Hot off the press and into my new albums playlist on spotify this week, Four80East’s latest offering, Off Duty. Frequently blasting out of my car speakers as I embark on another long trip somewhere, Four80East have once again made an easy home in my hi-fi. Their unmistakable style still shining strong and true but the fresh nature of the music on this pressing simply can’t be ignored.

After a few minutes on the turntable I can’t help but draw distinct parallels with Nocturnal, the sultry undertones and softer rhythm section lending its self strongly to that laid back, late night lounge listening with a long tall one and a summer breeze drifting across the terrace.

It’s not all mellow grooves though; the first track on the album, The Walker, brings in a distinct crisp modern edge on the lyrics side of things and Nothing is Written, a track around the mid section of the album, has a distinctly Eastern fusion flavour to it which I feel is certainly a new angle by the group but a foray which seems to have paid off.

It’s rare I find myself consistently impressed by a Jazz group’s offerings over a number of consecutive years but I do believe that Four80East are strongly bucking the trend. For fans who remember their sounds in the noughties I’d recommend checking out tracks from this album “Cashed Out” and “The Walker”, while those seeking something a little more up to date from the group will thoroughly enjoy “Sandbar” and “Gare Du Nord”.

A welcome addition to any jazz-head’s collection, a purchase of this album won’t disappoint.

When grabbing photos from my iPhone I often find that it has a funny idea of where “up” actually is and while the EXIF data always allows you to correct the problem I’d rather my image was simply the correct way up to start with and an EXIF rotate tag of 0 degrees rather than upside down with an EXIF rotate tag of 180 degrees!

Luckily I discovered a little utility that can be plugged in to the nautilus file/folder browser on the gnome desktop which lets you simply Ctrl-click the errant photos and then right click and hit rotate, later entering the amount you wish to compensate the images by and away it goes and batch rotates the images for you.

To install on Ubuntu (or any other Debian based system) just run the following

sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter

Enjoy your properly orientated photos!

Google is somewhat sketchy on what you have to do if you wish to hide the password string passed to SQLPlus on the command line from ps aux to enhance the security of automated processes on servers that may be accessible in part to others.

The answer actually turns out to be quite simple but it is best explained with a snippet of code, the below to be placed in a BASH script.

sqlplus -L /nolog <<EOF >> test.log
CONN user/password@tnsname
@test.sql
EOF

To explain the components then.

• -L tells SQLPlus to only attempt a login once. This means that if access is denied, the account you’re trying to access won’t get locked after 3 attempts.
• /nolog on the command line forces a prompt without a connection to a server. This allows you to specify a connection string as part of your script instead of on the command line which would then be visible to ps aux.
• <<EOF indicates that the input to SQLPlus will be a stream of lines, to be read until an EOF is sent on a line.
• >> test.log logs the output of the activities of SQLPlus to a named file, in this case test.log
• CONN user/password@tnsname passes your credentials to SQLPlus and causes it to establish a connection with the server sitting behind the TNS name. Being passed this way the credentials will appear neither on ps aux or in test.log
• @test.sql tells SQLPlus that it should read in and execute the file test.sql
• EOF terminates the feed in of lines and causes everything fed in thus far to be executed

I hope this ends up saving some head scratching

After a recent kernel upgrade on my home server I noticed that Kworker was hogging most of the CPU after boot and wasn’t dying down over time. Research online lead me to believe this was due to an ACPI interrupt storm creating a high load. I tested a fix for this by adding the following line to root crontab

@reboot echo "disable" > /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/gpe00

This essentially serves to switch off ACPI and upon reboot I found that CPU usage had indeed returned to normal. As setting ACPI to off has no impact on my home server and what it is used for I decided to leave this tweak in place and to check to see if it was still required when future kernel upgrades come around – this has been a widely reported bug on Ubuntu launchpad.

While recently upgrading my headess Ubuntu home server I came across an issue whereby boot would hang due to some issue with plymouth, the application providing the graphical splash screen shown when Ubuntu boots. As this server is headless I decided that rather than seek to resolve the issues I’d simply remove plymouth, after all it isn’t any use on a headless system to show a splash screen on boot!

Plymouth is unfortunately a dependency in apt for two important packages, cryptsetup and mountall and as such cannot be removed using the usual apt-get remove method. As plymouth is in fact not really required by these components, we can replace it with a dummy package that will keep apt happy and allow us to boot up sans-plymouth.

Firstly configure a dummy package

vi plymouth

Enter in the following details

Section: misc
Priority: optional
Standards-Version: 3.9.2

Package: plymouth-dummy
Version: 1.0
Provides: plymouth
Architecture: all
Description: Dummy plymouth package to allow proper plymouth removal

Now build your new package

equivs-build plymouth

If you get an error running this command saying it doesn’t exist, install it using apt as follows, then re-run

apt-get install equivs

Once you have your dummy package, we can now force remove plymouth and replace it with it’s dummy. To do this without affecting any if it’s dependencies, we do this using dpkg

dpkg -r --force-depends plymouth

Then we replace what we removed with the dummy package as follows

dpkg -i plymouth-dummy_1.0_all.deb

We can now safely reboot the server knowing that plymouth will not be available at boot but all other components will be. For me this fixed an annoying partial boot problem, for you it may just mean the removal of a component you really don’t need in headless mode. Either way, I hope this proves useful.

