decrease memory footprint of grails application

create war using grails war --nojar

copy shared jars into tomcat lib dir

JavaFX on ubuntu linux

JavaFX gets a lot of bad rap, but this is mainly due to the difficulty of getting Java plugin working properly on firefox. Once the java firefox plugin is installed properly JavaFX works well. The load time is quick as well. It can be a Flash competitor if only the java browser plugin installation was easier.

I prefer downloading the JDK directly from SUN instead of using apt-get. Once the JDK is installed, all thats needed is to create a symlink.

I install my jdk in /usr/local/jdk

ln -s /usr/local/jdk/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

Restart firefox and

grails create war with no jars

grails war --nojars

redirect http to https with grails

use a grails filter:
class SecurityFilters {
def filters = {
https(controller: '*', action: '*') {
before = {
if (!request.secure) {
String url = request.requestURL.toString()
String prefix = "http://"
String suffix = ".dispatch"

int startIndex = prefix.size()
def endIndex = url.indexOf(suffix) - 1
def grails = url.indexOf("/grails/")

String body = url[startIndex..grails - 1] + url[grails + 7..endIndex]
String secureHttp = "https://$body"
redirect(url: secureHttp)
return false
}
}
}

empty subject (no subject) in email with grails mail plugin

When sending email using the grails mail plugin, the email subject always ends up empty with (no subject)

this is a known problem. see the link
http://www.nabble.com/Grails-mail-plugin-0.5-:-subject-and-body-always-empty-td20008519.html

The problem happens if you have groovyws-all-0.4.jar in your lib directory. groovyws-all.jar also has javax.mail.* classes packed in there. The fix is as simple unjaring, remove the javax.mail package and rejar it.

hope someone finds this helpful... spent a good half day researching this

skype on 64bit linux

skype doesn't provide a 64bit version for linux, but the 32bit version works fine on a 64bit linux machine. On ubuntu, force the install:

sudo dpkg --force-architecture -i skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb

tmobile hotspot wifi at borders/star bucks ubuntu linux on dell studio xps

Got a dell studio xps 13 (SX13-163B) and have ubuntu 9.04 running on it. Everything works great bluetooth keyboard/mouse, webcam (tested using skype). Wifi at home works without a problem. However when connecting to a tmobile hotspot at borders/star bucks, the wifi would randomly drop connection every few minutes or so which is very annoying and disruptive to my work. I did some experimentation. I disable the network manager then manually started the dhcp client by running:

% sudo dhclient wlan0

After that I was able to connect without interruption for 3hours now. Hope this info is useful for somebody