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Aug 12 10

Finding the process ID of a process running on a specific port

by Graham

Im in the process of redeveloping an existing site. Its a small site that whilst i develop i am running on rails built in server using port 3003. This means i can work on it on the server its destined to be applied without affecting the original site, (This will make it a breeze to switch from the current site to the new site). The problem is i keep starting the server, but forgetting to shut it down properly so when i goto start the server, the server is not running properly but the port is still being used.

To find the process ID of a process running on a particular port you can use:

/usr/sbin/lsof -i tcp:3003 -Fp|tr -d p

This will give you the process ID which you can then pass to kill to stop it completely.

Jul 27 10

Using Tinymce with Interchange

by Graham

Interchange the ecommerce application based upon perl has a HTMLAREA widget within the backend that can be used to provide a rich text area for editing content. This can be configured to use fckeditor or htmlarea however I find both these editors a bit ugly and hard to configure, there also over the top for what most of my clients are looking for.

My prefered editor is tinymce which is a powerful editor which is much newer and much easier to provide new features for. To allow me to use tinymce i created the following widget tag which can be used to provide the tinymce editor in the interchange backend, the edityor can be used in several modes, simple or advanced.

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Jul 12 10

Interchange Not Starting – No Sockets INTERCHANGE SERVER TERMINATING

by Graham

The moment every computer user dreads happened over the weekend. My Macbook wouldn’t boot, it seems it was down to a corrupted boot file. After a reinstall and a restore from a time machine backup (I LOVE time machine My work has a time capsule on a netgear NAS) everything was back to normal. Or so I thought.

I tried to load an interchange website to do some development and got an error as soon as it attempted to start. The error stated,

No Sockets INTERCHANGE SERVER TERMINATING

I tried to recompile the link files to no success, i was able to fix the problem by deleting interchange/etc/socket and interchange/etc/socket.ipc. The next restart completed succesfully. My guess would be the socket files were not linked properly and deleting them forces interchange to recreate them.

Jul 2 10

What information do you want using Geektools

by Graham

Thanks for all the feedback from you my readers. It certainly seems my most popular articles seem to be about Geektools. I’ve had a few requests from my readers for howtos many of which i would not have thought of.

I’d like to know what you display on your geektools desktop and if there’s anything you would like on your desktop but don’t know how. Let me know in the comments below and ill see if i can find a solution for you.

Jul 2 10

Displaying Hardware Temperatures With Macbook

by Graham

One of our readers requested information on displaying Macbook hardware temperatures on their desktop using geektools. Below is a quick summary of what you need to do, unfortunatlly its not quite as simple as you’d hope.

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Jun 15 10

Announcing VuGA Rails Plugin for viewing Google Analytics Statistics

by Graham

I wanted to give you my readers a peak at what i’m working on at the moment. I’ve start created by first Ruby on Rails plugin “VuGA” which stands for View Google Analytics. The premise of the plugin is that it provides pages on your own site for viewing statistics collected by Google Analytics.

Im sure there are some people asking why when you can just use Google Analytics to view your statistics. There are 2 main reasons i’m creating a plugin to view these statistics.

1. This is the main reason, i’d like to be able to view my statistics from my iPhone, or at least the common everyday stats, visitors, page views, which pages are being viewed, where they are coming from. However Googles own dashboard uses Flash to display the information meaning its broken. Also its not really optimised for mobile browsing.

2. The second reason for creating this is to use as a feature for my companies clients. Many customers want statistics for there website but Google Analytics can be overwhelming. Most people dont need to know everything Analytics tells you.

I hope to have the first version out in the next couple of weeks. Please let me know your thoughts on what features should be included, what statistics it should display, using the contact form below. I’d be interested to know what statistics other people view on a regular basis.

Jun 10 10

Top Websites, Podcasts & Screencasts for Learning Ruby on Rails

by Graham

Yesterday i stumbled across a great new podcast series i had not come across before for learning ruby on rails. I’ve built up a few resources i use to help with rails programming, that i thought id share. read more…

Jun 10 10

Creating vcards with ruby on rails

by Graham

vCards provide a great way to pas your contact details to your clients, its a widely supported format which most programs for managing contacts understand be it outlook, outlook express, or macs address book. For a recent project we had a database of employees within our company and we wanted to provide these employees contact details through our website. Using ruby on rails and the vpim gem this was easy to setup.

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May 26 10

Creating Columns Of Equal Heights Using Divs

by Graham

Sometimes we want to create a layout with multiple columns, this multiple column layout used to be created with tables. Now we use CSS to layout out pages and we can create multicolumn layouts by floating divs left. The problem with using divs and floating them left of each other is that the columns cannot automaticly adjust their heights dependent on other columns within the row.

This can be done using divs with the display atribute set to table. By using the attributes table, table-row and table-cell we can create a purely css layout with columns that expand with the rest of the columns within the table row. read more…

May 14 10

Alfred – A New Launcher For Mac OS X

by Graham

Over the years there been many application launchers for Mac OS X. The most popular one being quicksilver, quicksilver is no longer maintained and I found myself not using it much as I found it just to complicated.

Enter Alfred a new launcher released in the last two months, I’ve been waiting to write a review untill I was sure it was a useful application. It is so here’s my review.
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