Automation Adventures

Sun has released an OpenOffice extension that allows you to import a PDF and allow basic editing. It uses Draw and Impress, as opposed to the more obvious Writer, to preserve the layout of the document. Forms are not yet supported. In future versions the developers aim to support more editing capabilities, and less on layout, by using… Writer.

There are versions available for Windows, Linux (32 and 64 bit), MacOS X and Solaris (x86 and Sparc). According to the comments in the Extension, it is kind of hit or miss if the extension works for your installation, but that explains why Sun is still calling it Beta.

Tags: extension, import, open office, pdf, sun

I’ve begun to experiment with some web services at work, and an ex-colleague of mine had set up some instructions on how to configure Apache, Tomcat and mod-jk to seamlessly pass requests from Apache to Tomcat. However, the instructions were written a major version ago, and didn’t quite work with Tomcat 5.5 and the latest mod_jk.

The main problem was the reference to ApacheConfig. In Tomcat 4 this was org.apache.ajp.tomcat4.config.ApacheConfig. No twiddling with it seemed to help, and Tomcat 5 kept giving load errors. This part was referencing how to have mod_jk and Apache automatically create a configuration file. The Apache website wasn’t very helpful…

Finally, I came across a forum post somewhere (sorry, I forgot where), giving the answer: the Listener className should be org.apache.jk.config.ApacheConfig. After replacing that line in Tomcat’s conf/server.xml file, everything seemed to work like a charm!

Tags: apache, java, mod_jk, tomcat, webservice

1. (1) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit
2. (2) Blackberry desktop crashes when reading Outlook Calendar
3. (4) WoW64: How to get the Progress debugger to run in Vista 64-bit
4. (3) Setting up MXP to run under Linux
5. (5) iTunes 7.4 not properly installed

Tags: 2008, september, top 5