"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.


Testing in Python 3 - unittest, doctest and __name__ == __main__ too.
Sorting in Python 3 - and how it differs from Python 2 sorting
Four in a Bed - most popular answers
Neighbourhood Plan - travel and transport thoughts
Moving from C to C++ - Structured to Object Oriented - a lesson for engineers
Sockets, time handling and keyboard interrupt handling in C
Catching up on a week all in a single post (?)
Rail Conference, Nottingham
Server program written in Tcl using sockets
Reading from a URL, and reading Json, from your Tcl script
Using Object Oriented Tcl and the Tk toolkit together - real life example
Managing the window size (and layout) in Tcl/Tk
A new Tcl/tk example - a window to show system status
Test framework for TCL - Tcltest - some examples
Objects in Tcl - iTcl - updated first steps example
Working out distance between places, using OS grid references and a program in Tcl
Everything is a string - even a list
Tcl variable names - no real limits!
Binary data handling - Python and Perl
Running an operating system command from your Python program - the new way with the subprocess module
Deciding whether to use parameters, conditional statements or subclasses
Spike solution, refactoring into encapsulated object methods - good design practise
What is the difference between a function and a method?
Overnight accommodation in Melksham - if Well House Manor is full!
Combining tests into suites, and suites into bigger suites - Python and unittest
Graphing presentations in Python - huge data, numpy and matplotlib
Elements of an exception in Python - try, except, else, finally
Seventh stay away this year - and it's still only February!
Mutable v Immuatble objects in Python, and the implication
Reading command line parameters in Python
A first graph with Matplotlib in Python
Json is the new marshall, pickle and cPickle / Python
Loving programming in Python - and ready to teach YOU how
Adding a PHP build option, rotating an image based on camera data, and a new look at thumbnails in PHP
Accessing a MySQL database from Python with mysql.connector
Images of our rail promotion campaign
Public training courses - upcoming dates
Different views of a Welsh Valley - but headed home
Java web application for teaching - now with sessions and clustering / load balancing demonstrations
A Java servlet that is also a stand alone program. And a server that is also a web client.