Re: OT: Bad examples everywhere (Was: distinguishing between failures and errors)

[snip...]
I've fallen in love with  
Log4J.  Doing something like:

catch (Exception ex) {
   log.error("Something bad happened here", ex)
}

is just a nice thing to have.  Your own error message
AND the exception message AND the stack trace.
[end snip...]

... which is just as easy to get by having the following in some utility
class:

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(sw);
ex.printStackTrace(pw);
return <your own message prepended to> + sw.toString();

=jason