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.

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!

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

As my office is just round the corner from Fleet Street I nipped out to see the funeral procession file past and Shweta grabbed a few photos

@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.

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.

First weekend after going back to work in the New Year called for a relaxing walk in the countryside

The usual annual photo set from Christmas with my family

A romantic weekend away in Paris with Shweta to start the Christmas period off

Making the most of the sunshine and broad Autumn skies, Shweta and I headed out to view the Autumnal colours at Westonbirt Arboretum