After a brief hiatus concerned with moving this site onto a new server and the excitement that brings (lost files, configuration issues, corrupted databases etc.), I’m back on the blog.

Regulars will notice some missing posts, about 2 weeks worth. This was due to an rsync accident prior to migration which resulted in my having to fall back on one of my full weekly backups, which just so happened not to have run last week.

Still, I should be thankful – I’ve seen bloggers lose their entire site with no backups and have had to start from day one. By comparison 2 weeks of data is nothing.

I would however still like to apologise to those who have lost forum posts and article comments. If you were waiting for a reply I advise you re-post as I have no record of ever having received your query. Users who registered on the forums in the last 2 weeks will have to re-register too.

Here’s hoping this site will see many good years of trouble free service in it’s new home!

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?

The first translations have begun to trickle through for Calendar; German, Spanish and Galician. You can download these translations in the translations thread on the calendar forums.

Many thanks to those who have taken the time to translate and who have shared their work with others by submitting it to me for publication. If you have translated Calendar into your native language, please submit your PO file to me for compilation and distribution.

I would like to extend my congratulations to the following Leeds School of Computing students who received their degree classifications today

• Matt Revell – 2:1
• Nicci Kerrison – 2:1
• Chris Clarke – 2:2

Well done for all your hard work, you certainly deserve to have done so well. I shall be seeing you all at graduation and sharing a pint (or two!) with you after the ceremony 🙂

On my way to and from work today the set of traffic lights that allow traffic to cross the busy dual-carriageway and into Lydiard fields business park were out, thus necessitating a rather hair-raising dash in front of two lanes of fast moving traffic in order to get to the office car park.

I must say that I really hope the lights are fixed tomorrow morning (I saw a repair van there on my way home) as my experience today is one I’d rather not repeat any time soon.

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.

The previously scheduled Randy Crawford concert at North Sea Jazz 2009 has been cancelled. This is reported to be due to ill health although details are sketchy at this stage.

It would also appear that all of Randy’s previously scheduled concerts have been cancelled. While no official announcement has been made on her MySpace page, the upcoming concert list has been updated with a cancelled notice beside each event. Posts from fans sending their best wishes have already started to arrive in the comments section.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish Randy all the best for a speedy recovery and I hope we will have the opportunity to see her in concert again soon.

So my flights, hotel and entrance tickets are all booked for the 2009 North Sea Jazz festival in Rotterdam. Given that the festival is just over a month away, I am more than just a bit excited about the line up and how awesome being this close to so much musical action is going to be.

At present I’m thinking my concert attendance during the festival is going to be something along the lines of the following.

Friday 10 July

• 16:45 – 17:45 : Nationaal Jeugd Jazz Orkest conducted by Peter Guidi
• 18:00 – 19:15 : Lee Ritenour
• 19:15 – 20:00 : The Temple Jazz Orchestra
• 20:00 – 21:00 : George Benson A Tribute to Nat King Cole
• 21:00 – 22:15 : BB King
• 22:30 – 23:30 : Ari Hoenig Group
• 00:00 – 01:15 : Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor

Saturday 11 July

• 16:45 – 17:45 : Codarts Big Band conducted by Maria Schneider
• 18:15 – 19:30 : Randy Crawford & Joe Sample Trio
• 19:30 – 20:45 : SMV feat. Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Victor Wooten
• 21:00 – 21:45 : Blazin’ Quartet
• 22:00 – 23:15 : James Hunter
• 00:00 – 01:15 : Candy Dulfer Band with special guests

Sunday 12 July

• 15:00 – 16:00 : Amsterdams Conservatorium Concert Big Band plays the music of Porgy and Bess conducted by Justin DiCioccio
• 16:30 – 17:45 : David Sanborn and Horns – feat. Ricky Peterson, Richard Patterson, Gene Lake
• 17:45 – 19:00 : John Scofield Piety Street Band
• 19:30 – 20:45 : Seal
• 21:00 – 22:15 : Anthony Braxton Diamond Curtain Wall Trio w/Mary Halvorson and Taylor Ho Bynum
• 22:30 – 23:45 : Jazzanova Live! featuring Paul Randolph

In addition to enjoying all of this music I will be writing reviews of each performance for my site and taking plenty of photos.

If you are going along to the festival, please get in touch and maybe we can meet up!

It has recently come to my attention that users of Calendar were having trouble registering on my support forums so they could ask questions – activation e-mails were not arriving.

I have now fixed the issue with the server that was causing these e-mails to fail and have ensured that all outstanding messages have been sent, so anyone who registered so they could ask a question and hadn’t yet had got their account activated should now be able to do so.