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New Bimini Top

bryankearney — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:34:57 +0000

The big ticket item for this year was a new bimini. Jenny really wanted one so that we could stay out on the boat longer during the summer months without getting burned. I was all for it as it would dress up the tower a bit more. However, I was a bit nervous about loosing headroom. Nothing is worse than having to duck or hit your head on a boat. We agreed to look for a over the tower bimini.

We did some research, and only found one place which would do this style. It is Tower Biminis out of California. We called them up, told them what we were looking for, and the type of boat we have. Ours is an older boat (2003) so the did not have a pattern for our tower. It was no issue tho. They sent out some measurements for us to take, we did so, and we were on our way. To make sure it would be a good fit, they even found a local place with a boat with our tower to double check the manufacturing.

2 weeks later, we had a new bimini. Blue to match the boat, with a white racing stripe. As you can see, it looks great:

When stowing it, it sits up high on the tower so that it is out of the way:

All and all, a great addition to the boat. Next year… LED lights!

2012 Stereo Build

bryankearney — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 22:03:24 +0000

My parents got me some new speakers for the boat for Christmas. The speakers are Infinity 612m’s which have a blue cone which would look great with the boat. In doing some research, I was told that I should put in a basic amp if I was upgrading to nicer speakers. Thus was born my second off season task for the boat.

The first step was to replace the speakers themselves. The bow speakers came out pretty easily:

But Moomba decided, went mounting the stern speakers, to put them behind the body panels. After bending behind the fiberglass.. and getting lots of fiberglass cuts.. I got the rear ones out:

A trip to Radio Shack to get new connectors for the speaker, and a guess that the copper wire was positive and and silver wire was ground… and the speakers were hooked up!

We took the boat out the next weekend.. and they looked good. However, the power was still a bit low. I could not hear the speakers over the engine. Next up, the amp. Need to get it to sound good. I grabbed an older JL amp off of Amazon, a JX360/4. It got good reviews and the price was right (cheap!). I went with a 4 channel.. doing 2 channels in the front and 2 in the back.

I knew I wanted to mount it out of the way, and I did not want to spend alot on 4 guage wire. I located a spot right next to the battery, and cut some pressure treated plywood I had down to size:

The local audio shop sells speaker box carpet, so I wrapped it in that to make it purty:

I then mounted the amp, the fuse and the wires. If I had done a bit more research.. I may have put the wires behind the wood, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out:

Finally, I mounted it into the front compartment behind the battery. I did not loose any space… and the wires which you see in the photo you really do not see when in the boat:

All and all, it took me about 14 hours to replace the speakers, build the amp wall, and install. I would probably give myself a B-. The wiring could be a bit neater, and the mounting could be a bit stronger. But, the next weekend when we took the boat out.. I was actually able to hear the stereo over the engine!

Here is the kids wakeboardng, while Mom and Dad are listening to Madonna the second:

First Try at Boat Detailing

bryankearney — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:17:59 +0000

Last season was our first season with the new boat. The boat was new to us so there is a bunch of fix fix it up work that needed to get done. When the boat was being winterized, I asked about having it detailed. I heard BLAH, BLAH, Wet sand, BLAH BLAH $1500. Needless to say, that inspired me to learn how to do it myself. So, I grabbed a 50% off coupon for Harbour Freight and order a Meguiars gel coat kit off of Amazon. I was in for $60 and ready to go.

This is what I had to start with. The boat had been sitting in the water with only the fitted cover, so there was a fair amount of oxidation in the gel coat.

I followed the instructions pretty religiously. I would do a round of the oxidation remover with terry cloth buffers, and then let it sit and “dry out” for a week or so. Sometimes I had to wait a bit more for the weekend with no hockey to line up with nice weather. I then touch up where I missed with the oxidation remover, and then go over the polish with a sheepskin cover and the wax with a microfiber cover of by hand. This is what I ended up with:

The good new is that I can see my reflection in the gelcoat. The bad new is that the oxidtion was covering a few gel coat scratches . I may try and pick up some gel coat repair at some point and try and clean it up. Along the way I got some great help from Jenny, who was more interested in how above the rub rail looked. So, here are a couple of photos to show off her work as well:

At the end of the day, I think we paid about $100 in product and covers. I would estimate about 15 hours of work over 3-4 weekends. We could have done it in a day and a half if weather and hockey had not gotten in the way. All and all, very rewarding!

