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I recently deployed Hudson on Tomcat 5 running on Fedora Core 6. A few things to note:

• Make sure to Hudson’s home directory belongs to the Tomcat user, i.e. chown -R tomcat.tomcat on Hudson’s home directory.
• To change Hudson’s home directory from /usr/share/tomcat/.hudson to somewhere else, edit /etc/tomcat5/tomcat5.conf and add something like -DHUDSON_HOME=/home/hudson to JAVA_OPTS.
• While you’re at it, add -server to JAVA_OPTS too. Sun’s server VM blows my mind.
• Securing Hudson is pretty simple. It doesn’t seem like Tomcat requires any additional configuration after enabling security in Hudson itself.
• If you have any other issues, check /var/log/tomcat5/catalina.out.

I recently set up Tomcat 5 on Fedora Core 6 for a top secret pet project involving Hudson. I was able to follow the steps in Tomcat 5 on Fedora Core 6: In Five Easy Steps most of the way, but I had the problem that accessing a Tomcat application through mod_proxy_ajp without a trailing slash in the URI would cause a 404 error. I went for the following solution:

LoadModule proxy_ajp_module modules/mod_proxy_ajp.so
ProxyPass /tomcat/ ajp://localhost:8009/
RedirectMatch permanent ^/tomcat$ /tomcat/
ProxyPass /examples/ ajp://localhost:8009/jsp-examples/
RedirectMatch permanent ^/examples$ /examples/

If anybody knows how to do this without the RedirectMatch, I’d like to know.

Just spotted a mention of Yahoo! Research’s Pig project on the Hadoop mailing list. More at Geeking with Greg: Yahoo Pig and Google Sawzall.

I recently experimented with Boost uBLAS a bit, especially with the BLAS and LAPACK bindings. I was able to link against the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) without problems.

I also recently resurrected a Python script I wrote to convert the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) autoconf/automake build scripts into Visual Studio project files. Using these, I was able to build GSL as a DLL linked against Intel MKL. In the process, I uncovered a few differences between the GSL BLAS and Intel MKL BLAS implementations which I reported to the bug-gsl mailing list.

In recent months I’ve played around with quite a few Continuous Integration servers for building a bunch of Java projects. I looked at CruiseControl (old, complicated to configure) and Continuum (good for Maven projects, but hasn’t had a release in a while). Recently, I tried Hudson (a spin-off from the Glassfish project, I think) and I’m very impressed. Getting it up and running is dead easy and configuration is a breeze. Also, the developers quickly respond to bug reports. Hudson can build Ant, Maven or shell projects (so you can build just about anything with it). Check it out.