Mikael's blog

A developers seventh time trying to maintain a blog

Tag #misc

The seventh blog | July 20, 2023 at 12:07

The seventh blog has gone live! I didn't dare to hope that this day would come, but a stint of bad (or not as great as usual) weather has left me with a lot of time for coding while my family wears out their phone batteries to the best of their abilities. ## The fixed and the missing While there was quite a lot of missing features a few days ago, there is now a working archive, tag cloud and even search(!). The latter was solved with [Orama](https://oramasearch.com/), formerly known as `Lyra`, and it does all the full-text searching client-side. It's all hooked up with a custom WebComponent and some clever index building with Astro. There will be a more complete writeup on it in the future, but for now you can check out the code over on GitHub. The link for that is at the [source page]

And just like that... | July 14, 2023 at 06:15

... I started on yet another rewrite. ## Stargazing I've had my eye on [Astro](https://astro.build) for a while now. One of the things that caught my eye was just how much it looked like [Svelte](https://svelte.dev). Consider the following examples: ````astro --- import BlogPost from "../components/BlogPost.astro"; const allBlogPosts = await fetch("https://blog.lofjard.se/api/blogposts/all", data => { return await data.json(); }); --- <div class="blog-list"> { allBlogPosts.map(item => ( <BlogPost item={item} /> ))} </div> <style> .blog-list { width: 600px; margin: 0 auto; } </style> ```` vs ````svelte <script> import BlogPost from "../components/BlogPost.svelte"; const allBlogPosts = await fetch("https://blog.lofjard.se/api/blogposts/all", data => { return await data.j

Summer is Coming | May 23, 2014 at 20:58

And with summer, my almost year long blog hiatus ends. July 31st 2013 was the day my second daughter was born. Besides installing some long forgotten parts in the server machine, little has happened since then. Well, little has happened with regards to the blog, that is. September 25th marked my 31st birthday and the scale tipped at 90 kilograms. I strapped on my running shoes and started running. Once a week. Then twice a week. For a while I ran three times a week. I also cut all my intake of carbohydrates, except for one beer each weekend, and about two weeks after Christmas the blinking digits underneath my feet presented themselves as 75 kilograms. I've kept on running ever since. Then the year 2014 happened and boy did it happen fast. It's already May and I've yet to write a sing

Server Maintenance of 2013 | August 18, 2013 at 10:42

My server mostly keeps to itself, chugging along in my apartment storage space, but sometimes I order new parts for it. One such part was the picoPSU I bought several months ago to replace my totally overkill 650W PSU. Essentially, I wanted to replace this: ![Really big PSU](/img/upload/36848b40-cda9-4d89-b43b-7bc008126874.jpg) with this: ![Really tiny PSU](/img/upload/80e008fd-c6cf-4dc2-a8be-dc9bb1eea0ac.jpg) The Corsair TX-650 has worked without a hitch, but my server is an Atom D525 with a TDP of 12W and its only other hardware is an SSD. It seems like there would be some serious loss of power due to PSU inefficiencies on such small loads. The picoPSU on the other hand is a DC-DC PSU with an external brick rated for 120W loads, and it has proven much more efficient on smaller load

Midsummer Grind | June 22, 2013 at 12:40

Here's my latest project: ![Sanded down keys](/img/upload/61f7f626-f25f-42f0-9bd5-d9cf30e66abb.jpg) It's taking me a lot longer to sand down all the keys with 180 grit sand paper than I originally planned, but a few more hours and I'll be ready for paint. Having kids though, I might not be able to complete it until next weekend. :) Oh and yes; that's a Logitech Wave I'm modifying...

The End of May | May 31, 2013 at 15:30

The blog has been silent lately but i certainly have not been sitting still. About a month ago I started to remake the administration area of the blog into something a bit more fashionable (today it consists of a few input boxes and a "publish" button). Halfway through I decided to rewrite it using AngularJS. Needles to say, I'm not quite done with it yet but it's a work in progress and it's going to be awesome. My great friend and fellow coder Mattias spent a long weekend here and we put together a little P2P file sharing site using Node.js, AngularJS and Web RTC data channels. It's really cool but like most things, it needs a little more work. It's [up on GitHub though](https://github.com/mlofjard/WebDrop) if anyone wants to take a peek at it. The day before yesterday I beefed up secur

Pictures! | April 30, 2013 at 09:03

I've been hacking away at the blog again and made a little nifty photo uploader for the admin area. It resizes the image on the client (browser) before uploading it with Ajax which is great because now I can upload directly from my phone without worrying about file size. The uploader really needs its own blog post but I'm heading out so in the meanwhile, here is a sneak preview of things to come! ![Robotics](/img/upload/c79b3b1d-1008-4be5-b56d-f6f7587e99f8.jpg "The Pi-bot") Oh, that's right; inline pictures are working as well. Remember to refresh your browser cache if stuff looks weird.

