Myself, Coding, Ranting, and Madness

Keeping the Blog Fast

Although I've dropped off the front page for any useful set of keywords in GoogleNow 11th for C++ for Physicists, I still take some amount of pride in this blog. Some of the content is even readable, and the underlying tech does seem to work.

Part of my guiding principles in the design of the blog has been to keep it really fast and really technical simple. I’ve discussed some of the server work I’ve done on this in previous posts. What I have been working on more recently is reducing what is being sent to the browser.

PHP FPM Configuation

Last week I talked for a long while about using PHP FPM to speed up the site, but avoided offering up any of the configurations files. The support for FPM and Apache is still a bit thin on the ground — niginx seems to have quite a lot of support and questions out their on this topic already. As such, I'm not entirely sure if I'm doing this the most efficient way, so don't take this as good support advice.

PHP Fast Process Manager

The design of Acorn and Mangler was aiming for light-weight and blisteringly fast — however, eventually you become limited by the tools that you're using. A good example of this is the standard LAMP stack that is ubiquitous in both smaller, and larger web environments.

The Underused Bits of ASCII

7-bit ASCII and it's mapping onto UTF-8 is one of the few nice things left in in the mess that is character encoding. The 128 possible values that ASCII are mainly use for the latin character set, ‘arabic’ numerals, and the common punctuation you see on a standard keyboard.

Mangler's Tag Parser

Wordpress might well be an unauthenticated remote shell, with a blog added, but it does has a number of exciting features. These include the flexible support for ‘Short Codes’, essentially extra custom tags which are processed server side. These formed the basis of my footnotes plug-in, Note-n-Cite.

Governing? There's an app for that!

Government is steadily becoming more digital: we've had services.gov.uk, data.gov.uk, and legislation.gov.uk providing online access to a wide range of data. This year has seen something of a drive for getting the politician into the digital age.

Factor.js and Rational.js

Non-integer number handling in JavaScript is...somewhat fuzzy. And not in the cute critter kind of way. Some implementations of JS use a variation on IEEE-754; the standard seems to be that a minimum of 64 bits are used to represent the number.

Welcome to Mangler

Welcome to the new version of my blog, now powered by Mangler. You can find out more about the other bits and bobs I've used in the theme information page.

It's going to be a bit sparse for a little while — there were some rather last minute changes to engine, so I'm going to have to work on the importing of old posts all over again. That's going to take a little while, especially as I haven't finished writing the administration interface for Mangler yet.

Noggle

What happens when I get utterly destroyed playing boggle? I write a training program where you have to, as a single player, find words as a path of letters! You can play the result, called Noggle, and have some fun looking for words. The code is not compatible with any current version of Internet Explorer.