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Woaw. I really should keep up my blogging effort but for the last few months I’ve just been too busy.

Anyway, as of the 28th of June I’ve finished my education at The Technical University of Denmark and now hold the title of Bachelor of Science in Engineering BScE. Tadaa! Its a nice feeling to look back at the three years of study, pondering where they went, and knowing that I am through with all the introductory type courses.

Alas, I am not totally finished with my education - and when are you ever? I’ve chosen to enroll at the university to take a masters degree in mathematical modelling and computation (mmc). A topic a world apart, from my bachelor which mainly focused on management and production. The voluntary courses I took in multivariat statistics, algorithms and datastructures etc, however, got me hooked on pursuing something more within my main field of interest - computers. Actually I will be taking courses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer graphics and stochastic simulation, all in the pursuit of an interest of mine; computergames. Whether or not I will devote myself to that industry is too early to say. However, I think that, at least, the AI stuff can be used in a variety of things beside computergames.

Went to a Rails patch day arranged by some of the people from Copenhagen.rb. Quite cool event with the objective of putting up patches for as many Rails bugs as possible in a day. The event took place at Netgroup’s offices in Store Kongensgade and Capgemini had generously sponsored food, snacks and beverages. Although my participation was primarily/only in the form of observing and trying to fiddle a litlle around with Rails edge I enjoyed the session very much - a learning experience.

Jesper Rønn-Jensen has posted some pictures on Flickr, check them out here.
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Went to a Copenhagen.rb meeting this evening. It was very informal and the people there seemed very nice. It was also very interesting to hear Jury talk about Puppet. It seems quite powerful (if you have 500 servers )

Went to Rome for a few days, four actually, from Thursday to Sunday. This was my first trip there and wow is there a lot to see! One of the guides actually told us (the group) that according to UNESCO Italy has 60% of all archaelogy worthy of perservation - though I do not know how that is defined. I do know, however, that Rome in itself has far too much historic places and buildings to see in four days. I did do an honourable attempt though and got to see both the Trevi fountain, Patheon, Coluseum, Forum Romanum (the senate, temple of venus, via sacre etc.), the Palatine hill, the Vatican, Castello Sant’Angelo, Skt. Peter’s square/church and the pope’s tomb along with a few other places. If you have never been to Rome I highly recommend it. Especially if you, like me, take an interest to Roman history - it is a must.

I will definately go again some time, to catch the things I missed on this trip. I still need to see the Spanish steps, Hadrian’s villa (the guy who build a wall across Britain to secure the south against the barbarians in the North), the catacombs and a lot of other places. Next time I would also set aside some time to go see the lost city of Pompei, which was buried in lava from the errupting Mount Vesu.

Bringing up NetBeans IDE to work on one of my projects I noticed in the startup page an entry on NetBeans going to support Ruby on Rails. Cool! They made a screencast about it you can check out here.

I think it is important that a company like Sun recognizes Rails in this way. I am excited to see if their final implementation can compete with TextMate.

So, my upstairs neighbour set me up with a virtual host. Him and a couple of other guys run gigahost.dk where they provide a cool option called GigaHost Pro (if you can find it on their site) which is in reality a virtual server with root access. These are perfect for running Rails, mailserver, SVN repository etc.

Being a noob at setting up Apache and Mongrel it took me some time to get it working and I thought I might as well share my struggle with you. So here is a guide to setup Apache2 with Mongrel using mod_proxy.
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Today I got my new camera. It’s a Canon Powershot A550 with a 2gb SD card. The 550 has been around for some time now though, so calling it a “new” camera might not be fitting. However, it was very cheap and I wasn’t in the mood to spend a whole lot of money on a camera right now. I have been looking at the Canon EOS400D but I am afraid that having a really good but not very compact camera will discourage me from bringing it places where good photo opportunities might appear. So I went ahead and ordered the 550 based on the reviews I could google and the cool new functionality at Flickr that lets you see pictures by camera.

The picture above is taken using the 550 and shows my desk. This is where all the magic (or rather lack of) happens. A quick tour of desk from the left shows my Samsung 215TW a great widescreen display which I know use as a second screen for my Macbook Pro although in this picture it shows the Fedora install screen from a box I am setting up. In the middle is my Macbook Pro and to the right of it my old Toshiba Portege, a very cool very small notebook which now has been replaced totally with my Macbook pro. In the front is a wireless Mac keyboard and a wireless Mighty Mouse which I picked up today on my way to the postoffice to get my camera.

In the beginning of March month where the calendar tells us that spring has arrived, Denmark suffered a blizzard. Of course the snowfall came as a big surprise to the Danish people since we do have snow almost every year?! And every year Danes are taken by surprise and have suddenly forgotten how to drive their cars in the snow which results in massive trafic problems everywhere.

The weather in Denmark in general is nothing to be proud of. We have a lovely summer though, which lasts an incredible 3 months or so. The remaining 9 month it is just grey skies, rain, wind (and fire?). I would be surprised if anyone said they moved here because of the weather. And the bad weather always has it’s effect on me resulting in a bout of flu.

In the past weekend the Danish police finally decided to evict the young people at “Ungdomshuset”. The operation was quite dramatic with anti-terror police gaining access to the building via helicopters and bulldozers. The eviction resulted in numerous violent clashes between demonstrators and police all over Copenhagen. This lasted for a few nights with a lot of molotov cocktails, stone throwing, tear-gas, burning cars and sirens. I am quite pleased that I do not live in inner Copenhagen and pity a friend of mine who lives in one of the worst hit areas. In my humble opinion the politicians made a very bad call on this one by using the police to force out the young people. The results at least speak for themselves.

At the moment I am finishing a project for a customer which involves displaying some data via barcharts and more detailed datacharts. The project is meant as a prototype / pilot project for a future bigger project and we wanted to use this oppurtunity to try out some different AJAX approaches. I opted to use the prototype framework along with script.acolu.us.

Everything seemed to work fine - W3C validation, IE6+7, Firefox 1.x+2, Safari, Opera etc., relatively small document/page sizes and so on. The customer was very satisfied especially since one of the new AJAX functions (based on the autocomplete function) provided an easy approach for users to find information which was otherwise a bit difficult to present.

Project was on time, on budget and everyone was happy - until.. one users IE6 crashes. Not just some minor thing.. It completely crashes iexplore.exe and kernel32.dll. Wow! Strange!

Ok - first off I wanted to check the build numbers on the different pc’s. Turns out that I got a couple of pc’s running the same build. However, these didn’t crash in fact everything ran smoothly. How marvelous! This turned my suspicion towards 3rd party plug-ins and after some googling I found a post on Aleksandar Vacic’s blog which mentioned that Text Ware’s QuickFind might be the problem, so today I went to the customer to check out the pc which crashed. Sure enough the QuickFind plug-in was present as part of a dictionary application. I then disabled it in IE and guess what? No more crashes.

Now this really leaves me in bit of a pickle. How far do you, as an independent consultant, go to solve these kinds of issues involving 3rd party BHO’s (Browser Helper Object). This problem will probably only affect a few users and taking into account the numerous amount of BHO’s available it might be impossible to make sure that the page doesn’t conflict with any of these.

UPDATE 04/27-07: Jakob Skjerning has written some more on the issue.