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Let's say that you would rather not root your android device simply so that you can test websites on your local network. Turns out it is super easy to do if you have an ubuntu box around.

Part 1 - Setup your ubuntu box as a local proxy

1) Run this command to install squid

sudo apt-get install squid

2) Begin editing the /etc/squid/squid.conf file

3) At the very top of the http_access section, add the following

http_access allow localnet

4) Save the squid.conf file

5) Make sure squid is running

sudo start squid

Here's a quick little list of fields related moudules that have come in very handy lately:

http://drupal.org/project/field_collection.  This module lets you create a field that is a collection of fields.  For example if you need to create a route that contains an arbitrary number of paths, you would create a field collection that contains a path field.  The user can then add as many paths to the route as they need.  Drag and drop re-ordering is supported as well.

 JavaScript is one amazing language.  I recently finished reading "Javascript - The Good Parts", and am in the process of teaching myself node.js.  For all of the bad press it has gotten, JavaScript is going in some really amazing directions.  It is now possible to implement an entire web application in JavaScript - from the database on up.  Not only that, but you can get some rediculously fast performance out of it too.

This weekend I setup a cool arduino project that works as a web-accessible data monitoring solution.  This example simply detects temperature, but it can be used for pretty much anything.  In this the arduino has the following jobs to do

Wouldn't it be cool if you could have a bell ring every time someone liked or shared your web page?   In this arduino project I wanted to be able to connect directly to the facebook graph api which turned out to a bit tricky because facebook doesn't respond to just any request.  After lots of trial and error I got it working! 

Stumped for hours as to why I couldn't get processing to read my arduino's serial port I stumbled across a code sample in the processing docs that didn't use serialEvent.  Then it worked fine!  This code simply sets the background color to match the value being sent over the serial port from an Arduino that is sampling a LDR (light sensor).

 How do you get a feature to set the value of a ckeditor field so that it can run under any driver (javascript or not)?

#value = "Thing to set body to..."
begin
  page.evaluate_script("CKEDITOR.instances.discussion_body_editor.setData('<p>#{value.gsub("'","\\\\'")}</p>');")
rescue Capybara::NotSupportedByDriverError
  And %{I fill in "discussion_body_editor" with "#{value}"}
end

Can DotCloud dethrone Heroku?  It is getting more and more common for web applications to use more than one type of technology.  For example I have rolled out apps recently that incorporate some real-time updates powered by socket.io which runs on node.js.  I also have been using mongodb from the get-go on all my projects and skipping mysql/postgres altogether.  So, I was extremely impressed with how easy it was to setup an app on dotcloud.  Mongodb instance - done.  Ruby app - done.  Node.js app - done.

1 Phenominal Support - I have dealt with many support departments over the years, and few have been as responsive as OpenGateway.  They are constantly monitoring their discussion forums and are not simply hoping other random Joe's on the web answer questions for them.  I recently submitted a question and had a fix far faster than I was expecting.
 
2 Unbeatable Price - $95 one time fee, nuff said.
 

There are a lot of articles out there on how to do a POST with node.js.  I couldn't get any of them to work right, so here is what I came up with: