Merge pull request #399 from anodelman/make-gem

create beaker 1.17.1 gem
(QENG-1081) Beaker Fails During Pre-suite in the "install_pe"...

... Function on Windows

- when using an array of hosts the command object was overwritten and
  thus the platform specific information was lost
(QENG-1086) The master-start-curl-retries is preset to...

...0, which causes default hosts not to retry verifying a bounced master.

- host value being overwritten by default presets
(QENG-1090) beaker: exception when waiting for instance running in ec2

- correctly capture AWS::EC2::Errors::InvalidInstanceID::NotFound when
  checking status of newly created instance, deal with it as another
  case that requires a retry
(QENG-1087) beaker - failure in XML output

- caused by improperly stripping unsupported unicode characters from xml
  output
- add inclusion of 'jcode' for ruby 1.8 (included with Ruby and adds
  lots of useful Unicode-oriented features to String and Regexp)
- tested on 1.9 and 1.8 and correctly replaced invalid unicode with
  escaped hex value
Merge pull request #404 from anodelman/fix-default

(QENG-1086) The master-start-curl-retries is preset to...
Merge pull request #405 from anodelman/utf-8-encoding

(QENG-1087) beaker - failure in XML output
Merge pull request #403 from anodelman/win-fix

(QENG-1081) Beaker Fails During Pre-suite in the "install_pe"...
Merge pull request #406 from anodelman/ec2

(QENG-1090) beaker: exception when waiting for instance running in ec2
(GEM) update version number for 1.17.2
(HISTORY) update history for 1.17.2 gem