web and print with moinmoin, pdflatex, google charts and eastwood

As always, this is mainly a reminder to myself... We wanted to create a nice report/handbook that will be occasionally be printed, but in between printings should be a living (web) document. As typical for reports, it will contain charts and tables. We went with a wiki, which has pretty good tables and google charts looked like a perfect fit, until we saw that output is limited to png with a maximum resolution of 300k pixels. Then we found eastwood, a reimplementation of the google chart api in java with jfreechart as the back end.

Poor Man's Java memory profiler

Here is an example of do-it-yourself memory profiling e.g. showing used heap memory over the life of a program run. I compared it with results from YourKit to convince myself it's ok.

The concept:

• Launch a separate thread that collects used memory stats
  
• add a shutdown hook to output the stats