Google's Chrome browser is picking up speed lately, and the folks at Google are adding all sorts of interesting features and flags to the developer builds of Chromium. How do you start Chromium while passing command-line options on OSX? Assuming you've download the latest Chromium developer build:

open -n -a 'Chromium.app' --args <options>

Peter Beverloo has assembled a list of available command-line switches - check it out.

I decided to give Apache Ivy a try. I was looking at an old Ant build, and I was toying around with the idea of just "adapting" it to a repository manager. I fooled around with Ivy a bit. Had it retrieve some artifacts from an "ibiblio" repository type. Ivy, for some reason, calls the Maven repository format an ibiblio format. This would make sense five years ago, but now it is just an odd anachronism.

The basic performance of Protocol Buffers in a simple, unscientific experiment...

Encode One PositionData to byte[] 595 nanoseconds
Decode One PositionData from byte[] 970 nanoseconds

The basic performance of jsonlib in a simple, unscientific experiment...

Encode One PositionData to String 30 microseconds
Decode One PositionData from String 41 microseconds

This is something of a coup. For countless years I avoided PHP like it was a disease. I viewed it as a half-language. The implementation technology one would use as a last resort. "You program in PHP?" "Surely, you jest."

I've had a few requests from readers to create PDFs of individual chapters. Maybe you need to bring a team up to speed on a particular component like Commons Lang or Commons BeanUtils and it makes more sense to send people a focused, 20-page chapter on a single topic? Whatever the reason for the request, I decided to change the book's build to add these separate chapter downloads.