The fourth article in IBM developerWorks’ series Mobile for the Masses has been published! This copasetic article shows you how to take the Overheard Word demo app up a level with a JSON-based word engine and some prebaked, swipe-gesture functionality.

As the article summary states:

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One of my Android apps recently suffered from a nefariously ugly UI glitch that, embarrassingly, a user reported to me. Strangely, this phenomenon did not surface itself in local testing on either emulators or devices when I first wrote the app; nevertheless, I was able to reproduce the error after the bug report came in. I suspect that recent updates in the Android platform might have exacerbated the issue for my app as I’m fairly certain I never saw it before.

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All documents in a MongoDB collection have a primary key dubbed _id. This field is automatically assigned to a document upon insert, so there’s rarely a need to provide it. What’s interesting about the _id field is that it is time based. That is, the underlying type of _id, which is ObjectId, is a 12-byte BSON type, and 4 of those bytes represent the seconds since Unix epoch.

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Have a highly specific, yet custom validation for a particular field on one of your Rails model objects? Don’t want to create a ActiveModel::Validator type? Not a problem!

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Long running web requests are bad.

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Long running web requests are bad.

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Every once in a while, I need to give a non-technical user (like a business analyst) data residing in MongoDB; consequently, I export the target data as a CSV file (which they can presumably slice and dice once they import it into Excel or some similar tool).

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Every once in a while, I need to give a non-technical user (like a business analyst) data residing in MongoDB; consequently, I export the target data as a CSV file (which they can presumably slice and dice once they import it into Excel or some similar tool).

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I recently found myself implementing both an Android and iOS Appcelerator module for App47’s respective Agent libraries.

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I recently found myself implementing both an Android and iOS Appcelerator module for App47’s respective Agent libraries.

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My third article in IBM developerWorks’ series Mobile for the Masses is now out!

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My third article in IBM developerWorks’ series Mobile for the Masses is now out!

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Curious to see what all the ElasticSearch hubbub is about? Wanna see it in action without a lot of elbow grease? Then look no further, friend – in less than 60 seconds, I’ll show you how to install ElasticSearch on an AWS AMI.

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Curious to see what all the ElasticSearch hubbub is about? Wanna see it in action without a lot of elbow grease? Then look no further, friend – in less than 60 seconds, I’ll show you how to install ElasticSearch on an AWS AMI.

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Anyone ever told you that your website isn’t mobile optimized? Or have you ever seen a lilliputian-looking website on your device? You know, one that renders so small you are forced to squint as you enlarge various parts of the site with your fingers just to read it?

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