Yippie!

I just got a copy of my EJB3 book in my mailbox. It is again a great feeling to actually have the printed copy in the hands.
One can get sort of a feeling when one print it out on the laser printer, but having the real book is still different.

Amazon still shows it as unavailable, but this should change within the next few days. All those who preordered a copy will also soon get it.

I still need to add a few things to the accompanying web page, but I'll do this in the next few days.

Here is a picture with my copy:

Technorati: EJB3

Star imports

When pepole asked me why star imports are bad, I didn't really know what to answer. Usually I was talking about parsing time and so.
And actually IDEs like Eclipse or IntelliJ even offer to reorganize individual imports into star imports (I think IntelliJ does this as default).

Today I was doing a bigger refactoring and was moving packages around.
Eclipse is doing a really good job here.

Unfortunately I was getting compile errors afterwards, because the old packages did no longer exist.
The reason behind this is that a refactoring is a textual replacement and not a semantical. Example:

import foo.*;

public class Bar {
   Foo f;
}

Now you move foo.Foo to baz.Foo. Eclipse adds the new import baz.Foo statement, but does not remove
foo.*, as is does basically not know that foo.* no longer exists (it could analyze all statements in the class and
automatically remove unused imports afterwards though).

EJB 3 book, talklets at Stuttgart Java User Group

My EJB 3 book will probably be in stores starting on 26th of this month.

Within the next month, the Java User Group Stuttgart will host two EJB 3 talklets

• 25.1.06: Sun evening - presentations about Java SE 6 and EJB 3.0 from a Sun computers perspective.
  
• 15.2.06: Broader look into EJB 3 - presentation about EJB 3, existing Appserver and some tips and tricks on using EJB 3
  

As usual, everyone is invited to join those sessions.

Technorati: EJB3

Using a printer on the mac from Windows

Recently I was struggling with printing from Win*. Samba was set up nicely, but Win users were not able to print. I tried lots of different things, but no success.
Googling around brought me to http://members.cox.net/18james/osx_printer_sharing.html#ipp
Especially the section about IPP near the bottom was very helpful. With it I was able to configure the Win machines within a few seconds.
As all newer Win* version support this, I'd say this is the recommended way to print from Win* on a printer attached to a Mac.

Samsonite suitcases can break

Do you remember when you first found out that your dad does not know everything or that Santa Claus does not exist?
I hat the same experience when returning from my trip to Philly and saw that two out of three Samsonite suitcases had cracks on the side as you can see here and here.

Unfortunately those suitcases can not be reparied as it seems that single parts are no longer available and the cost of the repair would be higher than that of new suitcases.