Join the Kearneyville

At my kid’s school, a couple of times a year the parents are invited in to teach electives to the kids. I thought it would be fun to try to introduce the kids to something fun, and along the way expose them a bit to the open source world.

Now, I am not a graphics person. I have no mad photo editing skills. However, every once in a while I take photos of my kids and swap their heads to just to get a laugh. I figured this was a skill I could teach kids to do that in about an hour. The next step was to incorporate open source. I figured I would not be allowed to install the Gimp on the machines. So, I decided to create a live image for the kids to try on the school computers. I went out to the Fedora Spins Page and created a variation of Fedora 17 which included the Gimp and defaulted the background to the school logo. The desktop looked like:

The next step was to get my live image into school. I made the image small enough to fit onto a CD, but I figured it would be fun if the kids could save their work. I went to work, explained what I was going to do, and begged for donations. I got great support from Mairin Duffy and Robyn Bergeron from the Fedora Project; Theron Conrey from the Ovirt Project; John Adams, David Huff, and Paula Weigel from Red Hat. They were all very generous:

With a bunch of USB keys, I went to work burning the images onto the keys. My son did a couple of test runs for me to make sure things worked, and I learned a bunch about burning live usbs. For example, now know where my laptops hard drive is mounted because I blew it away . I ended up building the images with the following command:

livecd-iso-to-disk –reset-mbr –home-size-mb 45 –delete-home –force –noverify –unencrypted-home /home/bkearney/code/spin-kickstarts/Lourdes.iso /dev/sdb1

The day of the electives, I ended up having about 20 students over two classes. In each class, I explained about open source, and what Fedora is. I also explained what a live USB was and that they would be running Fedora. We then powered up the Gimp and went through a quick tutorial of putting Darth Vader’s head on top of Tony Stark’s Body. The end product looked like this:

Then they were allowed to play around with a set of faces on the images. I saw things like Taylor-Maximus:

Beyonce Obama, Sorcerer Tim Sherlock Holmes, and Terminator Black Widow. The usb keys would freeze up if they kids saved them. I am not sure if it was how I built the keys, or the hardware.

All and all I think the class had fun. They got to learn a couple of basic photo editing skills, they were introduced to Fedora, and they got to take  home the USB keys and maybe show it to their friends and family. In case you were wondering, I did hide the “Install to Hard drive” option. Although it would be cool to have them use Fedora at home, I figured I may get an upset parent or two. It is still in there tho, so who knows!

After 2 Brick Magic lego conventions, and a few orders from Brink Link I finally finished a small Shadowman Lego picture. Not too bad for a first time out:

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!

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.

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.

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.

We started to get this years roung of phone books. I dont know who uses them any more. Here is my message:

Please note, the second image is the recycle bin

Red Hat has just put out a new community service, opensource.com. The goal is get together and discuss how the open source principals can be applied not only to technology but to business, education, and government. Come on bye.. and check out the conversation.