Brett, Apple's launchd documentation is ambiguous in many places, and I've misinterpreted it more than once.

What that Apple engineer was telling me is that there is no way to fix automatically fix or avoid the problem of launchd trying to launch your program every 10 seconds if the executable has been removed. The only fix is for the user (or some watchdog that you've installed) to notice the problem, and then unload and uninstall the launchd task. But the watchdog is not a solution because then you need a super watchdog to watch the watchdog, etc., ad inifinitum.

What's weird in the case of your script is that it or some part of it must still be there, because it's hitting Pinboard. But launchd keeps kicking it every 10 seconds anyhow. I've often wondered, but could never establish consistent results, on what happens if a task launched by launchd returns other than 0. I know that launchd keeps track of return values. Maybe your script is returning other than 0. Or maybe it's timing out. There are a couple different timeouts in launchd, with particularly ambiguous documentations.

Anyhow, I think the solution is to somehow convince launchd that everything executed OK, so it will stop.

A user of my app BookMacster reported that he was unable to import bookmarks from Pinboard. After a week or so, with help from Maciej Ceglowski (the Pinboard guy), we found that the problem was this script, which the user had installed a few months ago. It was hitting Pinboard every 10 seconds and asking for all bookmarks (posts/all). This caused Maciej's server to throttle his account, so that any other app or script trying to get them would get an HTTP 429 error. Quickly skimming this blog post, I see that this script is installed so that it is triggered by launchd. One of the features of launchd in OS X is that if a job doesn't work, it keeps retrying every 10 seconds. I thought that this only happens if the script is missing, but apparently something was there. I haven't studied the package here in detail, but something like that that must have been happening.

Brett, maybe you could build in some kind of fail-safe mechanism for the next version so this does not happen to other users.

Thanks,

Jerry Krinock

Is your delicious script in the hands of anyone who still cares for it?

I am getting an error on the second running of the app - I have the config file created, and when I go to run it again, I get:

/Users/mitchellhislop/.rvm/rubies/ruby-head/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in require': cannot load such file -- ftools (LoadError)
from /Users/mitchellhislop/.rvm/rubies/ruby-head/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:inrequire'
from ./getpinboard.rb:98:in block in <main>'
from ./getpinboard.rb:97:ineach'
from ./getpinboard.rb:97:in `'

Any ideas?

Loaded up the script but seem to be getting the following repeating messages in the terminal

1579:1580: syntax error: Expected end of line, etc. but found “"”. (-2741)
2011-04-19 23:02:29.909 osascript[3505:903] Error loading /Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types: dlopen(/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types, 262): no suitable image found. Did find:
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types: no matching architecture in universal wrapper
osascript: OpenScripting.framework - scripting addition "/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax" declares no loadable handlers.
1396:1397: syntax error: Expected end of line, etc. but found “"”. (-2741)

The ~/bookmarks/bookmarks.stash file does not seem to get appended to either. At first I thought this may have something to do with the PDF part of the code but setting pdf_tag:false did not help.
Any ideas

Thanks

Dude, you are awesomesauce! thank you for sharing!

I figured out why I was getting an Applescript error, I figured I would post here to let anyone else know how to fix the same issue (the "Expected end of line" thingy).

Anyways, the Applescript calls Paparazzi. If you don't have this application installed, an error is thrown on the line with "capture "#{url}" min size minsize".

I removed this block with Paparazzi and everything now works perfectly.

Thanks a lot. For some reason I was thinking I had to add that in the getpinboard.yaml file >_<

In the past I've been using setWeblocThumb with the -ni option so it doesn't add the site's favicon image to thumbnail preview. So with this script I disabled setWeblocThumb and then let Hazel run it with the -ni setting afterwards.

Is there any way to do this in the script so that I don't have to run this separately through Hazel afterwards?

Thanks! Believe it or not, this scratched an itch I was just thinking about last week. Well done.

I have Tags.app (v2.02) installed, but no Bookmarks.plist file is stored in the folder ~//Library/Application Support/Tags/. I have gotten the script to work by using openmeta as tagmethod, but I am curious as to why I do not have the Tags.app database in the prescribed location. Tags.app works flawlessly by the way.

Oh, and thanks very much for your scripts and geekery. It is much apreceiated on this end.

Hi Brett, is there a way to have the script save the bookmarks in a .html bookmark file (like Safari "Export Bookmarks" feature)?

In this way I could point Launchbar to that .html file, and be able to search my pinboard bookmarks with it.

Thanks

Giovanni

All running fine now (after your emails and the new version with UK date formatting).

Thanks a lot for your help Brett.
I did recently trash the bookmarks database for Tags, but did tag a couple of web pages to recreate it. I've restarted Tags which will hopefully help.

Just trashed all files and settings again and set it up with this latest version. It is downloading lots of webloc files but I'm also getting lots of error messages in Terminal such as:

258:589: execution error: Invalid date and time date 03-13-2011 08:31PM. (-30720)

and the odd one such as:

435:436: syntax error: Expected “"” but found unknown token. (-2741)

I've been getting these on and off since using the first version of the script.

Not sure if this is relevant but I'm in the UK and we write the date differently to you. For example today (3rd April 2011) you write it 4/3/11 and we write it 3/4/11. Could that be causing a problem?

I've been having problems getting it running properly, so trashed everything and started again with this version.

But still having problems. After setting it all up and running it I get the following message in Terminal:

/Users/Jono/Documents/getpinboard.rb:778: undefined method []=' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
from /Users/Jono/Documents/getpinboard.rb:722:ineach'
from /Users/Jono/Documents/getpinboard.rb:722

Only loads a couple of bookmarks now (was loading a few hundred intermittently previously).

Great idea! Unfortunately, after setting up the configuration file and running the script a second time, I get a long series of errors like the following:

607:611: syntax error: Expected end of line but found identifier. (-2741)

When I set the debug flag it spits out the syntax error following every "Grabbing ..." line.

Yes, that's worked. It's now downloading the the .weblocs.
So cool, thanks!

…the last should read:
from /Users/Jono/getpinboard.rb:707

Thanks a lot. Really been looking forward to giving this a try :)

Aftern I run the script for the first time the yaml file file pops up all I have to do is enter my pinboard details, save it and then run the script again, right?

Once I've done that I run the script from Terminal and it displays the following message:

/Users/Jono/getpinboard.rb:641:in needs_update?': undefined method[]' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
from /Users/Jono/getpinboard.rb:7