"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.


Length, size or capacity in Java?
Java arrays - are they true arrays or not?
Removing duplicates from a MySQL table
Compile but do not run PHP - syntax check only
Optimising and caching your MySQL enquiries
Counting rows in joined MySQL tables
Relating tables with joins in MySQL
What does a web application look like under Tomcat?
Object Oriented Programming in PHP
How is your tax pound spent?
su or su - ... what is the difference?
Finding what has changed - Linux / Unix
Courses - Melksham and elsewhere - until the end of April
Linux - useful tips including history and file name completion
A PHP example that lets your users edit content without HTML knowledge
London to and from Melksham by public transport
Why do I teach niche skills rather than mainstream?
Shipping a test harness with your class in PHP
How to show a large result set page by page in PHP
Static variables and ampersands in PHP
Curly braces within double quoted strings in PHP
An example of an injection attack using Javascript
Saturdays out from Melksham - to Oxford, to Didcot or to Swindon
On Malachite Green
Both feet on the same pavement
Skyline and looking up in London
Object Oriented Ruby - new examples
Handling unusual and error conditions - exceptions
Ruby collections and strings - some new examples
Direct access to object variable (attributes) in Ruby
Passing code to procedures and yield in Ruby
What are Ruby Symbols?
Comparing floating point numbers - a word of caution and a solution
Defining a static method - Java, Python and Ruby
String to number conversion with error trapping in Ruby
Neatly formatting results into a table
Constants in Ruby
The Model, View, Controller architecture (MVC) - what, why and how.
Sunday Evening, City of London
Cheat Sheet - what do you need for Ruby on Rails?