Floyd’s Thoughts…

Best Buy has received much acclaim for its IdeaX platform over the last year, and rightly so. For anyone who isn’t away of IdeaX its an Idea Gathering application that allows Best Buy to capture ideas and comments from customers and staff members, which can then be voted or commented on buy other customers or staff members. The basic idea is that good ideas will organically rise to the top as votes and comments increase the “score” given to an Idea. Best Buy can then take a “good” idea and make it into a reality.

Idea Gather Applications (also known as Idea Management Apps) are not a new thing, many American corporates have already embraced this concept including Google and Dell, and while each have great apps the Best Buy IdeaX platform stands head and shoulders about the competition.

While browsing Hacker News the other day i noticed a post saying that the Best Buy IdeaX platform has been open sourced! This is a great step for Best Buy, Come on, a big non-tech US corporate releasing an Open Source product!!! its unheard of! Whats more the app is written in Ruby on Rails, which in its self is a massive step for a big corporate who would traditionally have written apps like this in C# or Java.

Check out the project home page for the full story, and be sure to take a look around the code

The project does take some getting going, you have to me using Postgress and be sure to check out the mad Postgress Specific stuff going on in the migrations. I plan on getting a version of it up and running on EC2 over the next few days (time permitting) so I will issue some instructions in a later post.

All I can say is Hat Tip to Best Buy, Great job!

As you know iTunes 8 has a new feature called Genius, which when activated will create a playlist based on the song that you are currently listening to.

Let me take this opportunity to say that the iTunes Genius feature is… well GENIUS! It has changed the way I use iTunes for ever!

Once your iTunes library get over a few thousand tracks you often find that you loose the ability to put your hand on a great track to listen to next, the grouping of albums, artists, genres, etc makes it almost impossible to create a “Fresh” new playlist that hangs together well, Genius solves this issue in an instant.

The icing on the cake is the Genius side bar that includes songs that would fit well into the playlist that you don’t already own, in the few hours that I have been using it, I have already found several “GEMS” that i would normally not have in my library.

The only down side to the Genius feature that i can see it that I’m now going to spend even more cash on iTunes each day! Doh!

Rails (or should i say ActiveSupport) adds a blank? instance method to object that encapsulates the nil? || empty? check that I find myself doing all the time.

A quick review of the source show that the empty? method is added to the following:

  # An object is blank if it's nil, empty, or a whitespace string.
  # For example, "", "   ", nil, [], and {} are blank.
  #
  # This simplifies
  #   if !address.nil? && !address.empty?
  # to
  #   if !address.blank?

The full source is actually very simple (I Love Ruby)

class Object
 
  def blank?
    if respond_to?(:empty?) && respond_to?(:strip)
      empty? or strip.empty?
    elsif respond_to?(:empty?)
      empty?
    else
      !self
    end
  end
end
 
class NilClass #:nodoc:
  def blank?
    true
  end
end
 
class FalseClass #:nodoc:
  def blank?
    true
  end
end
 
class TrueClass #:nodoc:
  def blank?
    false
  end
end
 
class Array #:nodoc:
  alias_method :blank?, :empty?
end
 
class Hash #:nodoc:
  alias_method :blank?, :empty?
end
 
class String #:nodoc:
  def blank?
    empty? || strip.empty?
  end
end
 
class Numeric #:nodoc:
  def blank?
    false
  end
end

Using the SVN client you can pass –xml to most of the commands to get a response in XML!

This is great for apps that use the SVN Client API and need to parse the response, for example…

svn log http://svn_url --xml

Will produce a nice XML version of the SVN log.

For good measure you can also use the verbose option to extract even more information…

svn log http://svn_url --xml -v

Pretty cool ey?