Forem: Bobby Bates

Web Server Kill Process on Ports

Bobby Bates — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 01:35:27 +0000

Here are a few things you can do when a locally-run web server port is in use and your server won't start back up.

This issue presented itself to me during Phase 3 of Flatiron School: Four weeks of learning Ruby, SQL, Active Record, and Sinatra.

Live or hot reloading all possible things makes me happy, so I was glad to implement rerun on my server immediately after learning about it.

It's great fun to not manually restart a local server on every change in your program, except for this very occasional issue I've come across. This happened when I would tab out of my VS Code window (configured to autosave my app as I leave), which triggers a rerun-fueled refresh in my browser.

I'd often Command + R my webpage anyway to restart my user path, and with the right timing, I would get an error along the lines of port is in use.

My first stop on Google was this Stack Overflow page which gave me a two-step solution: See if any processes were listening to the port my server was on by running:

lsof -i:9292

(ruby was indeed listening to that port, which meant it was blocking my server from restarting on that port), and then run:

kill $(lsof -t -i:9292)

to clear the way for a server restart.

Soon after running into this myself, the same issue came up in class and another solution was shown:

npx kill-port 9292

Comparing English and Spanish Words in JavaScript

Bobby Bates — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 02:39:10 +0000

I've been working on a single page web application using React. One feature uses a JSON list of Colombian cities:

"colombiaCities": [
    {
      "city": "Bogotá",
      "lat": 4.6126,
      "lng": -74.0705,
      "country": "Colombia",
      "iso2": "CO",
      "adminName": "Distrito Capital",
      "capital": "primary",
      "population": 9464000,
      "populationProper": 7963000
    },
// ...515 other cities

A user can search for a country to get some details. Their input will be in English, with no accent marks. They could type them if they wanted to, but they choose not to. That's not very cosmopolitan of them.

This user will fail to get their information with no accent marks (sometimes). When the accentless string is compared to the accented string in the object above (equalizing case using toLowerCase()), it is compared character by character. All is well until the a in Bogota is put up against á in Bogotá. They need a way to compare these words as equals.

Thus began my search. I first came across the normalize() method. It looks like this:

const str = 'ÁÉÍÓÚáéíóúâêîôûàèìòùÇç';
const parsed = str.normalize('NFD').replace(/[\u0300-\u036f]/g, '');
console.log(parsed)

Regular Expressions still scare me off, so I moved on to the next search result: localeCompare(). This looked more my speed, plus it's already doing the comparing I need. It looks like this:

const enStr = 'Bogota'
const esStr = 'Bogotá'
enStr.localeCompare(esStr, 'es-CO', { sensitivity: 'base' })

I actually looked into this term before localeCompare(): Full Text Search. It's pretty heavy duty. In JavaScript, this can come in the form of a library dependency like FlexSearch. Far too bulky for the humble sorting task I have at hand.

I will choose localeCompare() for my word comparison and city sorting features.

What is the Meaning of Life?

Bobby Bates — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 03:55:40 +0000

I was hung up on this one for a long time. After much reading of Existentialism, Stoicism, and pop-psych articles, I eventually decided that the meaning, for me anyway, lies in my day-to-day actions. If I want to live a life worth living, I need to make those actions count. By count, I mean that it must be meaning*ful* to me. So what's meaningful to me?

Equal rights for all beings, human and nonhuman
Human-powered transportation (i.e., walking, bicycles)
Bicycle infrastructure
Helping others
Laughing with others
Being in control of most of my time
Consistent full nights of sleep (7.5 or 9 hours work best for me)
Stretching my body

I'm vegan, an animal rights activist, a former bike messenger, former and long-time bike commuter. I am generally successful with incorporating the other bullet points into my life. I have also pursued programming for some years now. Is that meaningful to me? Why yes, it's challenging, and I share the communal feeling among coders of delight after pushing through the dim, hopeless middle of a problem and landing on the other side with a solution.

But it didn't make the meaningful list; what gives?

Yeah, well, it should be up there because I can spend days on end working on a project, Googling this method and that extension, truly delighting myself in building something well, and that looks good, too. Having something like that is superb.

What am I on about? I'm uncovering why I'm pursuing software development. Problem-solving brings direct meaning to me, as well as the collaborative aspects of coding (after I push past the shyness, the social anxiety, and the imposter syndrome). High demand and pay for programmers come into play as well. Also, I am done beating my body up with physical labor for a paycheck; super glad to have the privilege and opportunity to change the majority of my waking hours to healthier activity.

What about future meaning? This is still uncomfortably undefined at the moment. I know that I'll have refined my coding skills by the end of this Flatiron Software Development course and will be ready to start the programmer's path professionally, wherever that will take me. It'll be fully remote. Other than that, it is, and I am, wide open.