PSA – Surgeon General releases health warning regarding horse hair

horse-hug

Urgent Notice: Potential Danger of Horse Hair

This is a public service announcement. In a press release today, the National Institute of Health has announced the discovery of a potentially dangerous substance in the hair of horses. This substance, called “amobacter equuii” has been linked with the following symptoms in female humans: Continue reading →

2004 Florida Hurricane

hurricaneFrancesYou know you’re in trouble when Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel broadcasts from your neighborhood!

We’ve lived on the east coast of Florida for many years.  Each year the forecasters would warn us about a hurricane approaching, but at the last minute it would always veer off to strike Georgia or North Carolina instead.  So when my wife said she had a bad feeling about an approaching hurricane I told her that it was nothing to worry about.  However this time she was insistent that we evacuate.  As I continued to reassure her she finally gave me an ultimatum – she was leaving and that I was welcome to come with her! Continue reading →

Using Hibernate JPA within Glassfish

Glassfish provides TopLink as its default JPA provider.  However it’s possible for applications to instead use Hibernate within a Glassfish deployment.  The challenge is to determine where to install the Hibernate libraries so that the application references Hibernate instead of TopLink.  While googling for an answer I saw several recommendations suggesting that the Hibernate libraries be installed within Glassfish’s server lib directory, thereby in essence removing TopLink and replacing it with Hibernate. Continue reading →

Calling EJB 3 Session Beans from Spring

There’s been quite a bit of discussion these days as to which technology is best for developing enterprise applications – EJB 3 or Spring?  In my view it’s not an “either-or” question, both technologies have their strong points and use within an application.  When deciding which technology to use, my answer is “simplicity wins”.  Given a particular component to implement the best technology is the one that 1) accomplishes the goal, 2) minimizes complexity, and 3) is the quickest to implement with the least amount of code. Continue reading →