The c quiz has changed! We have replaced c questions with answers! And from those answers you'll find further links to even more information - forums where you can ask questions, training courses, longer articles, and more. [link to quiz index] ... If you really want the old quiz questions, you can find them here, here, here and here ... and with onward links to the possible answers to each question too.

Freedom of Information - consideration for web site designers

The Freedom of Information Act in the UK has proven very useful in some of the things I've been doing with regard to public transport services in Wiltshire - though more in an analysis after the even ...

Exception handling in PHP

PHP has exception handling - where you can try a block of code; it it completes, that's good and normal, but if something doesn't work in the normal manner an exception is thrown, and a piece of code ...

Car Parking in Melksham

Car Parking in the centre of Melksham is a major concern to many residents of the town and the surrounding area. Shops out of town are limited with a very limited bus service to may parts, driving is ...

Adding extensions to PHP Open Source applications - callbacks

Over the last two days, I've installed and configured MediaWiki, WordPress, Status.net and Drupal on one of our training systems, and looked (in each case) at how to configure them and install extra ...

Tcl - a great engineering language

It might be a little old and out of fashion - but Tcl is still very much in use, we use it and we can offer you a learning to program in Tcl training course if you're new to programming, or a Tcl ...

Static class members in PHP - a documented example

Within a class, you can have dynamic or object variables and methods, where the code and the values associated with it are applied to individual objects. They're far and away the majority of your ...

Reaching out to the community - a good case for support

Over the past few weeks, I've attended a number of town and parish council meetings in Wiltshire. I've sat in and listened to talk about flooding and drainage at Dilton Marsh, about who should be ...

Blowing out the winter cobwebs

Spring was here for the first time this weekend - and Sunday afternoon was an opportunity to blow out the cobwebs a few miles from home on the Westbury White ...

Changing Times

We try to be helpful ... and when we were getting a lot of hits on our web site for people looking for arrivals at a local public transport place, because we were top Google hit for certain keywords, ...

Redirecting to your main domain for correct security keys

Do you want to come to Well House Manor as a base to see Wiltshire or for a course? If it's you're first visit you'll want to find us on a map - and we have a map at ...

Make and makefiles - a commented example to help you learn

If you're making an executable C++ file you build it from a whole lot of .o files, each of which you have compiled from a .cpp file. And you also build in library files. If you change a .cpp file, ...

Multiple Inheritance in C++ - a complete example

C++ and some other OO languages support multiple inheritance ... Java and some others do not, and it's often argued that multiple inheritance is an unnecessary complication. That may be the case in ...

Melksham - Carnival, Party in the Park, and Spot the Oddity

Saturday, 17th July 2010. There's a lot happening in Melksham, and here (for the newcomer) is a list of the events which are separately organised but co-operatively co-ordinated. Melksham Carnival. ...

Efficient use of dynamic memory - C and realloc

C is basically a language in which you dimension your arrays at compile time - however, at run time you can call up malloc or calloc to grab a chunk of dynamic memory. This is very useful if you ...

Web page to telephone calls / links using an iPhone

Would you like people who visit your web site from their iPhone you be able to just click on your number and call you? Well - they can; the iPhone Safari browser recognized phone numbers and turns ...

Oliver Cromwell at Bristol Temple Meads

I've been to Taunton today - a meeting of TravelWatch SouthWest which I'll be documenting elsewhere. But I couldn't resist this picture of Oliver Cromwell - Britannia class 4-6-2 locomotive no. ...

Is Melksham public transport actually used?

'''There never seems to be anybody waiting at the bus stop behind my house when I look out there - so I ask "why have it ... why run the buses that call there?" ''' - comment made to me by a local ...

Current Public Courses

I was asked for a full list of our public courses yesterday - simply the main subject area and titles. Here it is ... Perl Learning to Program in Perl / Perl Programming [link] Perl for Larger ...

Save the Train - a significant change in approach

It's nearly five years since I got involved in "Save the Train" and public transport - mainly by rail - in and across Wiltshire. Although local support has always been near 100%, in those early days ...

