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Westbury Bypass Refused - looking forward

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 ...

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 ...

Travelling

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

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 ...

Learning about others private lives

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

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 ...

History is not always pretty

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. ...

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 ...

Grouping rows for a summary report - MySQL and PHP

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 ...

Questions I have been asked on answering the phone

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

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 ...

Forum membership - a privilege not a right

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 ...

Walks in and around Melksham, Wiltshire

Melksham is a town with a history around every corner - a guest at the hotel on Saturday morning was asking me a few questions, and I've put together a few of the walks that I enjoy from the hotel. ...

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 ...

Over a third of numbers start with the digit 1

Someone told me recently that over a third of numbers start with the digit one - which of course is untrue - it's 10% of numbers (if you allow for zero starts), or 11.11111% if you don't. Except ... ...

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 ...

Getting home from Melksham

I have written so many blogs and notes about how to reach us in Melksham, but very few on getting home afterwards. "Isn't it just a mirror of getting to you" you may well ask, and of course in many ...

A day in the life of a hotelier

It's been an exhausting day ... ... and it isn't even 3 p.m. yet. Breakfast for five and all checked out. Meeting for 3. Coffee service and meeting for 8. Lunch for 7. ... ... still to ...

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 ...

How do I query a database (MySQL)?

From my mailbox ... "What are the different ways of queries in databases? Could u pls explain each way in more detail? thanks" The term "query" means something a little bit different in the term ...

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 ...

Alumni - revisiting and supporting the old University

I have just completed a survey for my old university - I won't name them here, but researchers will be able to find out who they are easily enough, as I made a comment and recommended one of their ...

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 ...

Transforming data in Perl using lists of lists and hashes of hashes

In Perl, you don't have conventional two dimensional arrays - you have lists which are single dimensional only. However, you can have a list that contains a reference to another list, in effect a ...

Why sendmail one way, and pop3 the other?

When you send emails, you'll use a "sendmail" protocol / service, whereas when you receive them, you'll typically use a "pop3" or similar protocol / service. Why not use just one protocol for all ...

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 ...

Do not re-invent the wheel - use a Perl module

"If you think 'surely someone has done this before', you're probably right ... and in Perl, you'll find the resource you need available as a module on your system, or if it's not quite to common, on ...