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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.

I had to install Oracle XE on a Fedora 11 machine, and had lots of trouble. This blog post:

http://remcodeblok.blogspot.com/2009/07/install-oracle-xe-on-fedora-11-x8664.html

provided the help to get it running. A couple of other things to note:

1) You have to install xterm. The rpm does not force that depdency for you.
2) If you do not have glibc installed, there is no visible error message. No log, and the rpm does not enfore the dependency.