Let's start here: Drupal for Firebug is amazing. I'll even go so far as to say that it's more useful than Devel Themer. More details below, but you should start by downloading the Drupal for Firebug Firefox extension (or the Chrome one) and drush dl drupalforfirebug on a local project and giving it a spin.

It's been too busy around these parts for me to put together a post about the exciting things happening in the DC tech community, particularly in the hobbyist electronics space (short version: they're exciting!). But I can at least share this tip.

Many of you are probably using the newly-released Firefox 3 release candidate, and it seems likely that some of you are running into the same problems with Firebug that I was, particularly when using its Javascript console. Big, angry errors with "NS" and "SECURITY" in them? Yup, that's the one.

Well, get thee over to the firebug downloads page and grab the latest alpha. It solves this problem, but introduces a new one for those debugging a jQuery-enabled page: the jQuery object is nowhere to be found.

Actually, it's not that bad: you just need to do something like this

$ = window.$;

Before you start mucking around with scripting from the console. It's irritating, but I'm sure it'll be fixed soon. And in the meantime, you could always whip up a Greasemonkey script to do this job automatically.