I’m pleased to announce the launch of Best Buy Idea X, a website where you can share, vote for, and discuss ideas that will help make Best Buy a better company. The site is built using Ruby on Rails and runs in Amazon’s Compute Cloud.

We’re far from done with the site. There is already a list of 20+ new features and enhancements that we will be developing over the next 12 months. If you have any feedback or great ideas for the site feel free to let me know. Or, better yet, post an idea in Idea X itself and let the community decide if it’s a good one.

Thanks to Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt at Best Buy for being the muscle behind this project, Barry Judge for executive support, and to my team for kicking ass – Paul Cantrell, McClain Looney, Eric Grossnickle, and Andrew Bessler.

According to Minneapolis Police, the alarm going off in our studio office at 4:20 am was a false alarm. Officers responded to the alert and after investigating, determined the place to be secure, despite the fact that the exterior door to the building was forced open, our office door was open and splintered, and our 55-inch television was ripped off its mount. But at least they left the Mario Kart and the wii. Wouldn’t it be a shame if we lost all our scores and race history?

Matt’s recent posting on the 37 Signals blog about going rogue inside a big company put a smile on my face. Cali and Jody’s ROWE revolution and Gary and Steve’s social web movement have one interesting thing in common: they are both clients of Bust Out Solutions. We’ve been working with Cali and Jody of CultureRx for nearly three years now, and with Gary and Steve for about one year on numerous projects, including the featured website on Google AppEngine, Giftag.

I have the utmost respect for Cali, Jody, Gary, and Steve for going against the grain at a major corporation, and I am thrilled that Bust Out Solutions has been able to support their endeavors.

Bust Out’s design partner Play has done excellent work creating a corporate identity for Bust Out Solutions. We’re slowing working on the next generation of Bust Out’s website in our free time, which, thankfully, there hasn’t been much of.

If you’re getting this error, install the mysql gem by executing the following command:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

This worked for me, and I’m using Mac OS X 10.5.6, Rails 2.2.2, and MySQL 5.0.67.

If you plan on allowing users to upload images to your Rails site, you’re probably using Rick Olson’s attachement_fu plugin. You’ve also probably come across Mike Clark’s File Upload Fu tutorial.

Step one of Mike’s tutorial requires you to install an image processing library. ImageScience is simple and does the trick. To save you some time, follow my steps to get things installed and running quickly on Mac OS X.

1. Install MacPorts. I’d recommend just downloading the “dmg” disk image and running the installer.
2. Install FreeImage:

   sudo port install freeimage

3. Install the RubyInline gem:

   sudo gem install RubyInline

4. Install ImageScience:

   sudo gem install image_science

That should get you through step one of Mike’s tutorial in no time.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the website for the St. Mary’s Healthcare System for Children, a New York City-based network of hospitals and rehabilitation centers aimed at helping children from around the world in need of world-class medical and educational attention. Bust Out Solutions was brought in to design and engineer a site that would totally replace the existing site with one that is more attractive, easier to navigate, and much easier to maintain by non-technical staff.

We set the client up with a portfolio of great tools, including Radiant CMS, Mailchimp, Vimeo, and WordPress, along with custom engineering and a totally custom design.

Thanks to Tor, Eric, and Matt for their work on the site, and thanks to the folks at St. Mary’s including Josh, Leslie, Jennifer, and Jan for making this site a success.

I’m pleased to announce the re-launch of Giftag, the universal wish list where you can pick anything from any website and share your wish lists with your friends. Giftag is a Best Buy project that started off as a prototype in Drupal. I had the pleasure of joining the team to help re-platform the application onto Django on Google AppEngine. Along with Gary, Steve B, Curt, Thomas, Nick, Jerry, Steve P, and Sean, we successfully launched the new version of the application just in time for the holiday shopping season!

Check it out, let me know what you think, and have fun. It’s very much an evolving application, so user feedback is more than welcome. We like it, and we think it has a lot of potential.

I recently got this error after customizing the size of a google map to be embedded on a site. If you change the height and width of the map and copy the customized embed code, you might get this Forbidden error. The simple work-around is to copy the default embed code (don’t click “customize and preview the embedded map”), paste it into your HTML as-is, then manually change the width and height attributes of the <iframe>.

Like all web developers, every now and then you need to remotely share a screen shot with a client, team member, or anyone else. If you’re using Mac OS X, Grab Up is the perfect tool for that.

1. Download and install the free Grab Up tool.
2. When you want to take a screen shot, hit command-shift-4 and select the area of your screen you want to capture (or command-shift-3 to take a full screen shot).
3. Grab-up uploads the screen shot to their server and copies a URL to your clipboard. Just paste that URL into your IM or email and send it off.

TIP: After you hit command-shift-4 you can also hit the space bar to select just an open window.