Subscription Asset Manager

bryankearney — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:14:36 +0000

Red Hat has just released a beta version of Subscription Asset Manager. It is a new tool which is available with your subscription. The tool allows you to do on premise Subscription Management. You can see the Quick Start guide at the website.

This is the first product to come out of the great work which the team is doing on Candlepin, Katello, and Thumbslug. If you are an open source project looking to add subscription management functionality, you should stop on bye and take a look.

Using YourKit Profiles on Fedora with Tomcat as an RPM

bryankearney — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:10:24 +0000

We use YourKit at work, and it is a pretty good profiles which runs on Linux. All of the instructions I saw talk about how to integrate with Tomcat if you have the tarball install. We install with the rpms, and so a bit of investigation was required.

First, install YourKit in /opt. I had it in ~/bin but I got a whole bunch of permission errors. I have SELinux set to permissive, and this still did not help. So, for me, it is installed in /opt/yjp-9.5.4/.

Next, I added the Config for the agent to the /etc/tomcat6/tocmcat6.conf file. The line looks like this:

JAVA_OPTS=”-agentpath:/opt/yjp-9.5.4/bin/linux-x86-64/libyjpagent.so=disablestacktelemetry,disableexceptiontelemetry,builtinprobes=none,delay=10000″

When you do a “service tomcat6 start” the init scripts will pick up the JAVA_OPTS variable. You can then laucnh the profiler and connect to do the needful in looking for performance issues.

Movie article missing the point

bryankearney — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:58:11 +0000

This morning I read an article that discussed how movie ticket prices are going up but revenue is going down. In the afternoon, we went to a matinee showing of Hugo. The day proved how much the article is misses the point.

As a family, four of us went in the middle of the day. Tickets cost us 28 dollars (2 adults, 2 kids). We went for popcorn and 2 waters to split across us.. add on another 18 dollars. So, for a matinee showing the family is out 46 dollars. We were lucky, since the movie was very good and was a good way to spend a rainy day.

Back to the article. A movie is a minimum of 50 dollars right now for me. Even if the quality is super high (and lets be honest, they are not always super) I am not going to go out and drop $50 every weekend for a 2 hour activity. Especially when I have to sit through 30 minutes of ads before it. I am going to wait 3 months and rent it at home where I will be out a buck for a rental or 7 bucks for my monthly Netflix Rental.

The auto dealerships have figured it out. Some try to get as many dollars from each customer, or they try and get a large number of customers. The movie industry is trying to do the former. The latter may be a better way to increase the health of the industry.

Latest Release of Candlepin

bryankearney — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:12:51 +0000

We continue to use Scrum at work, and it is working very well. The team is able to work very independently, and very quickly. We continue to roll out new features every three weeks.

Version 0.4.11 is the latest release which adds partially subscribed logic, activation keys, and lots of additional features.

Please come on bye, and help out. You can find us at http://candlepinproject.org.

Adding Search to Rails Apps

bryankearney — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:02:17 +0000

Good blog artcile on adding search to rails apps. Used in Foreman, soon to be used in Katello and Headpin.

http://scopedsearch.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/adding-search-to-an-activerecord-rails-model/

Great Summary of Using Foreman

bryankearney — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:34:45 +0000

This came across today, great summary of setting up and using The Foreman. http://engineering.yakaz.com/managing-an-infrastructure-datacenter-with-foreman-and-puppet.html

Project Katello: Open Source System Management

bryankearney — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:17:50 +0000

As a followup to the Candlepin Post.. we have just opened up the larger project for Open Source Systems Management. The project is called Katello. The name rhymes with Jello, so that should help. The goal of this project is to bring together Content Management, Subscription Management, and Configuration Management.

If you are interested in participating, we would love the help. Come on bye, check it out, and say hi!