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.

Stairs

I was in Trowbridge in the afternoon, dropping off some papers ... Here are some stairs. I know they are stairs. Why do I need a sign to tell me they are stairs? Note for the reader - this ...

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 ...

How to build a test harness into your PHP

I was writing a PHP demonstration yesterday, and I wanted to include a test harness with my class definitions that I could leave in place on the live code on my server, to be silently skipped over ... ...

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 ...

Dear Planners, please provide viable alternatives

I have a meeting at Melksham Police Station this evening (of the Community Area Partnership - not on police business!) - from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Melksham Police Station is about a mile and a half from ...

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. ...

Pointers to Pointers to Pointers - what is the point?

From today's course - a new example showing pointers to pointers to pointers. But why? C pointers are useful in many ways: • they let you pass a single value into a function that holds a whole ...

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 ...

Is it worth it?

Occasionally, I ask myself "is it worth it?". I write a lot of technical articles and add them to our website, and at times it feel like they're going into something of a void. It's rather like ...

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 ...

Random thoughts on Melksham Town Planning and development

On Friday evening, I attended the Mayor's reception in Melksham Assembly Hall, and on Saturday I traveled to Taunton to attend TravelWatch SouthWest. At one of those meetings (and I'm ashamed to say I ...

Early Spring walk in Melksham

The subject lines says it all, really! In the afternoon, full of a cold and not concentrating on other things, I was tempted into a long walk by an energetic and willing companion who - if you look ...

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. ...

Improve your PHP on a weekend away

I'm delighted to announce two new weekend events - courses on which you can learn or improve your PHP - and enjoy yourself too. The first weekend - at the Intermediate level - is described here. ...

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 ...

One number for Well House - 01225 708225

If you're looking to talk to Well House Consultants about Open Source Training courses, call 01225 708225 If you're wishing to speak to Well House Manor about Hotel rooms, please also call 01225 ...

New numbers, as 01225 707126 and 01225 709638 are being retired

Telephone technology has moved forward in the ten years since we set up the phone system at Well House HQ ... and our business has changed too. The move forward to the next generation of telephony ...

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 ...

Python - what is going on around me?

If you want to find out what's going on around you in a Python program, you can uses your system's environment variables via the os.environ module - the keys() method telling you which environment ...

Java - from applets to servlets. JSPs and more

When Java first came out in the mid 1990s, its main focus was on Applets - embedded chunks of applications that ran (and still run!) in a frame within a browser's window in much the same say that an ...

Java Server Pages - putting it all together

I've been teaching Java Server Programming to newcomers this week ... and here are three example that I wrote today, pulling much of the work together. 1. An example of a JSP (Java Server Page) that ...

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 ...

Java arrays - are they true arrays or not?

Java's arrays are "true" arrays, in that they occupy sequential memory locations in which they are looked up by position number, so that access can be very fast. But that does mean that once an array ...

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 ...