Horse's Mouth

Westbury Bypass Refused - looking forward

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:48:34 +0000

The report of The Public Enquiry into the proposed Westbury Bypass was published a couple of days ago, together with the Secretary of State's decision based on that report. As someone who attended the enquiry briefly and made a statement,...

winmail.dat enclosure ... reading on an Apple

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:47:48 +0000

I use an Apple Mac ... run OSX ... and I have that problem of how to deal with applications data files. I have become a passed master at Word documents and Excel spread sheets! How about an attached file...

Travelling

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:44:50 +0000

Six trains ... a bus ... four walks ... and a day's work too. Still - as you can see from above, a wide variety of places!...

A chance to do the tourist thing

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:36:56 +0000

Just occasionally, work takes me to exactly the right place at exactly the right time ... and so it was this evening when after a good day's work I had a chance to let my hair down, join the leisure...

Learning about others private lives

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:36:56 +0000

The woman sitting next to dad is worried about tomorrow's meeting now that Emily has had to pull out ... she wonders if Lucinda can go on her own and how that can be turned to her advantage. She left...

Mysqldump fails as a cron job - a work around

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:05:31 +0000

Here's a curiosity ... running a mysqldump as a crontab job, nothing happens on one of our servers. Now I HAVE included the full path to the executable file in my crontab line, and I have redirected the output to...

History is not always pretty

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:44:33 +0000

Around 200 years ago, Melksham was the largest town for many miles around - it dwarfed even places like Swindon. However, in the Victorian age it grew very much slower and it hasn't caught up yet. So looking around the...

Tcl - nice and nasty

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:54:41 +0000

Tcl is a lovely engineers language ... but goodness you can do some nasty things with it, and write some unmaintainable code. set count 1 foreach type {if while} { $type {$count < 5} { puts "yay $type $count" incr...

Important - the future of Melksham / Chamber of Commerce

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:50:55 +0000

There's a difference between 'urgent' and 'important' ... and one of the things that we sometimes do is get bogged down in the urgent without looking ahead to the longer term important. Here is a piece I have just written...

Grouping rows for a summary report - MySQL and PHP

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:57:09 +0000

It's quite quick and easy to write a loop that goes through a mysql result set and displays the content on an HTML page (but remember security of data, size of resulting HTML page, and the need to consider special...

Questions I have been asked on answering the phone

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:15:33 +0000

What does a fishing license at Shearwater cost and who sells it? Dunno ... What light bulb do I need for my fitting? Err ... What's the best way to sell a mango press? (I can't work out why...

Ramblings on church and state linkage in Melksham

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:11:33 +0000

With an interest in how the country, the county and the town is run, there are naturally times that I get invited to meetings and 'ceremonials', and so it was last Sunday, when I was invited to the Civic Service...

Is it Python past cheetah already?

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:57:31 +0000

When my son was young, we had a clock with animals rather than numbers around the dial at each hour, and we used to refer to times like tiger past zebra, rather than twenty past twelve. In retrospect, and in...

Past PHP delegates / others - coding help needed for next 3 months

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:49:28 +0000

To past delegates and other technical contacts ... I had a lunchtime meeting yesterday with a director who is working on a major PHP application and has urgent need of extra coding staff for a near-immediate start, with work lasting...

Forum membership - a privilege not a right

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:30:42 +0000

How fortunate it is that the vast majority of online contributors respect the guidelines laid down, especially when they agree to terms applied to contributions that they make to forums. But there is a tiny minority who will feel the...