeff Friedl, you might have trouble following some of the underlying concepts, but you should go out and pick up a copy today