Gruber, about Apple probably removing the jack and maybe shipping wireless earbuds by default with the next iPhone:

[…]not that one port is better than another, but that wireless is better than wired.

It’s not that wireless is better than wired – it’s that Bluetooth (as it’s widely speculated that Apple would still stick to that technology) is a far better alternative than something proprietary like the Lightning port. The complete absence of the “proprietary vs. compatible/open” considerations from the Apple bloggers is not only baffling but incredibly worrying to me. If Apple was to use, say, AirPlay, that would still be a terrible choice.

A transition towards Bluetooth as the replacement to the venerable jack port would be tolerable in the short term, and would maybe (hopefully) drive improvement on how OSes and devices work with it – for instance, the experience of switching your wireless headphones between devices is far from ideal, and that’s a very common scenario for me, almost on a daily basis. But frankly, I’m not looking forward to having to manage yet another battery level, and having headphones become obsolete with wireless protocol updates.

Update: the times reported by the Bench utility are CPU times, i.e. they represent the time spent working by your various CPUs. The “real/wall” time, i.e. the time you effectively have to wait as a user, is usually a third less than that. So the “real” time for my blog went roughly from 7 seconds to 5 seconds.

In a previous blog post about PieCrust performance, I mentioned how static site generators are dependent on the performance of their formatting and templating libraries. One of the most common formatters are Markdown formatters and, by default, PieCrust uses Python Markdown. It’s the easiest one to install and use, but it’s far from the fastest one.

As far as I know, the fastest one that’s still maintained is Hoedown, for which some Python bindings exist. And if you have a recent enough version of PieCrust, there will be support for a Hoedown formatter, as long as you install Hoedown. You can do that by running pip install hoedown.

Once installed, you can make replace Markdown with Hoedown by writing this in your config.yml, or in a config variant:

site:
    default_format: hoedown
    auto_formats:
        md: hoedown

Any extensions you have declared for the Markdown formatter generally also translate directly to Hoedown:

hoedown:
    extensions: [fenced_code, footnotes, smartypants]

The performance increase can be pretty noticeable. For instance, on my ancient MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo), this blog takes almost 9 seconds to bake¹:

With Hoedown, the time goes down to 7.2 seconds:

Pretty worth it if you ask me! Now most of the time spent baking happens during templating with Jinja2… time to look for a faster alternative?