broken pipe error with aptana

5 03 2010

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:Broken pipe error for webrick

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.
That’s it. You should be able to continue using Aptana.


how to setup Dropbox to automatically backup folders

16 12 2009

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.



rtopsy, the Topsy API ruby gem

3 12 2009

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

(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!