Halloween 2009, WhiteLabelDating.com style.

Myself, I want to be Frank the Bunny (Donnie Darko) when I grow up.

Are you looking for a job? Are you a ColdFusion developer? If you are then we’re looking for you!

We’re looking for a ColdFusion developer to join our team of 15 developers and designers at WhiteLabelDating.com. We’re focused on creating the very best online dating platform in the industry. We’re highly profitable, growing quickly and want to recruit the best people to work with our experienced team and be a part of our future.

We’re based at 1 High Street in the centre of Windsor, west of London. We’re easily commutable from London (West from Paddington or South-West direct from Waterloo), Reading, Staines or Slough.

Our core application is written ColdFusion and we’re looking for someone to join the team to help maintain and improve all areas of the code. This would be an ideal role for an intermediate level developer looking to improve their skill set and also diversify into other languages and frameworks such as Ruby on Rails. We are currently investigating architecture changes and someone with an interest in cloud computing, sphinx and highly available database systems would be a great asset.

For the full job spec check out our site: http://www.whitelabeldating.com/jobs/current-vacancies/coldfusion-developer/

After much debating, researching, comparing and generally going round and round in circles I have once again changed my dedicated host.

I had a box from The Planet over in sunny Texas which was great, got it on an offer and paid in USD so it worked out great. Problem started to come in that I wanted to upgrade the spec, perhaps more memory, CPU etc. After research most truly dedicated boxes worked out too expensive even in USD as the sites I host are mostly personal ones and I don’t get much money for them.

VPS/Cloud of course was an option and having tried The Rackspace Cloud (formally Mosso), looking at Slicehost and UK2.net’s VPS offering I found Memset. I’d heard of them in the past but quickly found quite a few people who’d used them and had good things to say.

Having signed up my payment was taken quickly and my virtual box was online in less than 15 minutes. The couple of issues I’ve had have been dealt with very quickly and so far performance of the box outweighs that of the fully dedicated machine. Only issue is the DNS control panel is very basic and is not particularly well designed or user friendly. If you understand DNS you’ll be fine, if you don’t, you won’t.

Basically I’d recommend them and now all my sites are happily running from the UK based datacenter.

This guy is a little bit crazy and if you listen on speakers it’s got some swearing in. Very amusing though.

Merlin Labs! – 5 Surprising House Hacks! from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

Internet Explorer strikes again, sometimes. In Chrome, Firefox and Safari the problem doesn’t present. On a couple of webservers in a cluster we recently noticed the following type of error being returned randomly on images, CSS and JavaScript files when calling the page via SSL.

GET ERROR_INTERNET_SECURITY_CHANNEL_ERROR image/gif https://www.domain.com/path/to/image.gif


Now the majority of our SSL certificates for the site in question are server out via a SSL accelerator on our Cisco LBAL’s but this site wasn’t. It was still using a cert on the local box. Having dug deeper I noticed that a couple of the servers had the following lines of code in whereas all the others didn’t. Due to the load balancing that solves the randomness side of it.

AddType application/x-x509-ca-cert .crt
AddType application/x-pkcs7-crl .crl
SSLPassPhraseDialog builtin
SSLSessionCache shmcb:/var/cache/mod_ssl/scache(512000)
SSLSessionCacheTimeout 300
SSLMutex default
SSLRandomSeed startup file:/dev/urandom 256
SSLRandomSeed connect builtin
SSLCryptoDevice builtin

Something in those lines of code causes the issues, I’m stabbing in the dark that it’s the session cache as none of the others would seem to be causing the problem. I’ve not tried line by line to find the offender.

Hopefully that will help someone out as I found lots of results in Google but not many solutions!

Been looking for a function in ColdFusion to get the root domain from a url. There are a few but none actually cope with the many combinations. This function by no means copes with every combination however it does cover quite a lot. Comments inline indicate which domains the rules handle.


<cffunction name="getRootDomain" returntype="string" output="no" hint="Take a URL and get the domain from it.">
<cfargument name="url" type="string" required="true">
<cfset var dots = listLen(arguments.url,".")>
</cfset><cfset var domain = "">
</cfset><cfset host = arguments.url>
<!--- host.com, host.biz, host.ly --->
<cfif dots eq 2>
<cfset domain = host>
</cfset></cfif>
<cfif dots eq 3>
<!--- www.host.com, sub.host.com, www.host.mobi, www.host.ly, del.icio.us --->
</cfif><cfif listfirst(host,".") eq "www" or
((len(listgetat(host,3,".")) eq 3 or len(listgetat(host,3,".")) eq 2) and len(listgetat(host,"2",".")) gte 3)>
<cfset domain = listdeleteat(host,1,".")>
</cfset></cfif>
<!--- host.co.uk, host.com.za --->
<cfif (len(listgetat(host,3,".")) eq 2 and (len(listgetat(host,2,".")) eq 2) or len(listgetat(host,2,".")) eq 3)>
<cfset domain = host>
</cfset></cfif>
<cfif dots eq 4>
<!--- www.host.ltd.uk, www.host.co.uk --->
</cfif><cfif len(listgetat(host,4,".")) eq 2 and (len(listgetat(host,3,".")) eq 2 or len(listgetat(host,3,".")) eq 3)>
<cfset domain = listdeleteat(host,1,".")>
</cfset></cfif>
<!--- www.sub.host.com, sub.sub.host.com --->
<cfif len(listgetat(host,4,".")) eq 3 and len(listgetat(host,4,".")) gte 3>
<cfset domain = listdeleteat(listdeleteat(host,1,"."),1,".")>
</cfset></cfif>
<cfif dots eq 5>
<!--- sub.sub.host.co.uk, www.sub.host.co.uk, www.sub.host.com.za --->
</cfif><cfif len(listgetat(host,5,".")) eq 2 and (len(listgetat(host,4,".")) eq 2 or len(listgetat(host,4,".")) eq 3)>
<cfset domain = listdeleteat(listdeleteat(host,1,"."),1,".")>
</cfset></cfif>
<cfreturn domain />
</cfset></cfargument></cffunction>