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.

Assuming you already have a tumblr account, like http://ellens.tumblr.com/

1. Go to your DNS manager (eg. http://GoDaddy.com)

2. Login and go to the DNS total control panel

3. Add an ‘A’ record that points your subdomain

(eg. ‘your-cool-subdomain-name’ or ‘tumblr’) to 72.32.231.8 – if you want to have your-cool-subdomain-name.ellens.com or tumblr.ellens.com

4. Save that configuration

5. Go to your tumblr page (eg. http://ellens.tumblr.com/)

6. Click on ‘Customize’

7. Check ‘User a custom domain’

8. Add your custom subdomain (eg. http://tumblr.ellens.com/)

9. Click ‘Save’

This is pretty simple.

Very important note: Please give it time, 1 to 24 hours. I forgot about this and I freaked out because I was getting the “We couldn’t find the page you were looking for.” error message. I gave it 15 minutes and then it started working.

Also, keep in mind that http://etagwerker.tumblr.com will redirect to http://tumblr.etagwerker.com after you do this. You can change it back at any time.

Did you ever search for anything in Twitter? What did you get? Probably a lot of noise. Useful information is hard to find using Twitter search. Hopsy solves this.

Do a Hopsy search and find useful Twitter messages. How? Hopsy ranks the Twitter search results using an influence number. People on Twitter are influential according to the messages and links they tweet. Your followers endorse you (RT) or don’t. The links you share start trending or don’t. That is influence.

Basically, if you have a good reputation, your tweets will show up before than someone with no rep or a bad rep. Makes sense? If yes, please check out Hopsy. If not, I would like to hear your ideas about Twitter tweet rankings and search.

Here is a Hopsy search you can try out: Search for 2009. Here is a Twitter search to compare: Search for 2009.