4 Hours of Markdown | March 29, 2013 at 13:17

Wow, that was kind of exhausting. I've completed my rewrite of all my blog posts into Markdown. Somewhere in the middle I found why my inline HTML didn't work and that made my old posts look almost acceptable, but the syntax highlighted source code didn't work anymore since I had moved the highlighting code into the `marked` configuration. So on I went into the abyss, continuing to rewrite (more like edit) all my older posts. While I was at it I re-indented all source code examples into using 2-space indentation. Man, some posts do have a lot of source code in them. =) I made good use of SSH for connecting to my server from my parents-in-laws' cabin (where I've spent the last week). `ssh -L 8080:localhost:5984 lofjard.se` made sure I could connect to the CouchDB instance on lofjard.se.

Group Pressure | March 26, 2013 at 13:49

In a totally unoriginal move I'm now starting to wean myself off Facebook, starting by deleting the Facebook app from my phone and tablet. Since almost everyone else in the tech sector seems to have done the same thing at least once, I don't feel that I have to post any particular reason for doing so other than being tired of it. Since I'm not going cold turkey right away I will still check in on Facebook from my laptop, but the number of "feed reads" will hopefully be few and far between.

OMG New Certificates | February 6, 2013 at 14:09

One might wonder where I've been or what I've been up to these last couple of months. One would be right to wonder why I, so close to the one year anniversary of this blog, suddenly stopped writing. The truth is kind of embarassing. ## What did you do? I created a bunch of SSL certificates that were set to expire in a year (by not changing the default value). So here I was, wanting to write to you about building a robot, going to FOSDEM, hacking away at my blog etc, but I just couldn't. Well not in any easy way anyway. ## But isn't that an easy fix? My first thought was to generate new client certificates but that was when I realised that my server certificates had expired as well and my CA certificate had been lost in the [maintenance](http://lofjard.se/post/maintenance-in-progres

Old But Not Dying | September 20, 2012 at 07:35

Tuesday the 25th of September 2012 marks my 30th birthday. Even though I might not be fresh meat anymore, I haven't forgotten about my blog. I've just been busy (raise your hand if you've heard that one before). ## The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Me... * I've been planning an article about my success in getting my laptop installed with Arch Linux on UEFI, but I've yet to complete it. * I've also redesigned the blog and it now looks like crap in Firefox. * I then fixed the Firefox bugs but have'nt gotten around to uploading them because of my next bullet point. * My server operating system/software stack is ooooold. :-) ## Planned maintenance My pretty little server <abbr title="Itty Bitty Server">IBS</abbr> is running Ubuntu Server 10.4 LTS. My original plan was to update it to 12.04

Jackrabbit | June 27, 2012 at 19:47

I've finally received my new laptop. It's not the one I initially wanted (the Lenovo X230) since that on costs a small fortune in the configuration I wanted. Well at least it costs a bit too much here in Sweden with all the taxes and what not. Anyway, I settled for an Asus Zenbook Prime (UX31A) and had money left to take the family on vacation instead. ## Crapdev My old laptop (crapdev) has served me well. I didn't even pay for it since I just took it home with me when I received it's replacement at work. Yes, I've been using my old work laptop as a private workstation for the last 2-3 years and it's starting to show. ## Hello Jackrabbit I named my new toy "jackrabbit" as a nod to the restaurant from Pulp Fiction (Jackrabbit Slim's). With the UX31A measuring only 18 mm at its thickest,

Weekend Getaway | May 24, 2012 at 13:04

I'm leaving for Gothenburg in a couple of hours for some all-weekend-hacking-codapalooza-marathon-event-thingy (A.W.H.C.M.E.T?). It's going to be awesome! Also, I'll get to enjoy the company of some great friends and some great minds (not at all mutually exclusive). I have a pretty neat idea that has been brewing in the back of my mind for a few days. I'm going to put this weekend (and as many of those great minds as I can persuade) into it and see if it pans out to something usable. I might even tell you about it someday. =)

Screw You Ubuntu - I'm Going Home | March 4, 2012 at 13:49

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 things that can happen when you install new versions of software on top of the old, I setup a package manager, but Slackware still lacked a central package repository. ## All Your Source Are Belong To Us The central source repository led me to switch to Gentoo. Being able to just install things without having to find the source code online first was great, but again I grew tired. The long compile times eventually wore me out and this time the switch was made to Ubuntu. ## Out of The Box Experience Ubuntu was nice in a everything-just-wor

The Month of No Content | February 29, 2012 at 21:47

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.

