The quiz has changed! We have replaced 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.

Keeping Business Local. But is that realistic?

"Shop in your High Street" says the Town Council, the Melksham Independent Traders, the Chamber of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Melksham Independent News, and many more. "Shop ...

Help to get online in Melksham

Here's one for your friends or relatives (or the people next door) who are not yet online. Specific help in the Melksham area! Wiltshire Online is Wiltshire's program to get you online, and from ...

A customer thanks Well House Manor

"Thank you" means so much. And this floral display - a "thank you" gift from one of our customers who's an expert at making such things means so much to us at Well House Manor. It's proudly in ...

Training to do a job, or training to pass an exam?

Are 46%, 47%, 48% or 49% of visitors to "UK Online Centres" aged 55 or older? I'm told that the answer is 48%. But what a stupid question to put into a test to see if I know enough to be a "Digital ...

How do classes relate to each other? Associated Classes

How do classes relate to each other? Associated Classes ... or ... define: Associated classes, parent classes, superclasses, subclasses, base classes, abstract classes, interfaces and mixins. ...

Design Patterns - what are they? Why use them?

Object orientation provides a wonderful bag of components, but they need to be linked together to provide a full set of facilities for data handling. And very often that linking together is in a way ...

Designing your application - using UML techniques

When you're planning to write an application, you shouldn't just start writing code - you should think about what you're going to do and plan ahead. But how do you plan ahead? How do you ensure that ...

Gypsy and Billy enjoy the snow

I know my feet would get cold - so we careful about taking the dogs out for too long in the snow. Yet on our brief walk this morning, they really let off steam. The field that backs onto the Spa ...

Snow comes to Melksham, Wiltshire - pictures

Last night, I travelled home from Uni (City University, Islington) late in the evening ... Even in London, some snow was settling Chippenham Station at Mindinght-10 ... a delayed 22:15 from ...

Melksham Campus - a blog you can read, and a place you can comment

I'm a member of the SCOB - the Shadow Campus Operations Board - and last night I attended a meeting to learn about the uses that are being made of current facilities, from their users, about their ...

Another cold night

I got home late tonight - that's two nights in a row. And it's another cold one, with the temperature down to -7°C already. Tomorrow morning will be brisk, like the last two. ...

Emerging proposals for land to the east of Spa Road, Melksham

Letter - to be hand delivered within the immediate area of Melksham Spa. Copies of the letter and one of the map pages to be attached. Available via links in my blog - Graham 3rd February 2012 404, ...

Rail Travel - has it become more unreliable?

It times it almost seems like railway travel to the West of London is like travel in the wild west. When I started a thread on the "First Great Western Coffee Shop" this morning, commenting on all the ...

Visa, MasterCard and American Express - changing payment profiles

Well House Consultants opened for business in 1995. And in the early days, payment for courses was almost exclusively made by cheque. My goodness - how things have changed! We added Visa and ...

Seeing how Melksham has changed over the years, via an iPad

I spent some time over the weekend working my way into iPad and iPhone programming, using XCode, and already I've written a "toy" application which lets me drag a slider and move through overlaid ...

Melksham Civic Awards - report and pictures

Friday Night was the Mayor's Reception - an event to which all the dignitaries from neighbouring towns are invited (and they turn up in full regalia), and at which civic awards are handed out. I ...

Niche businesses in Melksham. From glass painting to Tcl and Lua courses.

Melksham has a number of excellent shops and other establishments selling niche products and services - things that you won't find in other nearby towns or (in some cases) in any other towns at all. ...

Want to learn iPad and iPhone programming? Come along and learn with me for free.

I'm learning Objective C. The language itself doesn't look too difficult, nor do the elements of how it's used on the iPad and iPhone for App programming. But there's an awful lot of content to those ...

Looking up

You can walk through a city and see the street ... and you can glance upwards too and see far more than the street - some incredible architecture, both old and modern. Click on any image to see it ...

Back to Uni

We're trainers so we should be (and we are) advocates of training courses. And that means attending appropriate training, as well as giving it. Those readers who've been on our courses may well ...

Chars, char arrays and strings in C. Some early cautions and pitfalls.