Want to do a big batch edit? Nothing beats Perl!

I still love Perl ... Wanting to convert a file of lines like this:   <img src=rp_153_track.jpg><br><br> into lines like this:   rp_153_track.jpg <img ...

Melksham Carnival

Melksham Carnival and Melksham Party in the Park take place this year on Saturday, 17th July ("this year" is 2010). The whole town comes out on Carnival day! From lunchtime onwards, there are stalls ...

Reading and writing cookies in Java Servlets and JSPs

Do you want to check (and perhaps set) cookies within a Java Servlet? I was looking around for good, straightforward examples today but found that most of the published code is only snippets rather ...

Calculation within objects - early, last minute, or cached?

When you create an object with the constructor, you may also set property [attribute] values within it ... or you may follow on with a series of method calls to set the initial values. Then when you ...

Getting a phone line changed ...

Let me see if I can remember this. 1. I called a number, and went through a series of four menus, looking to speak to someone. In between the various elements of the call, I was told that I could ...

Length, size or capacity in Java?

You get the length of an array, but you ask about the size() of an ArrayList, and you can inquire into the capacity() of a StringBuffer. Aren't they really all the same sort of thing? Which does Java ...

Removing duplicates from a MySQL table

Surely there's got to be an easy way to remove duplicate records from a MySQL table? With a well designed table that has a unique primary key, you can simply get rid of a few duplicates, but if there ...

Compile but do not run PHP - syntax check only

The -l option to PHP on the command line compiles but does not run the code in the file - so it's very useful for syntax checking your code. Here's an example where I tested a file with a deliberate ...

Optimising and caching your MySQL enquiries

If you want to get a list of all the different values in a column, but don't care how many times each occurs, you can apply the DISTINCT keyword on your SELECT. See [here]. The DISTINCTROW is a ...

Counting rows in joined MySQL tables

Yesterday, I showed you how to join two database tables and get out all matching records, and records which are "orphans" too - records in the left hand table that don't match anything in the right ...

What does a web application look like under Tomcat?

When you're deploying a Java application on your web server, you're likely to be using a container engine such as Tomcat ([learn about tomcat]). If you're not the author of the application, it will ...

Object Oriented Programming in PHP

New ... for the first time ever ... our Object Oriented PHP Programming training course is running on a Monday. That's Monday, 26th April 2010. It then revert to Friday - its more normal day of the ...

su or su - ... what is the difference?

If you're wanting to do admin work on a Unix or Linux system, you'll probably need to be logged in as the administrator. However, you're likely to find that you're not allowed to log in as root ...

Finding what has changed - Linux / Unix

If you want to find out what has changed in a file, use the diff command. And if you want to find out what has changed across a whole directory structure, use diff -r If I want to compare a backup ...

Courses - Melksham and elsewhere - until the end of April

I'm usually well scheduled a few days ahead, but as I look further ahead, things are less certain. Extra private courses are booked, "options weeks" resolve into a decision as to which course we'll ...

Linux - useful tips including history and file name completion

Linux is feature rich - it's so feature rich that it's daunting to know where to start when teaching about it - what features to include and what to leave out. It's twenty to nine at night, and I'm ...

A PHP example that lets your users edit content without HTML knowledge

Scenario one. I need a "todo" list page for our web site which I, and the rest of our team, can view and update quickly and easily. Scenario two. Dave wants to provide his local cricket club's ...

London to and from Melksham by public transport

Melksham is a town with a population of around 25,000 people located around a hundred miles to the West of London. It's the home of Well House Consultants, our open source training company, and many ...

Why do I teach niche skills rather than mainstream?

Being able to drive a car is a far more useful skill for me (personally) than being able to service that same car would be. And having the life skills to live in a house is far more of a mainstream ...

Shipping a test harness with your class in PHP

If you're writing a class (or group of classes) into a file you include into your main application(s) in PHP, you'll be recommended to keep the included files out of the document path so that they ...

Static variables and ampersands in PHP

If you call a function within your program, the last thing you usually want is to have the debris from a previous call left over and effecting how it runs. The fact that you previously looked for a ...