Category: Technology

Thousands of books on management practice have been written, covering a multitude of disciplines and methods. Some are excellent, some not so much – but none of them are as important a read as you’ll get from ‘reading’, and talking to, your colleagues. Continue reading “People Management and the art of the Kicking Session”

If you’ve been following along with this series of tutorials, you’ll have built a LEMP stack capable of handling multiple vhosts. That’s all very well – but if you expect your users to enter their username and password into the site then you’ll need to provide them with a little security. The only way to do that is with ssl, certificates for which used to be pricey or came with strings attached.

Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority started by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, University of Michigan, Akamai Technologies and Cisco Systems to provide ssl certificates for free, and to simplify the process of securing your website into the bargain. They take donations though – and this is one project that you really should consider supporting. Continue reading “Docker Lab – Containerising your website, Part 4 (Let’s Encrypt)”

So you’ve set up containers for Nginx and for PHP – now you’d like to have a database. After all the work of the last two labs you’ll be glad to hear than adding MariaDB to the mix is very simple – we can get it up and running in minutes. Continue reading “Docker Lab – Containerising your website, Part 3 (MariaDB)”

In the previous instalment (Docker Lab – Containerising your website, Part 1), we installed Docker and Docker Compose, and set up an Nginx container. If all you need is to serve a few static pages there’s no need to read any further. But if you need your website to be dynamic, if you need PHP and, perhaps, a database, read on…

These instructions assume that you have followed the steps in part 1. Continue reading “Docker Lab – Containerising your website, Part 2 (PHP)”

For many years now, 45RPMSoftware has maintained its own webservers (hosted on virtual machines by Rackspace).  These webservers have been set up in the ‘traditional’ manner, with a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.  They’ve worked well and so I’ve ignored them, which isn’t the right way to run a website and especially not one which hosts your business.For many years now, 45RPMSoftware has maintained its own webservers (hosted on virtual machines by Rackspace).  These webservers have been set up in the ‘traditional’ manner, with a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.  They’ve worked well and so I’ve ignored them, which isn’t the right way to run a website and especially not one which hosts your business. Continue reading “Docker Lab – Containerising your website, Part 1 (Nginx)”

You may remember that, a little over a year ago, I wrote a clock for the micro:bit (read it again here if you need a reminder).  I pondered adding alarm functionality to it but, in the event, I didn’t get around to it. In keeping with that tradition, I now offer you a calculator for the micro:bit – this one has unimplemented improvements too!

I run a computer club for the kids at the local school where we teach them how to code – free from the constraints of the National Curriculum. It’s no secret that I don’t like Scratch, and I think that one of the reasons that the British Isles produced so many great coders is because they learned Basic on the ZX Spectrum and BBC computers from an early age. Continue reading “A Calculator For Your micro:bit”

If you haven’t read my earlier articles on Object Oriented Programming in C (Objects and Polymorphism) I suggest that you go back and read these first.  It isn’t necessary to understand these concepts in order to understand Encapsulation – but it might help give you some background into what I am attempting to achieve here.

To recap, Encapsulation is a means of preventing access to internal object data, ensuring that the data can only be accessed and modified via methods. That’s not to say the internal object data can never be manipulated directly – but one has the option to decide how best the data should be accessed. In explicitly OOP languages this is often achieved through the use of the ‘private’, ‘public’ and ‘protected’ keywords. Continue reading “Object Oriented C – Encapsulation”

Like many geeks I love old technology. I also like to push my technology to new heights and, if possible, make it usable in the modern world. Nearly all of my old computers are networked and, theoretically at least, able to browse the Internet. In practice though Gopher is the most usable standard nowadays since SSL tends to render most email servers and websites unusable. Even if it didn’t, Javascript has changed almost beyond recognition from its nascent days in mid nineties – and don’t even think of rendering HTML5! Continue reading “Retro Computer – Modern Internet”

If you haven’t yet read ‘Object Oriented C – Objects‘ Stop! Go Back! Go and read that earlier post before continuing. In this post I build on the earlier concepts, so much of this won’t make sense without it.

In my last tutorial, I demonstrated that it is possible to write Object Oriented code in C. I wrote some classes, and instantiated objects on those classes. I even made a start on sorting out C’s hopeless string handling (before giving up because others have already solved the problem). This time I’m going to extend the tutorial to cover Polymorphism. Continue reading “Object Oriented C – Polymorphism”

Bear with me a while. I am going to stand of the shoulders of my favourite giants (Kernighan and Ritchie, since you ask) and address an oft-made point of criticism which is levelled against my code.

The criticism? Namely that my C++ code looks suspiciously like C. There’s a good reason for this – I like C, and I’m not so keen on C++. C++ is (in my view, and with apologies to its many fans) a bad way of making C object oriented – as evidenced by the need, on occasion, to drop into plain old C in order to avoid name mangling. Objective C is object oriented C done right – but that’s a topic for another day. In the mean time, I want to address my critics by making C look like C++ – and writing an OOP program in C. Continue reading “Object Oriented C – Objects”