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Transition

We're moving from Autumn to Winter; the picture with the bright leaves on the trees is less than a month old, but it seems like an age ago. The bare tree was taken at Wilcot on Saturday. And this ...

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 ...

Out of memory during array extend - Perl

Use a hash if you want a sparse list in Perl! If you set up a list in Perl and don't fill all the members from zero up, that's OK but all the missing elements will actually use up some memory as ...

Why I remember East Grafton

There are certain places that bring a poignant reminder to me when I drive through them - and one of those is the village of East Grafton, near Hungerford in Wiltshire. We passed through there on ...

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 ...

Book now for 2009

We review our prices every 1st January, and at this time of year often say something like "Book now to be assured of getting your 2009 course at the 2008 price". But this year, I can predict rather ...

Remember Me - PHP

Here's a paradox for you as a web site designer, when putting together a web site which requires a login. Most of your users are regulars, who really don't want the hassle of logging in every time ...

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 ...

Melksham Hotel Rates

Melksham Hotel Rates - Well House Manor - VAT changes We're passing on the reduction in VAT rates to our customer; with immediate effect, room rates at Well House Manor are reduced to: 90 pounds per ...

Long, Longer, Longest in Java

If you want to find out how long a Film3 is, in the class that I use on our private Java Programming courses, you can call the getminutes method. That's standard OO stuff. But what if you want to ...

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 ...

Ruby, Perl, Linux, MySQL - some training notes

We have just come to the end of a solid 12 days of training ... and we are just getting ready for the next week, with delegates arriving this evening. There's a lot going on behind the scenes, even ...

daemons - what is running on my Linux server?

Processes which (re)start when you start your computer and run until you halt it are known as services in the Microsoft world and daemons in the Linux and Unix world. As well as providing support ...

sstrwxrwxrwx - Unix and Linux file permissions

Have you ever wondered about those letters that turn up on the left of a long listing (ls -l) report? Here's an example: ...

XML, HTML, XHTML and more

HTML is a language ... but XML is a Metalanguage. In other words, you can write something in HTML and have it (quite) well defined, whereas anything you write in XML has to have another layer of ...

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 ...

Keeping on an even keel

Some (but not all) Open Source products have a numbering system where the second number is even for a production release and odd for a development release - so if you're looking to install one of ...

Virtual Hosts and Virtual Servers

Do you want to use a single computer to host many different web sites? There are no less than four quite common ways of doing this - each of which has its advantages and disadvantages. At the top ...

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 ...

Shopping in Melksham

On Thursday, 27th November, Melksham is hosting a late night Christmas shopping event. Businesses that will be open until 8 p.m. include: Amber Home Appliance Centre [link] Andy York Photography ...

Some Linux and Unix tips

How to make a woman equal to a man [trainee@easterton ~]$ man ls [trainee@easterton ~]$ woman ls -bash: woman: command not found [trainee@easterton ~]$ alias woman=man [trainee@easterton ~]$ woman ls ...

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 ...

MySQL database from Ruby - an example

Both MySQL and Ruby are huge subjects - the former being an excellent database engine and the latter a superb programming language. Yet although each individually is a huge subject, linking the two ...

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. ...

Find the link

What do the following have in common? 1. Discount Spa Covers 2. Childcare products 3. Poland Translation Services 4. Telephone Headsets 5. Executive life coaching 6. Eye Surgery in Houston 7. Web ...

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 ...

Hiding a MySQL database behind a web page

"Keep the browser simple - with a single route in (http) to a server." That's the philosophy behind the web and one of the things that's made it a huge success. It means that a straightforward ...

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 ...