the corner office

Some tech things not worth their own blog posts:

• Java properties files are meant to be encoded as ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8. That's a bit of a pain and very counter-intuitive when you're using .properties for i18n resource bundles (and may well trip you up the first time you work on a multi-language app). Java's native2ascii tool (and the related maven plug-in) are very useful. I also learned/remembered why I far prefer server-side development to web stuff.

• Speaking of which, I've been playing with Apache MINA. It's way cool and Java's nio is smoking quick. A colleague asked 'how fast?', so I tried an experiment. I was able to set up two windows clients with 3,500 clients each hitting a MINA reverse-echo server on Linux, concurrently handling 7,000 open connections, and handling thousands of requests a second. And the server using a little over 30 megs of memory. You couldn't do that with normal Java thread-per-connection blocking IO. Async message handling is a pain though. ByteBuffers take some getting used to; I keep thinking there must be an easier way. Or at the least, a simpler alternative if you don't need the fancy things that BBs give you.

• Ubuntu 8.04 has a little thing called 'AppArmor' and it makes doing something trivial like running mysql with a non-standard user suddenly very non-trivial indeed (eg.)

• Google Chrome: zippy, but not my idea of pretty. I've only tried it on XP, it uses Vista-style window widgets, which really grates me. I don't see anything that makes it more compelling than Firefox. Competition is good, but I'm happy with Firefox.