Marc Palmer

I wrote an item a while back on biofuels after reading Monbiot’s excellent book HEAT.

Monbiot has written another great article on the subject. People need to wake up and smell the deforestation and starvation.

Don’t buy the crap the governments are telling us about biofuels reducing our carbon emissions. They are completely unsustainable and will cause massive environmental and social damage:

Already we know that biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum. The UN has just published a report suggesting that 98% of the natural rainforest in Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022(10). Just five years ago, the same agencies predicted that this wouldn’t happen until 2032. But they reckoned without the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market. This is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the orang utan in the wild. But it gets worse. As the forests are burnt, both the trees and the peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or ten times as much as petroleum produces(11). I feel I need to say that again. Biodiesel from palm oil causes TEN TIMES as much climate change as ordinary diesel.

Source: George Monbiot: A Lethal Solution – worth reading full article

According to ‘net sources Apple say they delete posts criticizing their products from their support forums so that it remains a support forum uncluttered by people ranting. Notice the "Posts Removed by Hosts" forum the message and its 5 replies have been moved to:

What is worrying is that my post was asking about other peoples’ experiences with the screen’s viewing angle and contrast issues, and my wonky iSight. Some people had followed up saying yes they’d seen similar display issues on other MacBooks.

Come on Apple, this is no way to treat loyal customers – I’m a switcher and have bought 4 macs in 10 months! Nobody even mailed me to say why the thread was deleted.

I am definitely disappointed. MacBook Core2Duo came, looking all beautiful. Build quality much more solid than iBook G4 I have, feels more sleek and less like a toy.

But to my horror I discovered the screen is very poor compared to my iBook G4 (Jan 2006).

The screen is nice and bright and has good colour saturation compared to the iBook, but as soon as you try to drag anything or use anything animated like magnified dock, watch a movie etc, you notice the horrendous motion blur in the LCD panel. It’s like an LCD from 10 years ago – where the blur happens it looks over-exposed and whites-out and looks a total mess.

The vertical viewing angle is unbelievably narrow if you want good colour representation also. The bright tones close to white all merge and white-out unless you have the laptop screen fully folded back and a specific (long) distance from your body. Obviously this depends slightly on your height, but I have no such problems with the iBook G4, which is much more usable.

Then… I notice the iSight camera is off-center. I have to move to the right of the laptop for my face to appear in the middle of the picture.

And… the trackpad seems to have a defect such that it feels like there is a grain of sand under one spot.

This just isn’t good enough Apple. The screen is by far the worst problem. I’m hoping mine is from a faulty batch because I just cannot believe that a screen this poor compared to previous screens would make it through quality control.

Don’t you just love democracy. Rather than voting FOR things we seem to always have to vote AGAINST them for some reason. Stupid decisions are made for us and then we have to fight tooth and nail to stop them coming into force.

The UK government is on the verge of destroying independent midwifery. There is an excellent article on the issues and about the unique services provided by independent midwives. It is nothing to do with wanting private care over state provided care, it is all about giving birth back to women and their families rather than medicalizing all births without a second thought.

Both of our daughters were born at home in our living room in the same "home made" birth pools, in a terraced house in a city center. Amazingly most people consider home birth to be something odd rather than something done the way it is "meant to be". Birth is not something to fear, and it certainly shouldn’t involve mandatory hospitalization!

We were lucky enough to have fantastic independent midwives to support us and provide the information and caring environment my wife needed to have completely intervention free healthy births.

Please sign the online petition on the Prime Minister’s website to try to stop this daft regulation killing off independent midwifery completely by requiring insurance that just doesn’t exist for midwives, as the risk is deemed too high and yet independent midwives in general have better outcomes than hospitalized births.

No Fluff Just Stuff have put up a great video interview explaining Grails and why it rocks. It’s really worth watching, even if you know Grails. It helped me focus on the benefits of Grails for users other than myself

Also, another one of the Grails developers reminded us in an email last week that it’s easy for us to forget the power of Grails’ agility in terms of getting from 0-60 in record time. I often have my head buried in my client projects or Grails internals, and sometimes forget this because I’m so used to it and working on existing projects.

So maybe it’s worth a little repeat session. Here’s a working web-app in minutes, based on Java, using Java code/libs if you want them, with Groovy glue code (or all your code for those bitten by the dynamic languages bug like me):

1. Download and install Grails 0.4.2
2. Open up a console/shell window
3. Change to a directory where you want to create a project.
4. Run: grails create-project GrailsTest
5. Run: cd GrailsTest
6. Run: grails create-controller Hello
7. Edit: GrailsTest/grails-app/controllers/HelloController.groovy to read:
   class HelloController {
       def index = { render "Hello world" }
   }
8. Run: grails run-app
9. Browse to http://localhost:8080/GrailsTest/hello

Of course this is trivial as it isn’t a full tutorial. So what do you have here? A web application that:

• has a project structure already created and a working app with local HTTP server and in memory database
• will build directly to a WAR file trivially (Run: grails war)
• will reload most code changes immediately without a restart (edit HelloController again, change the string to "Goodbye World" and refresh your browser window!)
• has SiteMesh built in
• has MVC using GSP (Groovy Server Pages, like JSP but less sucky) or JSP views
• has Hibernate preconfigured aand abstracted beautifully, ready to go (see GORM)
• has convention-driven access to controllers
• has Spring configuring beans and injecting services (more in a future article)
• has support for custom Taglibs in views, much easier to write than JSP taglibs.
• has built in unit testing infrastructure (Run: grails test-app)
• has built in Ajax support

…and there’s so much more! Compare the time taken to create this working application, literally a handful of minutes, to the last time you started a new web-app project in Java using any framework.

Spend one lunch hour trying Grails and you may well be running to your project manager in the afternoon foaming at the mouth.