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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.