I had a weird problem today when my perfectly indented code comments from Vi editor were looking like a mess in Geany.

The pound signs were all out of line though they look perfectly aligned when opened in Vi editor. Initially I thought that it was a problem with the tab settings in Geany. But after tweaking some of the tab settings did not produce any result, I noticed that spaces in Geany were having lesser width compared to other characters, which was the root of the problems. I found that the font that I was using in Geany was not fixed width. And for that I should use Mono variation of the fonts. So I changed the font setting in Edit > Preference > Interface > Fonts > Editor to below:

A few days back at work I was trying to open a fairly large unformatted (a single line) JSON file generated through one of the junit tests. At first I tried to open it in Eclipse since my Eclipse JEE IDE contains an inbuilt JSON formatter but it ended in a disaster! So much so that I had to kill the Java process running Eclipse. Then I tried to open it using Mousepad, the default text editor that comes pre-installed with Xubuntu. It also failed and got hung. I even tried with Gedit but still no luck. I copied the file to a Windows machine and opened it using Notepad++. The online JSON formatters were able to prettify it, so I went on with it then. But the fact that I was not able to open it natively on my system was bugging me.

This week and last week I spent a lot of time writing code to implement the persistence feature for our module with EJB 3 at work. This is the first time I was working with EJB so there was quite a bit of learnings involved. During this time, I noticed that even some of the most seasoned developers don't have a very clear idea about how the whole Persistence thing in JPA works under the hood. They would take some of the things for granted like if they use an EntityManager in their managed objects, something will auto-magically manage everything for them and in the process, did some rookie mistakes.

try-with-resource is the new feature introduced in Java 1.7 to automatically close a resource after using. It basically helps you to avoid a finally block at the end of the try-catch block to close any resource that needs closing like the BufferedReader. But there's a catch. You can not use any type of resource with a try-with-resource block, only those classes that extend java.lang.AutoCloseable can be used, an interface that has a single method:

Before the final release, I like to test my Python scripts the way these are supposed to be invoked in actual environment, usually with command line arguments. And this is apart from the unit testing and integration testing that I have for the individual modules. I also use Python venv for development because I don't like to directly install all the required libs in my operating system, thus keeping the system PATH clean from the development libs. Invoking a Python script within the test cases is easy, you just need to use the os.system() function. But running a Python script from os.system() using the 'python script-name.py' syntax invokes the python executable from the OS even if I am running the outer Python test case from withing a venv.