Latest Grails-mail plugin SVN commits fix GSP view rendering

The other day I committed some further improvements to the experimental email body rendering from GSP views. There is no release of grails-mail with this code in, you need to manually svn checkout and build it from the grails-plugins SVN repo.

Anyway, the fixes allow you to render email body GSPs where the GSP may live in a plugin, or be overriden by your app. To do this, you have to specify the plugin name when rendering the body of the mail – this is required because there’s currently no way Grails can know where the view might be as the contents of plugin view trees are not merged with the app view tree. I can see scope for a future improvement in Grails core, to add all plugin view paths to the resource search paths during development, and shipping a single merged views/ tree within .WAR files built by Grails.

So here’s how you render a mail body from a view in a controller with grails-mail installed:

sendMail {
   to "test@somewhere.com"
   subject "Hello"
   body(view:'/something/mailbody1.gsp',
      plugin:'my-great-plugin')
}

This will try to locate the view in:

<app>/grails-app/views/something/mailbody1.gsp

but if it can’t find it, will try:

<app>/plugins/my-great-plugin-<vernum>/grails-app/views/something/mailbody1.gsp

Also these commits fix GSP taglibs in email bodies. Previously they’d appear in the HTML response of the controller ooops… now they appear in the body of the mail as expected.

Those poor Barristers on as little as £90 per hour

There’s some storm about Legal Aid rates for Barristers here in the UK.

There was an interview with some people on Radio 4 this afternoon, including one such Barrister. He made what can only be called a major misjudgement when he said that these are “derisory rates of pay”. A minimum of £91 per hour, up to £140 per hour (if memory serves), with travel expenses on top.

Now I’ve used lawyers that charge upwards of £180 per hour, but that is for very small cases. For long cases, they cited that some Barristers earn upwards of £500,000 per year.

So, I’m not going to lose any sleep over a Barrister getting as low as £91 per hour. Its just laughable!

iTunes 8 – are Apple bringing us wireless iTunes speakers soon?

I fired up iTunes 8 which seems a nice incremental update… but you wonder if all Apple apps will be exactly the same single unified app one day, what with all the feature overlaps. Genius seems to be working, not sure I’ll use it much.

I noticed that where previously I had some double entries of albums in my library, one on a shared NAS and one on my local HD (local one being a re-download from iTunes – yes they can let you do that if you have a problem!), iTunes has made them both point to the same shared NAS version. An annoyance I’m sure some will complain about – “lost” music is possible depending on how iTunes decided it was a duplicate, although I imagine they did this because it is an itunes purchase and those tracks have unique ids.

ANYWAY… I had a nose around to see what else is different. I noticed this in the iTunes preferences:

I don’t recall seeing “Allow iTunes control from remote speakers” before. Perhaps I’m wrong. Anyway this, coupled with the Remote app for iPod Touch / iPhone and the lack of AirTunes/Airport Express refresh for years surely points to some future wireless speaker + wifi repeated product, that you will be able to use to control itunes either directly with buttons on the speakers, a local remote, or over wifi to the speakers (even if out of range of your iTunes machine) via iPod or iPhone.

I just hope they make humidity resilient versions for the bathroom!

“What do you fancy eating tonight?” – a thing of the past?

We’ve become used to being able to just eat almost anything that takes our fancy at any time, but in the coming years this is likely to have to change. Not only are rising food costs and scarcity going make some products a luxury rather than every day commodities, people are going to have a rising awareness of the ethical issues behind the food they buy.

A piece on a possible ratings scheme system for food products shows the way things may end up going. However I personally doubt any supermarket is going to do anything that means ugly red “bad bad bad!” marks showing up on any of their products. Who wants to be seen to be selling “bad” things?

It may well be that Kenyan beans and Zambian mangetout end up being the first casualties of the coming food miles awareness.

The basic issue is however that we have to accept that we will have to eat more seasonally, and this for many will mean a major shift in diet.