"The Horse's Mouth" is an online magazine - the ramblings of Graham Ellis. I'm very fortunate to come across a lot of interesting people in my work, and they inspire me to think and to write. You'll find a mixture of technical tips on the subjects we teach, things we have learnt from our own website and wider, and pictures, thoughts and wider comment.

The beauty of the net is that you can search and read as much - or as little - as you like. You can even add your comments if you wish; although we can't offer you the same anonimity nor a "freedom of speech", I'm going to encourage you to post of views that don't agree with mine and only in what I consider to be exceptional circumstances will I remove or modify your material.


Teaching dilemma - old tricks and techniques, or recent enhancements?
Python string formatting - the move from % to str.format
Charities v Charitable. The cost of collecting your donation.
Passing of Steve Jobs - R.I.P.
How can I do an FTP transfer in Python?
Passing optional and named parameters to python methods
Busy weekend of contrasts.
Hangers, luggage and possessions
From flowchart to program - code design for the newcomer
Flying Colours!
Catching the fishes first?
On this day ... one PHP script with three uses
Away to train - but still around by video for Melksham meetings
Stepping stones - early coding, and writing re-usable code quickly
MySQL, MySQLi, PDO or something else - how best to talk to databases from PHP
Your PHP website - how to factor and refactor to reduce growing pains
Reading and using emails including enclosures on your web server.
Which or ATOC - who reads train fares right?
Why would you want to use a Perl hash?
A threat in the post? Poor marketing practise from Smiletrain?
Apache Internal Dummy Connection - what is it and what should I do with it?
Checking all the systems on a subnet, using Expect and Tk
Needle in a haystack - finding the web server overload
Awk v Perl
Perl and CGI - simple form, and monitoring script.
Take the dog on a lead - do not carry her. Perl references.
Getting more log information from the Apache http web server
A demonstration of how many Python facilities work together
Pressing ^C in a Python program. Also Progress Bar.
Research is exciting. But should routine be automated?
Python for loops - applying a temporary second name to the same object
Melksham to become a part of Trowbridge?
Light bulbs
Moving from scripting to Object Orientation in Python
Sorta sorting a hash, and what if an exception is NOT thrown - Ruby
Sundays - and over eating
Exceptions - a fail-safe way of trapping things that may go wrong
3 digit HTTP status codes - what are they, which are most common, which should be a concern?
Ruby at both extremes of your website
Sigils - the characters on the start of variable names in Perl, Ruby and Fortran