Are you a top quality system administrator? Do you know about Linux, Windows networking, Apache, Subversion and all things web? If you are then we need you!

You can see the full job spec over at whitelabeldating.com but for now here’s a snippet of the job advert.

Global Personals, the company behind WhiteLabelDating.com, is looking for a talented and enthusiastic Systems Administrator to join our technical team.

You’ll join 11 developers, designers and project managers focused on creating the best online dating platform in the industry. You’ll be an essential part of the company maintaining our infrastructure, supporting our clients and providing day-to-day IT support for all departments.

Working closely with the Technical Operations Manager, you will be responsible for services such as web server configuration, SSL certificates and domain renewals and will help manage the code release process when required. You will also work with our account management team to provide technical support for hundreds of partner sites.

If you do go ahead and apply make sure you mention me.

Been playing with Rails 2.3.2.1 and Passenger 2.1.2 but had some problems upgrading from the two respective earlier versions. The key was in the fact I probably didn’t RTFM. Following the guides.rubyonrails.org I’d got as far as section 4, changing the default index but whenever I did this or tried to view the controller directly on my Mac (10.5.6) it just 500 errored. The key was something that a friend (@neilmiddleton) alluded to was that the app was running in production mode. There was no errors in the log files also aiding the diagnosis.

Solution? Pretty simple, just add an environment variable.

ServerName rortest.local
DocumentRoot "/Users/ian/Sites/rortest/public"
RailsEnv development

Now I’ve got to try and write something useful rather than hello world or a blog post/view page.

The fitness campaign continues and seemingly still going OK. Last week wasn’t particularly good with only one trip due to a couple of late nights at work and general stuff going on. Over the weekend that was slightly made up for with a 8km cycle in the gym following by some arm weights, on Sunday I managed to up my swimming distance to 1100m (44 lengths). It did take slightly longer at 50 minutes but hopefully that’ll come down.

So far not much sign of weight loss, though that I’m not too fussed about as long as the belly decreases it’s presence!

As you may or may not know I work at Global Personals / WhiteLabelDating.com. We’re currently after some top quality Ruby on Rails Developers to work from our Windsor office here in the UK. If you think you might fit the bill drop Ross Williams a line (rwilliams@globalpersonals.co.uk) and be sure to mention you saw the advert here.

Job Description

Global Personals, the company behind WhiteLabelDating.com, has a fantastic opportunity for talented, experienced Rails developers to join our development team.

You’ll join 11 developers, designers and project managers focused on creating the best online dating platform in the industry. We’re just beginning a series of new projects in Rails – you’ll be joining right at the start to help influence decisions based on your expert Rails skills and experience.

You’ll be based on the top floor of our lovely headquarters at 1 High Street in the middle of Windsor. It’s easily commutable from London (West via Paddington or South-West direct from Waterloo), Reading, Bracknell, Staines or Slough.

We give our people the best tools. You’ll get a brand new 24in iMac and a 23in Cinema Display to work on (or a top-end PC if you insist) and you’ll sit at a big desk on a swanky Hermann Miller Aeron chair. We have a free posh coffee machine in our own kitchen, XBox 360, Wii, LCD TVs, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Mario Kart, football table and other toys.

Salary will be based on experience, but will likely be in the range of £35k-£60k (negotiable).

We pay a £1000 bonus after your three month probation if you’ve come direct to us. Following your successful probation we’ll pay up to 5% of your salary into your company pension, contribute to gym membership, plus other benefits.

You’ll need the following skills/attributes:

• Ruby on Rails – essential to demonstrate your Rails experience
• MySQL (or equivalent RDBMS)
• Strong communicator, teamworker and best practice stickler
• Excellent knowledge of Javascript using Prototype/Scriptaculous
• Ability to write clean, semantic, well-formed HTML and CSS
• Proficiency with Linux or Unix
• Subversion

The following are desirables:

• TDD and/or BDD
• Experience of Agile working environment
• Open source projects or blogs you’ve written on
• Previous dating or social networking projects
• ColdFusion and PHP

Company Description

The largest private online dating company in the UK with offices in Windsor, Miami, New York and Sydney.

Adobe have today released announced the 2nd hotfix for ColdFusion 8.0.1. You can go get it from the Adobe site. It has quite a few bug fixes listed as well.

I’ve managed to reach my fitness goal a bit early. I’ve  got myself to 1000m/40 lengths in the pool (25m) ahead of when I wanted to. I was hoping to make it by the end of the month but am early. Problem is now deciding on what the next goal should be. I did 40 lengths in 40 minutes so I guess I need to try and get that down by 10 minutes but if I get to 1000m in 30 minutes then it’s not going to be pushing myself. I guess the next step is try to get all the way up to 2000m in less than an hour but that’s quite a long way off!

I do also need to do other stuff though. I’ve been neglecting the gym a bit and concentrating on the swimming so I may just keep the swimming pace as is and then go for doing a goal on either rowing machine, bike or treadmill. I hate the treadmill/running so I think I might start out with cycling or rowing.

Next time I go to the gym I’ll let you know what happens.

The World Wide Web as we know it turns 20 tomorrow, 13th March 2009. The following is a brief history of what went on (source unknown).

Tomorrow (Friday), the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) will celebrate the 20th birthday of the worldwide web, an event that sparked a technology revolution.

Although the two words are widely thought to be interchangeable, it is important to distinguish the web from the internet, which has existed in various forms since the 1950s. The internet defines a series of interconnected networks that allow data packets to travel, these days mostly using the TCP/IP transmission protocol, from one connected system to another.

The worldwide web, on the other hand, is more a network of content servers that allows information to be shared in specially formatted documents, hosted on systems connected to each other via the internet.

From humble beginnings as a proposal for a more effective document management system for internal use by Cern personnel, the web has grown exponentially into a global phenomenon, where almost a quarter of the world’s population convene to view and publish every type of information imaginable, and as a platform for communication, commercial transactions, dating, e-learning, entertainment, file swapping, software distribution and many other activities too numerous and diverse to list here.

So much so, that 20 years on, our reliance on the web for all, or the vast majority, of our information gathering has now become so complete that major internet outages that deny us access can quite literally bring our world to a crashing halt.

Cern has chosen Friday 13 March to mark the 20th anniversary of the day when one of its employees, Briton Tim Berners-Lee, first proposed a “universal linked information system” that would over the next few years develop into what we now know as the worldwide web. It was originally designed as a way of improving information management within Cern  then as now a large organisation employing several thousand people who all needed to communicate, share information, equipment and software. Read more…

I decided as a new year’s resolution to try and get a bit fitter. That didn’t really happen so in the last few weeks I’ve been sticking to it by going to the pool twice a week and the gym at least once or twice. First off in the pool I did 20 lengths which is 500m. Last time I got that up to 24/600m and I’m hoping that by the end of the month I can be doing 40/1000m. I do feel better in myself for doing more exercise and also trying to eat better. We shall see if it pays off!

Here we are again with another new site. This time a bit of design tweaking but most significantly a move over to WordPress. The site isn’t 100% done as you still can’t contact me yet, although that could be a good thing, but, I think most stuff works!