Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

The first annual Rails Rumble Competition will be starting in just a matter of hours now. It will most likely consume my weekend and render me incommunicado.

I’ve been sick all week after catching a head cold (probably from Spearmint Rhino, pfft!). I’m hoping I can stay awake and alert while the nerd party commences.

Nerd Party

“Rails Rumble?” you ask? More like a LAN party where you actually get something accomplished.

Its a programming competition where teams of up to 4 people will have 48 hours to build the ultimate web application in Ruby on Rails. After the 48 hours are over, we’ll open the polls up for the public to rate the various entries on Completeness, User Interface, Originality and Usefulness.

Believe it or not, there’s even a pretty extensive list of prizes to be had.

Army of Monkeys

I’m not sure if it’s a throwback to some 80’s film or an inside joke about evolution but our team is apparently the Army of Monkeys (although there are only 4 of us). That would be Travis (uh, that’s me), Rich Cavanaugh, Stephen Caudill and Rogelio aka the_mug who doesn’t actually use the internet.

And what are we creating? Linga!

Let Your Impressions Linga

See a live version!

The marketing nonsense:

Linga is a hypertext meta-universe in which we can all cavort and play. Through the power of teh intertubes, and the the little truck-like links betwixt them, we provide context for your commentary and useful data about other pages on teh intartubes with similar content. It’s your chance to step through the looking glass and leave an impression that linga’s. The Summary: At a very high level, the goal of this application is to provide a comment string and wiki overlay for any given page on the internet. We’ll achieve this through some clever in-browser javascript tie-ins (think grease-marklet).

Socialize

If you’re interested, come by the official forum and get involved in the judging (which is open to the public). It would also help get the word out when the judging starts to digg the Rails Rumble site (also on Reddit).

Working on a project for Rails Rumble? Is your team documenting the endeavor via phone pictures or otherwise? Post them up at our Flickr group. I plan on posting a hopefully steady stream of photos via phone at least.

Good luck!