Marc Palmer

The State will tell us how to teach and what results to aim for, and what the State prescribes will be bad. Its targets are the worst ones imaginable, yet it expects to get the best possible results. Today’s politics work in the direction of regimentation, and it will go even further than this in its attempts to make people conform. Human beings will be treated like puppets on strings, and this will be treated as progress in the extreme. Institutions like schools will be organised in the most arrogant and unsuitable manner

- Dr Rudolf Sterner, from an address given on 20 August 1919 (emphasis added).

Our battle is continuing to prevent the EYFS from clobbering the good work done by Steiner Waldorf schools in the UK.

At one of my clients I need to run a VMWare VM on my Apple MacBook.

After much pain and messing around, the problems I had with getting the network of the guest O/S working were related to VMWare and the guest O/S’s fixed IP address.

Even if you set VMWare to NAT mode, it will not notice the fixed IP that the guest O/S is using. What you have to do is change the DHCP and NAT settings of DHCP to use the correct subnet you want, and the correct IP address. You do this by changing the “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf” and “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/vmnet8/nat.conf” files, so that there is a single IP address in the DHCP range (end of range MUST be start+1).

You then ALSO have to edit the file “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/locations”  to change the value of – wait for it – VMNET_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR to the IP subnet you want the “static” IP to be on.

This last step took me a long time to work out, not least because the variable name makes no sense with using NAT mode.

Ugh. It’s one of those days where I’m being reminded that either I’m dumb or the rest of the world is, but someone is.

Case 1 – Calling each() on String in Groovy gives you every character of the string… but as a String and not a Character. I’m sure there’s a great reason for it, but it eludes me.

Case 2 – The Java Servlet API is an old friend. The person who put it together however did not understand the concept of HTTP Status codes. To send a non-”OK” response (code 200 as it happens), you have to call a method called setStatus(). However to set the string sent with the status, you have to call sendError – previously there was a setStatus(int, String) but that is deprecated. So… all responses with messages are errors now. OK. Then if you’re using Spring’s MockHttpServletResponse you find they have added getErrorMessage() to get the message set in setStatus/sendError… even though it is not necessarily an error message! Personally I think setStatus(int, String) was fine, and the mock should have getStatus() and getStatusMessage().

Rant over.

I released version 0.4 of the grails-mail plugin in the Grails plugin repo the other day, but have not posted about it as I’ve been busy working on-site. I’ve also been putting together a screencast that shows how to use the plugin in the most basic scenario and also render content from GSPs from within services.

To install the plugin, which adds support for rendering the mail body from a GSP from within a controller, service or job, run: grails install-plugin mail

Full docs for the mail plugin are here.

To view the “Using the Grails mail plugin” screencast, click on the thumbnail or go to the fledgling “Grails Rocks” page.

This is the first Grails Rocks screencast, but I hope to do many more. The next one is already planned, for the forthcoming release of the Email Confirmation plugin – which was dependent on this mail plugin 0.4 release.

Having just installed the latest firmware I find that Apple still have not fixed the bugs related to updating apps.

Basically when I try to update apps on the phone itself it tries installing it as a new icon instead of replacing the old one, and then fails at the end leaving 2 icons.

If I try to update from iTunes as the phone tells me to, it fails with a hex error code. The only solution is to delete the apps on the phone and in iTunes and use the store to ‘purchase’ them again which now requires an extra step of running ‘Check for purchases’.

Poor show.

Thankfully the SMS and contacts performance improvements are working really well.