Tech Talk News

So most of you have heard of the Startup Weekend that took place out in Boulder, CO earlier this month. Well the project that they launched is called Vosnap, which is currently in private BETA.  I expect that that they will be in a public beta soon, in which I hope to be apart of. Recently, Andrew Hyde, Startup Weekend Founder, sent out an open invitation to cities to host a startup weekend.  Thus far there’s been 10 cities that have responded with 6 of them having set dates. The first one to come up will be the Toronto Startup Weekend, Sept. 14-16th.

I was approached on Thursday by my good friend Matt, who asked me to sign up for the DC Weekend in October. I had to of course, since anything with Matt is always promising and always a good networking opportunity. I am looking forward to heading down to the DC area for a chance to create the next big Web 2.0 app. I am also looking forward to get to meet the organizers of the weekend and founder of the startup weekend. Currently there is roughl 55 or so that are signed up. If you are in the DC area, please checkout the DC Startup blog for more details and to register.  One thing to note is that we will be developing the core of the application with Ruby on Rails. Now don’t let this discourage your from becoming a part.  There’s lots of other developers, PR, Legal, Business, etc. that is needed for this to work.

So I bought a new computer this week and of course it’s got Windows Vista on it. For those that I don’t talk to everyday, I use Vista at work, and have been since January.  I have to say that I really do not like this new operating system.  There are some features that I do like it, however, if you do not have at least 2GB of Ram in the computer Vista is SLOW!!!! Currently, I’m barely running anything, Firefox and AIM, and I’m using 75% of my memory! This is pathetic! I’m really seriously considering looking into purchasing an XP license and installing that on here.

Anyways, I haven’t really seen a lot of people that have really tried to install Ruby on Rails on Vista, so today I decided that I wanted to take a chance and see what happened.  I first tried to use InstantRails, however I was unsuccessful about it.  I then decided to just install Ruby/Rails, and MySQL all together on the machine.  This I had no trouble with.  I’m not sure what exactly was going on with InstantRails, but I might try to give it another try later.  I’ll give you some more info later when I get an application actually working correctly on here!

I was asked by a friend on how to set up InstantRails. So I created a quick little video showing how to get it running on your computer. My next little screencast will be about creating your first rails application. Please feel free to leave me some comments as well as any feedback you have for this.