On my way out of the office today a strange patterned mark was visible on the push plate of the internal door. Upon closer inspection it was revealed to have been made by the sole of someone’s dust covered boot. Evidently a frustrating day at work can end in more ways than a few pints down the pub; this chap actually had to kick his way out of the building!

I had cause today to verify if a number of e-mail addresses really existed and stumbled across this easy to use web based tool, verify email. It’s handy because it also provides visual feedback of the interaction with the mail server on the domain which saves you having to fire up a telnet session.

Those who host their sites on my network for free in exchange for a link back to this site (and a pint or two) got a bit of an upgrade last night with near unlimited bandwidth and a doubling of available disk space.

This was possible in part due to a number of domains on my hosting list having lapsed thus freeing up space for those who still have active sites.

If your domain is one of those that has lapsed the hosted content has now been backed up and removed from the server with the files available on request. If you choose to re-register the domain and still wish to be hosted you can get in touch.

Now is also a good time to ask people to check their back links; there are a number of offenders in this area but usually this arises though inadvertent omission such as during a re-design or theme change.

Finally a quick reminder to ensure that your installed applications are kept up to date (there has been a WordPress update recently that not everyone has installed) and above all, happy blogging and enjoy the free hosting!

While combing through my WordPress dashboard this morning I was pointed by Matt in the direction of Jack Cheng’s article on The Slow Web.

The concept really captured my imagination; struggling in the present day and age to keep up with the ever increasing demand both to consume and generate online content I regularly find myself simply desiring escape rather than engagement as the agony of deciding often seems worse then the effort of doing.

By adopting a “batch, refine and consume at leisure” approach it genuinely seems that not only will the pressure to keep up dwindle but that quality and enjoyment will rise at the same time.

Take blogging. I’ve posted in the past about getting my blogging back on track but evidently this hasn’t happened. It’s not for lack of material, or indeed motivation, but the simply overwhelming number of possibilities and equivalent perceived value attached to each prevent suitable desire being channelled into the generation of even one finished item.

Speaking at WordCamp in Manchester three years ago I proposed a solution to this which, in retrospect, I believe was wrong. I stated that as the web sped up, our time available to each task was smaller and thus we should leverage the fast tools available to us (phones, cameras, GPS tracking) and push or pull all of this content automatically into a location (such as a blog) that used to require time, labour and love to maintain, thereby bolstering our web presence and preventing personal burn out.

The sad thing is, this approach is a fraud, a cheap imitation. After all, the nature lover desires not to merely see the sunset and the fact I was there but to catch a glimpse of the poetic thoughts that may have passed through my mind as I gazed upon the vista and compare them to his or her own.

I’m not sure these thoughts and ideas translate easily into a course of action but perhaps that’s the point; given the time and space to merely think, positive and decisive action will surely follow.

It will not be a surprise to some that I have bought yet another domain name, but this new one is a little bit special.

When tweeting we’re all accustomed to the shortening of URLs, most commonly using bit.ly, but in this day and age, personalisation is all the rage and can have important implications.

Lets say for example that someone posts a link to the BBC on twitter via bit.ly. Their service helpfully translates their URL so that it appears as bbc.in followed by the short code. That way everyone knows, that when they click on the link, they will end up at a site owned and operated by the BBC.

As well as inspiring confidence to click the link, origin is also transferred through re-tweets. What do I mean by that? Well, say I post an article and tweet about it using a bit.ly link. It is only once a user has clicked the link that they necessarily know it’s my article. Before that in the mind of the user, the article could in fact have originated from any twitter user who happens to have included the link in their tweet. Thus by having my own short code domain, my linked-to content can always be traced back to me, however a reader may have stumbled upon the link.

All well and good you might say, but does this really justify the expense? Well perhaps not, at least on it’s own. You see when you own and control a short code domain you can do clever things with it. For example, if I post a video on my site and link to it with a short code, the user must first traverse from short URL, to site, then in turn to video. What I can do if I own the short domain however is to make the short URL the actual permanent link for the content and save the user some hoop jumping. While I haven’t got a strategy for implementing this kind of thing yet, it’s certainly nice to have the option of doing so in the future.

The question you’re all asking then, why the .sh extension? Well, seeing as the .uk extension is not available for registration as a TLD I needed a suffix that both identified myself with the United Kingdom but also which was something related to me or my field of work; .sh does both of those things.

The domain suffix belongs to the island of Saint Helena, a British Overseas Territory and as an added bonus the .sh file extension is well known in the Linux and Unix world to denote a shell script which is quite possibly the most versatile way of accomplishing both manual and scheduled tasks on the platform. As an avid supporter of open source and long time Linux user, this fitted the bill perfectly.

So finally then, when you see a kjo.sh link, view it with trust – it will ALWAYS link you to a site under my control and you have my personal assurance that content served up from such sites will be safe. The root of the domain with no short code attached will form a permanent link to this article thereby explaining to the uninitiated who the short domain belongs to and proffering an explanation as to how and why it came into being.