Mikael Lofjärd

Form, function and flexibility. I find that these three concepts are not always easy to rank. Sometimes I feel that form trumps functionality, sometimes I don’t. When it comes to window managers however, function is king! I have to admit, I’ve been …

Sometimes you need more than your operating system gives you. That’s when a text editor comes in handy. ` Copying large files to my NAS becomes so much more fun when I actually KNOW that it’s doing what it should. Progress bars FTW! UPDATE: Now it’…

A while back I read a blog post somewhere about how the LESS parser/compiler had been remade in Javascript. "Well awesome", I thought to myself as I had been wanting some more flexibility in CSS but had been to stubborn/proud to install the SASS compiler since it’s written in Ruby. Needles to say, I wanted to incorporate it in my blog as soon as possible but I’ve not had the time to actually do it until now. LESS (like SASS) is a CSS derived language that adds a whole lot of long needed features to CSS to ease maintenance of large style sheets. It compiles into regular CSS markup either in realtime (through their nifty Javascript implementation in the browser) or, as in my case, as a bootstrapping task when I start my blog. For now, it’s tacked on in a kind of ugly way in my BundleCon…

Today at work was "do-anything-but-work-day". It’s a bit like Googles 20%, but instead of 20% it’s more like .8% or something like that. It’s was our first time and not that many people had a clear idea about what to do at first. I on the other hand had a mission all planned out. When I put the blog on the new server back in January, I noticed a small decrease in performance. After a few tests I’ve realized that the CPU is the culprit. The Atom D525, while dual-core, at 1.6 GHz has roughly half the computational power of the Pentium M at 1.5 GHz, which was what my old server had under the hood. Node.js can make use to multi-core processors by starting more instances of itself, which made concurrent connections on the new server almost the same speed as on the old server. However, co…

Ignoring a short play date with Red Hat around ’95, my first Linux love was Slackware. Slackware was fast and awesome but it somewhat lacked in the package discovery department. I installed most things from source and after learning about all the bad …

As you might have noticed, there hasn’t been much work done on the blog these last few months. It kind of boils down to complexity. When I started building this blog my main workstation was running Windows 7. Everything ran as well on Node.js on Win…

If not for this year being a leap year, there would have been no posts made this month. I plan on doing better. I also hope on getting ill a lot less in the months to come….

The HTTP protocol has a lot of header fields that affects requests and responses. HTTP also have a couple of different request types (HEAD, GET, POST, PUT and DELETE). Unless you’re building a REST service, you mostly have to deal with GET and POST on the web, and I don’t even differentiate those as much as I should. A couple of weeks ago, a thought occurred to me; "What happens when I make a HEAD request to my blog?". Well the answer turned out to be pretty simple. Node.js ignores any calls made to the write method of the response object if the request was a HEAD request. That’s all fine with me, but then I started thinking about what type of things should go into a HEAD response and if I could optimize anything. This lead me to look closer into the `Content-Length` header field. The `…

… it’s just a flesh wound. Jokes aside, I had planned to make a post last Monday about some HTTP HEAD/GET/POST and header request stuff I’ve done on the blog recently but something got in the way of me completing my work. I still plan to do it when…