Trying to get PEAR to run with MAMP 2 will result in the following error by default:

Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset 276 of 1133 bytes in Config.php on line 1050
ERROR: The default config file is not a valid config file or is corrupted.

To Fix, open up /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/conf/pear.conf, search for:

"php_dir";s:44

Replace with:

"php_dir";s:43

Disclaimer: I wrote this in haste because it's Saturday but I wanted to at least document things a little, so my grammar is horrible and I left out a bunch of stuff. Well, this should help quite a bit anyway :)

I had to get data out of a MSSQL database and into a MYSQL database. I had VMWare fusion with Windows 7 already set up.

In Windows:

Then I downloaded and installed MS SQL Server Express With Tools

Certain aspects of Drupal will break if you update jQuery beyond a certain version. So, to use a higher version for your custom code and still use the old version for Drupal stuff (overlays, tabledrag, etc), you can take advantage of jquery noConflict() http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.noConflict/. It can be a little confusing if you

create a plugin with the following code assigned to the global_start hook:

When loading a page with AJAX, it's necessary to reinitialize facebook connect and shareThis. Here's how:

Here's a snippet that parses some HTML to find elements with a certain class using PHP DOM (http://php.net/manual/en/book.dom.php) and XPATH (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms256086.aspx).