Accelerating Page Load Times by Reducing Requests

, 1 min read

In trying to decrease load times of this blog, I noticed that the prism.js library requires quite a number of requests to the unpkg-server. So I tried to combine all these requests into only two. The results are quite impressive. I compared various measurements using tools.pingdom.com. Old…

Performance Comparison Saaze vs. Hugo vs. Zola

, 3 min read

Zola is a static site generator written in Rust. Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. Simplified Saaze, Saaze for short, is written in PHP. Task: Compare run times of Saaze vs. Hugo vs Zola. I didn't find a direct comparison so far. There is a comparison of Eleventy vs. Gatsby vs. Hugo…

Making Static Site Generator 500-Times Faster

, 2 min read

I already described some changes I made to the original Saaze software: Moved Blog To eklausmeier.goip.de Calling MD4C from PHP via FFI Considerations Regarding Simplifications of Saaze Profiling PHP Programs In Making Static Site Generator 30-Times Faster I already described that removing…

Simplified Saaze

, 31 min read

Introduction Installation Directory structure Basic usage 4.1 Static site generator 4.2 Dynamic content generation 4.3 Single file generation 4.4 Specifying an alternate build directory 4.5 Turning extract file generation on 4.6 Draft-mode 4.7 Parallel output 4.8 Stealth-mode 4.9…

Saving Attachments in Outlook via VBA

, 1 min read

Task at hand: You receive daily reports with attachments, which you need to analyze programmatically. Therefore you want those attachments in your filesystem. You need an Outlook macro, which saves all those attachments to a directory. Outlook VBA to the rescue. Below macro processes all e-mails…

Copy Directories to FTP-Server

, 1 min read

Sometimes you have to copy whole directories recursively to an FTP-server. Many FTP servers are not able to handle bulk uploads directly. Here lftp comes to the rescue. lftp allows to upload or download entire directories irrespective of the capabilities of the FTP server. Assume we want to upload…

Making Static Site Generator 30-Times Faster

, 3 min read

Static site generators take Markdown files as input and generate HTML files. This way, when the end-user visits a website, all pages are already generated, and the web-server serves just plain HTML. No database is needed, no server-side script language is required. Two main advantages are easy to…

Profiling PHP Programs

, 349 min read

Profiling a program is the process to measure how much CPU time a function uses, and also to count how many times this function was called. One very powerful profiler for PHP, XHProf, was initially developed by Facebook engineers. Facebook formerly used PHP very intensively. 1.…

PECL's Yaml Way Faster Than Symfony's Yaml

, 3 min read

PECL is the PHP Extension Community Library. These extensions are written in C. Symfony is a PHP web application framework written in PHP. Initially I just wanted to reduce the dependencies in Saaze, so I installed PECL PHP package yaml. When I compared run-times between the original,…

Comparing GnuCOBOL to IBM COBOL

, 3 min read

When I ran the n-queens problem in COBOL using GnuCOBOL I was a little bit surprised how slow the resulting program was -- it was slower than the equivalent PHP program. Therefore I installed the IBM COBOL for Linux compiler on the same machine and compared performance, see Installing IBM COBOL for…

Installing IBM COBOL for Linux on Arch Linux

, 4 min read

Task at hand: Install the 60-day trial of "IBM COBOL for Linux" on Arch Linux. Please see the updated installation description here: Installing IBM COBOL for Linux on Arch Linux #2. 1. Download. Downloading the compiler is at IBM COBOL for Linux on x86 60-day Trial or here. 2. Unpacking.…

Compiling GnuCOBOL

, 1 min read

When compiling GnuCOBOL from source this works without any hiccups. The usual configure, make sequence. I had written on this in Generating JSON with COBOL. But if you run make check you might encounter multiple check-failures when run after makepkg. The reason is that makepkg introduces a couple…

Parallel Mass-File Processing

, 1 min read

Task at hand: Process ca. 400,000 files. In our case each file needed to be converted from EBCDIC to ASCII. Obviously, you could do this sequentially. But having a multiprocessor machine you should make use of all processing power. The chosen approach is as follows: Generate a list of all files to…

StackEdit: A Markdown Editor

, 2 min read

StackEdit is a Markdown editor, which runs in the browser, but stores files locally. The following features characterize StackEdit: Markdown and corresponding HTML are fully in sync and visible on the same screen. Changing Markdown will instantly change the HTML. StackEdit calls it "Scroll…

Mermaid: A JavaScript Library for Diagrams

, 1 min read

Mermaid is a JavaScript library which provides diagrams for: Flowchart diagrams Sequence diagrams Class diagrams State diagrams Entity Relationship diagrams Gantt diagrams Pie char Git graphs Currently Mermaid does not offer line charts. The Mermaid website also offers a…

Air France Air Tracker

, 1 min read

When I flew with Air France from Paris CDG to Montpellier I was surprised that all seats offered Wifi, which was not mandated to switch off. Furthermore, bluetooth was not required to be turned off, and all seats offered two plugs to charge electronic devices via USB. Using Wifi on board the…

Considerations Regarding Simplifications of Saaze

, 3 min read

This blog is built using a static-site generator called Saaze. Saaze can also serve content fully dynamic. Saaze is kind of the successor of Handle. Saaze and Handle were both written by Gilbert Pellegrom. Saaze has the following objectives: Easy to run Easy to host Easy to edit Easy to theme Fast…

YouTube: Something Went Wrong

, 1 min read

Yesterday I observed below error when accessing YouTube via my tablet: I had experienced related errors: January 2017: Youtube 500 Internal Server Error May 2017: Youtube 500 Internal Server Error For Facebook and WordPress I had observed: June 2014: Facebook Was Down on 19-Jun-2014 March 2019:…

HTML Anchor Highlighting

, 1 min read

In Alexander Six's blog I saw that you can highlight HTML anchor text with a skewed bar. Below is the solution I use in this blog. I am still struggling with my own requirement that the skeyY angle is dependent on the length of the anchor string. Currently I do not know how I can find this out. …

Bandwidth Diet for This Blog

, 1 min read

As mentioned in Speed-Tests With Pingdom.com the ratio of CSS to HTML (=content) was roughly 50:1. In my case CSS was taking 248 KB, while HTML is only 4.4 KB. Previously this blog continued to use Tailwind CSS, as started by the example for Saaze. But Tailwind CSS does not make too much sense for…