The original published date on this article, “The Day the Music Died“, is a little old but I think many of the points are still relevant to a lot of the online music services out there today. Certainly food for thought if you own an iPod or other similar device that allows you to pay for and download music that is restricted with DRM.

I found this amusing list of things that might make you a WordPress geek. I found myself falling into a number of the categories listed so I think it’s a strong possibility that I am in fact a WordPress geek. How do you fare against this list?

WordCamp UK is being held in Cardiff this year and on account of the fact I live relatively close by now and have always meant to go but never got around to, I’ve signed myself up. For those of you that don’t know, WordCamp is an informal gathering of bloggers and developers who use WordPress. There is an opportunity to attend talks, discuss projects and of course socialise with other technically minded individuals.

The scheduled talks look like they could prove very interesting and there is already a large group of people signed up, some of whom I have already exchanged words with over the internet on various occasions so it will be great to meet them in person. Matt Mullenweg is also attending and having the opportunity to thank him in person for creating WordPress will be really cool.

Last night facebook launched a username option which allows visitors to the site to go straight to a profile by putting the username in the URL. I of course made sure I snagged my username as soon as the system went live, so you can now access my facebook profile (if I have granted you access to it of course), on the following URL

www.facebook.com/kieranoshea

Sadly I wasn’t able to snag “kieran” for a username as it had already been taken - Kieran Cloonan I’m looking at you - grrr! I could have had “oshea” but having that as a username seemed to bring back distant memories of being called by my surname at school so I decided against it. The username “oshea” has in fact now been taken so Ben O’Shea, I wish you the best of luck with it.

All in all I think this is a good move by facebook. While some might criticise it and say it’s just another step towards becoming MySpace, I see it as more of a step towards the modern web. PHP files and arguments in the URL are so last century. Pretty permalinks and restful behaviour are what it is all about these days. While I can’t see facebook truly implementing a restful URL structure they have certainly made an important forward step with usernames.

I thought I’d share this little solution with people as its been bugging me for ages. My command line ftp client of choice, lftp, recently started not connecting. I couldn’t find a suitable solution until I noticed that the AUTH command was being used when I normally don’t make use of that for ordinary ftp sessions.

I added the following line to my lftp.conf file:

set ftp:ssl-allow false

This fixed the issue of failing to connect and everything is now working as it should. Hope this helps someone who is in a similar fix.