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How about doing the same without Apache?

Don't start with rails, start with ruby.

Doing otherwise is like trying to learn PHP by looking at the Drupal codebase.

I did, and Ruby was quick and easy. I wrote a bunch of programs and felt comfortable enough that I could understand stuff if I looked at it. But Rails seems like a whole other animal. And your right, this is the difference between languages and frameworks. But, without Rails I'm not sure how to get to a web app with Ruby. With PHP I was writing web apps before I really understood the language.

I don't mean to be saying that I'm doing it right, or that mine was a good way to learn programming. Just mean to be giving a data point about the relative approachability of PHP and RoR for actually making stuff as a beginner.

Start with Sinatra (http://www.sinatrarb.com/) instead. I had worked with PHP for a little while, and I decided to try out ROR. I could not understand it at all. I did some plain ruby for a while.

Eventually, I heard about Sinatra, and decided to try it out. It's a great way to learn about web apps. You'll learn the HTTP verbs if you haven't already, and you'll understand the routing process.

When you jump into Rails, you'll already understand Controllers and Routers, since Sinatra is basically the router and controller of Rails combined. You'll probably learn about views too.

Basically, learn sinatra, then go to Rails.

My favourite C programming trick is having others do the C programming for me.

I think this problem solves the wrong problems.

You are welcome, I'm glad you liked it.

Here's a dropbox link. It should be there 2-3 weeks.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18558160/How-to-make-awesome-diagram...

That was my subconscious. 4 is the maximum, but I'd actually steer more towards 1 or 2 types when possible. If the diagram is very complex and needs more types, I'd try to split it into several slides.

I saw the slide and the "visual complexity elimination subroutine" kicked in. I'll try to fix that in a future version.

Yes, this is something I should have written explicitly. Your advice is spot on, I should have included a "conclusion" in the colors section saying just that.

Hi pygy! :D I plan to do other awesome stuff

I used LibreOffice Impress over Ubuntu for that presentation.

I try to use the best tool for the job though.

Two weeks ago I had to make a code-based introductory presentation and I used showoff instead ( https://github.com/schacon/showoff ) since it comes with syntax highlighting and the slides are just a text file. It took me maybe a couple hours to learn the ins and outs, but then it was easy.

I've heard that the Mac app is good, too, but I haven't used it yet.