Introduction Corporations exist to make money, not to help people, but to help themselves. This is a fact of any capitalist socity. Many corporations operate responsibly, others do not. In the past, when a corporation’s actions were disagreeable, showing your dissastisfaction was as simple as not purchasing the products or services of it or any of its subsidiaries. In the internet age, this isn’t as simple as it first seems, in this post we’ll explore the technical challenges which present themselves when trying to initiate a complete disconnect from a large internet-based corporation. Read more ...

Introduction The Cloud, a digital fronteir, I al- hang on that’s the opening line from Tron… Cloud, the final fron- No that’s Star Trek… Okay so I don’t have an opening line for this… so let’s just get started. Running cloud, and cloud-like systems can be fun, but no matter what kind of system you’re running, your ability to do so is only as good as the monitoring and reporting tools you have in place. Read more ...

Introduction This post was inspired by @alex’s post What happens when. In this post I will attempt to explain in as much detail as I can, how you display text on the screen. We’re not going to take the easy option of using printf, which would simply hand the job directly to the operating system and we forget about it. We want to render our own text on screen, and we’re going to make it more interesting by rendering text that’s a little less straightforward. Read more ...