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Flurinci knows Raby Lae PHP and Jeve

Three more Perl Programming examples for you ... Use of $" to produce csv data Efficient code with map and grep Use of implicit loop and print (-p switch) ... All from the Topicalisation and Special ...

Progress Bar Techniques - Perl

Have you ever sat there and wondered "is this program nearly done ... is it still running ... how is it getting on" and wished you had a progress bar. But then have you ever watched a jerky progress ...

Perl Socket Programming Examples

It's always a pleasure to run private courses - for when a questions that's a little bit away from the normal comes up, I can take time to provide a full answer and demonstration without fear of ...

Quietly putting prices up

At 7 a.m. yesterday morning, I stopped at Welcome Break's South Mimms Service area on my way to Cambridge; I'm particularly watching for price changes with the VAT drop - to see if we can continue to ...

It must be nearly Christmas

Crowds waiting to join the "Santa Special" at Melksham; on the train with Santa, and Longford Road, Melksham - the Christmas lights. All pictures taken on the evening of ...

Alastair Darling helps make paperwork and confusion

Quite frankly, I'm not convinced that a drop in VAT from 17.5% to 15% is going to bring us much - if any - new business. A hotel room at our top rate of £95.00 should drop to £92.98 ... an ...

Java - Generics

If you're writing a Java program and you want to hold a whole series of objects of a similar type in a single variable, you can use and array ... except that you need to know HOW MANY of them there ...

javax.servlet cannot be resolved - how to solve

Two common problems in compiling Servlets for use within a Tomcat container ... PROBLEM: My Java Compile of a Servlet says "javax.servlet cannot be resolved" For example: ...

Java CLASSPATH explained

When you run a Java program (be it though the java virtual machine or as a servlet within a web or application container such as Tomcat), it's only the main code (class) that's initially loaded. Any ...

A Gold Star for First Great Western Customer Service

Regular readers will know that I've been running something of a campaign for the return of an appropriate train service in Melksham, and that First Great Western (who took over a service of 5 each way ...

Table Topics

Here's a link for the delegates who were with us at lunchtime yesterday ... it's to Table Topics. L**** picked up the little box that we have left lying around near the dining table in our eating ...

Virtual Hosting under Tomcat - an example

Tomcat supports "Virtual hosting", where you can direct several domain names to the same server computer / instance of Tomcat, and it will serve different content depending on which server you have ...

Every cloud has a silver lining

At first glance, a recession or depression in the economy slows things down and reduces the need for products and services, resulting in a need for us all to tighten our belts. But I've been taking a ...

Comparison - with and without flash

Do you Use flash to make a bright scene darker? Not necessarily! Here's a picture of Melksham Station taken last Sunday night with the available light: And here's a picture taken a few seconds ...

Melksham Chamber of Commerce and Industry

I'm passionate about Melksham - it's a great place to live and a great place to do business, and Lisa and I, although we were newcomers in 1999, feel greatly welcomed here. And I hope that we have ...

Ruby to access web services

If you want to use a Ruby program to access an RSS feed (or some other XML or HTML data), you can start with the standard Net::HTTP module ... full (working, tested) example here. That example ...

Ruby mixins, modules, require and include

A Ruby "mixin" is a way of adding extra code from a module into a class - thus giving the programmer the ability to share code between a number of classes in a way that's in addition to inheritance. ...

Ruby Programming Course - Saturday and Sunday

We're so busy during the week at the moment that I'm running an extra Ruby Course this weekend. The main use of Ruby is within "Ruby on Rails", but our course concentrates on the language itself and ...

Keys to friendless churches

I don't know exactly how I found their web site - but I have come across the Friends of Friendless Churches. And I read ... The forlorn tower at Saltfleetby was taken on by the Friends in 1976. The ...

Recession? Depression?

09:10, Friday There's three guests eating breakfast in "The Whitworth". A meeting going on in the Coffee area, and another meeting in the Library. Groups in "The Wilts" are still chatting at the ...

