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.

You saw the shirt at DEMO 08, now you want one of your own. Announcing the grand opening of the Bust Out Solutions Shop! The store is built using the Shopify platform with integrated payment processing by PayPal Website Payments Pro. We recommend this combination for any small to mid-sized business that wants to sell product online without the hassle of large e-commerce platforms and high-cost payment gateways. If you want to start selling online, contact us for more information.

Yup, the monkey job market is still alive and kickin’ compared to over a year ago. Luckily business at Bust Out continues to grow despite the sad state of this nation’s economy, but maybe I really do need to find my inner primate.

Comodo’s Free Email certificates allow you to use the digitally sign and encrypt features built into your personal email client to authenticate and secure your email communications. This allows recipients of your emails to confirm your identity and ensure that the email you sent was not modified during transmission. It is also simple to fully encrypt your communications to prevent unauthorized viewing.

If you have a Macintosh and you use Apple Mail to check your email, installing a certificate is incredibly simple when using Safari to download the certificate. Just fill out the application for secure email certificate, then click the download link in the confirmation email. Done. Safari downloads the certificate and integrates it seamlessly into your machine’s Keychain, and an email certificate in the Keychain integrates seamlessly to Mail.

We’re currently involved in two very cool projects for Best Buy, building one Django application on that will run on Google App Engine and a Ruby on Rails site that will run on Amazon EC2. We plan to do a comparison between the two cloud systems just to describe our experiences with the two. If you have any thoughts about the differences between the two or benefits of one over the other, please feel to leave a comment.

Google Calculator lets you enter a mathematical calculation in the search bar, and will return the result. Apparently, Google Calculator has some trouble handling arithmetic between large numbers. I found it particularly amusing that Google bungles some calculations involving a googol, a number equal to 1 x 10^100. This CNET article dives a little deeper into this problem.