Join the Kearneyville

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.

Alright…. it is about time I stopped being a luddite. I have tried Facebook, Twitter (well.. identi.ca).. so now let me try a blog. Since I am doing a bit of coding this will allow me to post what I have done. And.. expose the internet more to my kids