greg haygood

To go along with the previous post about building a custom install CD, I wanted to create a custom splash screen with the product's logo instead of the one from CentOS. The syslinux/isolinux mechanism requires it own format, but it's still really easy to accomplish:

Unless you're going to use a specific VGA resolution on boot, you'll need an image 640 pixels wide, and up to 480 pixels tall. 480 will fill the screen, but in order to display instructions/help underneath, you'll want less.

I needed a custom install disc for CentOS 5 in order to bundle some additional RPMs. Revisor has the promise, but it remains unstable and mostly unusable many months after I first gave it a shot. So until they knock out those issues, here are the instructions for rolling your own. I couldn't find anything specific to C5, so based this loosely on some CentoS 4.1 instructions.

QEMU is a super quick way to test custom ISO images. The major linux distros have it in their respective repositories.

JRuby has been around for a little while, and is getting lots of attention for its ability to let Ruby developers code for a Java environment, and vice versa. However, as with many young projects, there isn't much documentation when it comes to the fringe cases.

The need I came across is the following: I have a client that's been running a JSP/servlet app under Tomcat for many years (originally started with JSP 0.91!). Over time I've added more and more functionality using the same JSP, Struts, etc. toolkits as everyone else uses.

Started playing with Plone3, to see if the Reflecto product might address a client's desire to maintain the "Windows Way" of working with a shared file repository (as opposed to something like Enfold Desktop). More on that later, but in the meantime, I had to build TextIndexNG3 again since Zopyx has a different version for Plone3.

Plone (both v2 & 3) do not currently support indexing of the new Office 2007 file formats: docx, xlsx, and pptx. Even TextIndexNG3 3.1.6 doesn't understand them (I assume TNG 3.2.x, which is only for Plone3, also doesn't work).

If you've got any kind of slow queries in your Rails app, you have to check out EasyCache. Since REXML's XPath processing seems really slow on even a small document, caching is critical for performance. It was super easy to add this around my xpath queries, and immediately boosted the response time of the page. Yea!

Turns out I forgot to mention a couple extra steps to get TextIndexNG3 compiled and working on Windows.

The Plone installers for Windows don't bundle the cool TextIndexNG3 fulltext search add-on. To enable it, you need to compile the C extension module that comes with it. There's an older binary version available, but it's expecting Python 2.3, not the 2.4.4 that comes with the bundle.

The plone site is filled with documentation for authenticating against LDAP/AD with LDAPUserFolder. But Plone 2.5 has a new Pluggable Authentication Service ala PAM, but strangely no updating docs. Glad I found this post to save me the time!