Tech Notes From The Trenches

I work on a Mac with Aptana. Sometimes Aptana crashes and then, after restarting it, it shows this error when I try to access my application:

Errno::EPIPE in Site#home

Showing layouts/_banner_headers.html.erb where line #11 raised:

Broken pipe

The line doesn’t matter. The problem is that Webrick continues to run even after restarting Aptana. So, when you go to http://localhost:3038/ it is actually accessing a ‘zombie‘ Webrick. Not the one you last launched.

Here is the solution:

1. Fire up a Terminal

2. [etagwerker@gesell trunk]$ ps aux | grep ruby

etagwerker 22930   0.2  2.0   165156  84312   ??  S     2:53PM   0:48.88 /usr/local/bin/ruby -e p(Process.pid.to_s) -e load(ARGV.shift) -I … etc…

The first number is the PID

3. Kill the zombie process

[etagwerker@gesell trunk]$ kill -9 22930

4. Restart your Aptana.

These instructions are for Mac. Any Mac. If you are on a PC, get a Mac.

1. Download Dropbox

You need an invite from a cool techie friend.

2. Install it

(Yes, drag and drop it to your Applications folder)

3. Fire up a Terminal.app

(You can find this in Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app with the Finder. Double-click on it)

4. Type:

cd ~/Dropbox

You are changing directory to the default Dropbox folder.

5. Type:

ln -s ~/Documents Documents

Basically, I created a symbolic link in my Dropbox folder to my Documents folder, which did the trick. This creates a backup of your Documents folder, by creating a symbolic link in your Dropbox folder.

And you are done! Dropbox will automatically upload your files to a Dropbox/Documents folder.

About two months ago I learned about Topsy. I really like their solution to organizing the ‘Twittersphere‘. They use links to organize content, define trends and rank twitterers.

The truth is there is way too much noise in Twitter. A lot of people posting characters about nothing or everything. I still don’t understand how people can follow 100+ people. The Twitter list feature is an answer to this problem.

(A sample of the twitter clutter/mess/noise)

I am on Twitter and I post useless stuff constantly too. Everybody does it. I like a particular feature from Topsy: The Topsy influence. I believe that can be used to rank the tweets. The Topsy influence number is a number from 0 to 10 which defines how influential you are, according to the links you posted.

A few weeks ago I joined the Topsy API group (Otter API) – I noticed there wasn’t a Ruby gem implementation to the API, so I decided to build it. That’s how rtopsy was born. Basically it’s a Ruby implementation of the API. It creates Ruby objects from API requests/responses. It is simple and straightforward.

I still need to work on it, test it and improve it, but an initial version is out: http://gemcutter.org/gems/rtopsy – This is my first open source project and I am excited about the possibilities of people using it. I welcome any sort of collaboration/feedback.

You can also see a sample of what you can do with rtopsy with Hopsy: Check out today’s Twitter Trends!