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winmail.dat enclosure ... reading on an Apple

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 ...

A chance to do the tourist thing

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 ...

Mysqldump fails as a cron job - a work around

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 ...

Tcl - nice and nasty

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} { ...

Important - the future of Melksham / Chamber of Commerce

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 ...

Ramblings on church and state linkage in Melksham

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 ...

Is it Python past cheetah already?

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, ...

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

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 ...

Leaping dog, Leaping horse, copyright of old masters

A picture I took earlier - Gypsy leaping through high grass in the field that also includes the Devizes White Horse. It got me thinking that I have seen other pictures of leaping animals, and also how ...

Bluegrass comes to Melksham

Well - what did you expect on a Friday afternoon - a sensible technical post, or something about some ...

Public Transport from London to Melksham, Wiltshire

In answer to a delegate who will be attending a course with us, I have put the follwowing updated information together about how to travel by train or coach from London to Melksham, Wiltshire in the ...

What difference does using the XHTML standard really make?

I enclose my HTML attributes in quotes - or at least when I remember, I do! I always provide a matching close tag to go with each opening tag - except when I forget to do so, or am in a hurry I make ...

Client side (Applet) and Server side (Servlet) Graphics in Java

What is the current release of Java? Is it Java 1.6, Java 2 (1.6) or Java 6? Yes it is - they're all different names for the same thing! Java started out as Java 1.0 ... and since code that would ...

What should a web site cost you?

I don't know, but I was asked my opinion on website costs for a government department (the Department for Transport) which have been revealed in a Freedom of Information request here. And I have ...

Changing a variable behaviour in Perl - tieing

What can you do with a scalar variable? When you reduce it to lowest level programming principles, not a lot ... you can create it, destroy it, save a value into it, and read a value back from it. ...

So what is this thing called Perl that I keep harping on about?

"An overview of the Perl Language" It almost sound like one of those dreaded school essays that I had to write in my several attempts to get an English "O" level (they were the things that came ...

Perl references - $$var and \$var notations

In Perl, if I write: $stuff = "Porridge"; then I'm setting up a variable to contain the value "Porridge". If I write: $stuffat = \$stuff; then I'm setting up a variable to contain the ADDRESS OF the ...

Cornerstone Cafe, Melksham

There's a natural concern when a business changes hands. And a deepening concern when virtually all the previous staff disappear. But sometimes, a change is a breath of fresh air and a new bright and ...

Handling nasty characters - Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Lua

Are your writing or maintaining a web based application that uses forms? If so, you have better be aware of some of the nasty characters that are around! The < character, when echoed back from a ...

Taking a pride in the community

How do you encourage young people to take a pride in their community, rather than engaging is antisocial behaviour? By encouraging their inclusiveness and by providing them with facilities. Lisa ...

Sending awkward characters by email in Perl

Carrying on from the email work I described in a recent article, I wrote an example today in Perl where I used the mailx program to send an email, piping to it in a system call via an echo. For a ...

Loading external code into Perl from a nonstandard directory

Here's a piece of Perl code that loads in an external module. push(@INC, "/var/opt/OV/bin/OpC/monitor"); eval { require "monitor_utils.pm"; }; if ($@) {   print STDERR "could not load ...

What is CGI.pm / A dozen new examples

Perl's CGI.pm module allows both a structured and Object Oriented approach to generating and handling web pages via the Common Gateway Interface. It was written (a long time ago now) to provide a ...

Running a piece of code is like drinking a pint of beer

Q: What is the effect when I drink a pint of beer? A: I get slightly tipsy. But that's too simplistic! A: The brewery has some more money A: There's a glass to wash up A: I need the loo! Running a ...

Learning PHP, Ruby, Lua and Python - upcoming courses

The following programming courses are all booking well, but still have good availability: PHP - starting 6th July Ruby - starting 14th July Lua - starting 10th August Python - starting 17th August ...

How important is a front page ranking on a search engine?

At the risk of researching and reaching an obvious conclusion (along the lines of "passengers will get upset if their train is delayed and they are not told why", which a half million pound report ...

Trowbridge - a missed opportunity? Melksham - into the breach?

Trowbridge is the county town of Wiltshire, and it a long and illustrious history, some magnificent Georgian buildings, the River Biss and a canal which brings tourists through the area already. ...

CSS Style Diagrams - working out where attributes come from

I have just been helping a customer who's got a problem with white text on a white background ... and hasn't been able to easily identify where the problem lies. Some of his code looks like this: ...

A (biased?) comparison of PHP courses in the UK

In answer to an email asking about alternative PHP courses ... I'm the tutor of our PHP courses, and I also keep a keen eye open on the options. Occasionally, I do a 'competitive survey' and compare ...

Adding a newsfeed for your users to a multipage PHP application

As I wrote it, I realised this was turning into rather a long article, but never mind. It shows the major new components added to a "4 layer model" application I was working on the weekend before ...

Configuring httpd, or Tomcat, to run CGI scripts in Perl

Here's a Perl / CGI script - a "Common Gateway Interface" program that I want to run on my web server, and access via my browser. What server to I need to run it on, and how do I set that server up? ...

Multiple web applications under Tomcat - what are the options?

If you're wanting to run a number of web applications under Apache [Jakarta] Tomcat, do you need multiple versions of Tomcat, or multiple machines? No, you don't ... but it may be helpful for you to ...

Global Index to help you find resources

How can you find all blog articles on Ruby? How about everything that I've written about looking after forums, and with all the information about spammers close to it? With 15,000 URLs on the ...

Keyboard reading in Perl - character by character not line by line

If I'm typing in my age in response to a prompt and I start with a "6" character, will you assume that I'm between 60 and 69 years old? You might ... but then I may backspace (having accidentally ...

Tcl/Tk - why does the canvas widget use a display list?

"Tcl/Tk uses a display list when you draw on a canvas widget." OK - so what does that really mean? With most of the languages that we teach, any graphics you draw go straight into a frame buffer of a ...

MySQL server replication

Following on from yesterday's article about MySQL tuning ... there may come a time that a single server can't cope. What should you do? Consider replicating your server. This works well if you've ...

A beautiful coastline

I'm home ... after a very long drive indeed. And glad to be home. But truely thankful for the opportunity to train in Northern Ireland, and to have had the time to spend a day looking around before ...

North Antrim Coast - a jewel thats well worth a visit

I've lived my whole life in the British Isles, and I've made a point of looking round wherever I travel - yet on this little group of islands there are still gems for me to find and take my breath ...

An evening walk in Carrickfergus

Yesterday evening, I walked two miles along the seafront at Carrickfergus and back. Just a dozen miles from the city of Belfast, this is a surprising gem with fishing boats, old quaysides, ...

Always use su with minus. And where do programs come from?

When you're using the su command to do systems admin work as route, you should always add the - options (minus sign on its own) to start a new root environment too. This means that the PATH that ...