A char in C is a single byte variable, and a string in an array of chars (i.e. a series of chars held in successive memory addresses) and terminated by a null (\0). Because of this need for a ...

Are we one man, one vote? No, and we never have been.

"One man, one vote" they say. Hmmm - it's not really like that when it comes to elections, and it never really has been. After a lunchtime discussion yesterday, I started exploring various sites to ...

Integer types, and integer overflows, in C

C offers you the ability to define a whole variety of integer types:   short int my_number;   int my_number;   long int my_number; typically occupying 16, 32 and 64 bits ...

Defining, declaring and initialising variables in C

When you declare a variable in C, you're instructing the compiler to set memory aside for it, and you're also telling the compiler how to handle any references to that memory. • C does NOT ...

Promoting a single one of your domains on the search engines

We have a number of different domains offering information about our courses, and technical content too. There's www.wellho.net which is our main, worldwide site. But then there's www.wellho.co.uk ...

Learning about how to help people learning - and retaining

"Teaching isn't only about knowing your subject. It's also about selecting which parts of that subject are relevant to your current audience, and passing on that knowledge to them in a way which ...

C++ Courses - do I get official certification at the end of my Well House course?

From my mailbox ... Question: Hi there Graham. I am interested in 1 or 2 courses to do with C and C++ coding, but after reading further through the site you come to say there is no certification. ...

Emergency First Aid Provision at Well House Manor - part of the service

We were on the "other end" of training today - receiving a course rather than giving one. And we've now got four members of staff - that's every weekday shift covered - with someone who's taken the ...

The changing Hotel and Bed and Breakfast business in Melksham

It still surprises me how quickly things change in the hotel and catering business. But I suppose it shouldn't. When we opened our training centre in Melksham in 2000 there were numerous places that ...

QR codes - graphics images that provide quick phone links

You'll have seen these printed "QR" codes turning up on printed documents such as railway timetables, brochures and business cards, and they allow you to wave your phone at the pattern and have a copy ...

Expanding a list of parameters in Tcl - {*} and eval

In Tcl commands, parameters are separated by spaces, just like Tcl lists are. So it would sometimes be very useful to be able to write   set action {piemiddle apple}   set ...

Tcl collections - lists, dicts and array

In Tcl, almost all variables are what is described as "pure" - which means that they hold data as strings of text which can be passed, substituted with a $ prefix, etc. Special interpretation on pure ...

Perl - calls to methods that use => - what do they mean?

Have you seen Perl method calls that look like this?   $present = new box(-smell => "chocolate", noise => "silent"); and wondered "what is all this => stuff" and "what's the - sign for"? ...

Melksham Area - buses, trains, cycles, and roads. Meeting, 17.1.2012

This TUESDAY evening ... are YOU available? Melksham Town Hall on Tuesday January 17th at 6.30pm, with refreshments from 6pm. The meeting is free and informal, and open to anyone who would like to ...

Transport in Cambridgeshire - seen by an outside observer. What can Wiltshire learn?

A week in Cambridge - traveling there, and around when I needed, without a car - and a chance to look, listen and learn a bit more about the wider transport issues of that city. Some may be lessons ...

A busy start to 2012

It's been a busy start to the training and hotel year 2012 at Well House. I've already taught Learning to Program in Tcl, Tcl and Expect Programming, and two tailored private courses - Perl ...

How to do multidimensional arrays (or rather lists and hashes) in Perl

In Perl, you can have a list of lists, a hash of hashes, a hash of lists or a list of hashes - in effect, two dimensional arrays but with much more flexibility.And where you can have two dimensional ...

Tcl - apparently odd behaviour of string trimleft

Question: Why does this code:   set dir "D:/JNN/proc/"   set tempname "D:/JNN/proc/Doc-99887767.dat"   set cname [string trimleft $tempname $dir]   puts ...

Multiple buttons calling the same proc in wish (tcl/tk)

Question: 1. I have created a table dynamically using a for loop in Tcl/Tk. 2. One of the columns in the table is a column of buttons 3. All the buttons call the same action proc as the each do ...

Perl functions such as chop change their input parameters

Typically, functions / named blocks of code take a series of operands / parameters as inputs, and return a result which is saved into another variable - here's an example in Perl:   $size = ...