Spa Road Garage and Convenience Store, Melksham

It's "Children in Need" day, ... a fact I was reminded of when I popped into our local garage on Spa Road in Melksham Bruce and his team are always very welcoming when Sharon, Chris or myself pops in ...

Wiltshire Council says - part 2

"We have the following options available for lunch ... Baguettes ... India ... Chinese ... Baked Potatoes ... Greasy Spoon ... McDonald's ... Fish and Chips" That's not untypical of what we stay ...

Wiltshire Council says - part 1

Last night, Lisa and I attended the annual budget 'consultation' evening arranged by the Wessex Federation of Chambers of Commerce with Wiltshire (County) Council. It was our second year at the event ...

Melksham Chamber of Commerce, or the FSB

Yesterday, my email box received a number of messages concerning the Federation of Small Businesses, where the National Executive have fired the solicitor running their disputes and disciplinary ...

Dynamic code - Python

When I learned to program, named blocks of code (subroutines and functions) were built into each program and weren't things you could change at run time. But these days, in some languages like ...

Pascals Triangle in Python and Java

There are certain "party pieces" that I have during courses ... and on my Java Courses, a program to generate Pascal's Triangle in an array of arrays is one of them. One of my delegates on today's ...

What are exceptions - Python based answer

How do you check for run time errors in your program? You'll include tests with if statements in almost every program you write, to ensure that user entered data is reasonable / as you would expect ...

List Comprehensions in Python

How do you perform an operation on every member of a list, producing a new list? A List Comprehension in Python is a structure in which a for loop is written within a list's square brackets. Its ...

Barack Obama wins US Predidency

Congratulations to Barack Obama, who has won a decisive victory in the Presidential Election in the USA. And a few words too for John McCain, who was very gracious in his speech of concession - ...

What to do with a huge crop of apples

Last year, you had a good crop of apples on your tree .... what did you do with them? Make apple pies for all the neighbours! How? • You collect all the apples and bring them into the kitchen. ...

Anonymous functions (lambdas) and map in Python

Why do you name variables? So that you can use them again later. But if you don't want to use them more than once, why bother with a name at all? Most programming languages create temporary or ...

Liverpool - a friendly city

I'm in Liverpool for a three day Python course - if October was the month of Perl then November looks set to be the month of Python There's a certain friendlyness about Liverpool - it's very much one ...

What a difference a day made

Friday ... room set up at Well House Manor for a Business Networking International breakfast. Saturday ... room set up at Well House Manor for a MGphoto training day. And in between these two ...

Object Oriented Perl - First Steps

There are some occasions when a new example that I write / a topic that comes up on a course results in an article that's so long that it doesn't fit into the Blog / short article format, but requires ...

Reactive (dynamic) formatting in Perl

If you want to format your data neatly in columns, you can use sprintf or printf to do so if you're using a fixed width font. A format of "%20s", for example, calls for a string that's 20 characters ...

Camera with night vision, youth with no vision

I'm rather pleased with my current digital camera - it's able to take good evening and night shots of the sort I would scarcely have thought possible a couple of years ago. This image is at Westbury ...

November and December Public Course Schedule

It's only a couple of days since we turned the clocks back, but already my weekday time is fully spoken for up to Christmas - with bookings on all of these public courses so they're guaranteed runners ...

Volunteer v Employee - a skewed balance? (FSB)

"But it's not sexy" ... a reason advanced for something that should be newsworthy, or worthy of attention, but hasn't made the headlines. Take, for example, the relationship between volunteers and ...

Three Seasonal Pictures

    I've not labelled them individually, as each of them stands as a picture on its own. But if you want to know more, the first is Oliver's Castle, near Devizes, Wiltshire and the ...

Well structured coding in Perl

Write a small code utility - a few lines - and you can simply start at the top and work through to the bottom. But as the code increases in length, you're going to want to take out common code and put ...