I'm Not Dead... | January 22, 2012 at 12:11

... 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 I get some spare time, but for now a simple I'm-still-here-post will have to suffice. The last couple of weeks have been filled with work, migraines, sore throats and birthday parties. I also started watching a Canadian TV-series from 2004 called ReGenesis and it's been taking up most of my time at night. I'm almost halfway through the 4th and final season now, so I'm expecting more blogging to be done in the coming week.

TODO 2012 | January 5, 2012 at 13:30

Between my trip to the west coast for Christmas and my office being jammed up with boxes, there hasn't been that much developing going on for me in the last few weeks. I have, however, not been able to stay away from it completely so a few nights ago I squeezed myself into my office chair and wrote some wierd scheduler/saga-mashup code that I'm going to need next week when I'm going back to work. But that is a topic for another day (or night). Today I'm just writing down some of the stuff I will, and would like to, do during 2012. ## My 2012 TODO list * Learn a few mobile web development frameworks. This will be my spring topic for my Tuesday workshops at work. * Scan all the codes from my IR remotes so that I can finally do something more that turn the TV on and off (although this was

Feeding the crowds | December 17, 2011 at 16:37

For a while now I've been trying to decide between ATOM and RSS for by blog feed, and yesterday one of our company's owners asked me for a feed to my blog so that he could consume it at our new company web site. I've finally decided to create an ATOM feed and if anyone has any problems consuming it, please contact me and I will try to fix it. For now it's not a full feed. Each entry contains the same amount of text as the archive listings since I've yet to figure out what to do about all the source code that's in my blog posts. The source code formatting relies heavily upon CSS and I'm not even sure that I want my full posts in the feed. Until I've made up my mind it will work mainly as a way of getting notified of new posts without having to visit the web site.

Santa Lucia | December 13, 2011 at 23:03

The time left before my holiday leave is running out fast and I've got a ton of stuff to do at work. To top it all off, this entire week is filled with urgent stuff to do, when I do manage to get myself home in decent time. I apologize in advance for the lack of posts this week. I hope to get back up to speed soon.

Broken Archive | December 4, 2011 at 13:16

Turns out I broke the archive yesterday when there were suddenly two months to render posts for. It was a simple array indexing problem and now it's up and running again.

Oh Crap: Redux | November 27, 2011 at 07:09

The commenting system had stopped working again. Christ, I really need to pay more attention to it. It's probably been down since at least Thursday. On the other hand, I managed to remove my old CouchDB views without crashing the server. I can keep telling myself that something worked out the way it should.

Refresh | November 27, 2011 at 05:12

I've done a fair bit of CSS and HTML work today, so you might need to hit F5 and refresh your cache if the site looks weird. =)

Stupid admin | November 24, 2011 at 09:13

Sometimes I go to bed at night with an open ssh session running the server in the foreground. If that times out, so does the server. I really need to pay more attention to what I'm doing. Sorry about the down-time... \*ashamed\*

Programming Flu | November 20, 2011 at 22:49

This weekend I've been at home with some kind of wierd illness. At first I thought it was <del datetime="2011-11-21T15:55+01:00">angina</del> <ins datetime="2011-11-21T15:55+01:00">bacterial tonsillitis</ins> since that's what my daughter came down with right before I left for &Oslash;redev. But now I'm thinking it's something viral. Not in the Internet pretty-pictures-of-kittens way but an actual virus. I've been having some fever but it hasn't been that serious and my throat has been really soar, but it never really took of the way my daughters <del datetime="2011-11-21T15:55+01:00">angina</del> <ins datetime="2011-11-21T15:55+01:00">tonsillitis</ins> did. However, I've been totally knocked down by it. I spend half the day in bed and the other half knocked out on the couch. So far it d

Oh Crap! | November 18, 2011 at 20:52

I just realized that comments had stopped working. I had forgotten to upload the new JavaScript file with the SyntaxHighlighter code removed after I implemented it server-side. Silly me. Comments are now working again.

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