Anyway, in the same thread, people started providing patches that fix this issue (for time being). And in one of the project, I saw the Raphael source code split into different files and converted to CommonJS module pattern.

I took the liberty to extract only the raphael-js modules and put them together in this Github repo: https://github.com/vraa/raphael-require

So, if you have a need, please feel free to use the above repo and let me know if you face any issues.

She didn’t do anything wrong except being born as a woman in India. It’s a shameless society that we live in.

At 23, J Vinodhini was her parents’ only pillar of support. When she joined an engineering college in Karaikal district in Puducherry for a B.Tech. (information technology) course, her parents, Jayapal and Saraswati, sold their small plot of ancestral property to finance her education. They too moved to Karaikal, where Jayapal got a job as a watchman at a school.

About three months back, Vinodhini joined a private company in Chennai after completing her education, bringing hope and joy to her parents. But all their dreams shattered on November 14, when Vinodhini suffered an acid attack by a spurned suitor that has left her blind in both her eyes.

The accused has been identified as Suresh Kumar, alias Appu, 32, an engineering diploma holder who runs a business renting out concrete mixer machine. Kumar had reportedly expressed an interest in Vinodhini, after which she had informed her parents. Jayapal had complained to the local police, who summoned Kumar and issued a warning. He was made to give a written assurance that he would not trouble Vinodhini.

On November 14, Vinodhini, accompanied by Jayapal and a family friend, Padmanabhan, was on her way to the bus station at about 10:30 pm when Kumar reportedly threw acid on her. Having gone home for Diwali, Vinodhini was to return to Chennai that night. Kumar has since been arrested.

Vinodhini suffered 40 per cent burns in the acid attack, including injuries to her face, chest and hand. Both her eyes were severely damaged. Jayapal and Padmanabhan were also injured in the attack. Kumar himself suffered 10 per cent burn injuries.

Vinodhini was rushed to a local hospital, from where she was later shifted to JIPMER hospital. From there, she was referred to the Government Kilpauk Medical College Hospital in Chennai for specialised treatment. While her condition is now stable, both her eyes have been irreparably damaged. Doctors are waiting for the wounds to heal so that they can remove what is left in the sockets.

“In usual cases of burns due to fire, the eyes are saved because we involuntarily close our eyes tight. However, in the case of acid attacks, it takes a moment for the victim to realise what is happening. In Vinodhini’s case, it was a direct hit on the face, causing serious injuries. The acid burned her eyes completely. We now have to wait and treat her over the next few weeks before removing what is left there. We will then do a reconstruction and fix artificial eyes, which will happen in the next three to six months,” said V Jayaraman, who has been treating her.

Outside the burns ward, her parents keep vigil. The despair is evident on their faces.

Even a small amount you donate will bring lots of hope to Vinodhini and humanity! Do your part and ask your friend to do theirs!

I have been using this code snippet to generate pseudo unique IDs for sometime. Since it’s a utility function and it made lots of sense to move it to Underscore itself. Here’s how I did it.

_.mixin({
    guid : function(){
      return 'xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-yxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx'.replace(/[xy]/g, function(c) {
        var r = Math.random()*16|0, v = c == 'x' ? r : (r&0x3|0x8);
        return v.toString(16);
      });
    }
  });

Once the above code is in place, then creating a unique ID is as simple as calling _.guid().

Last year resolutions:

You follow them or not, but you must make a list of new years resolutions. So, did I. For 2012, I had three things in my mind.

1. Release treesk.com - it’s my web app that I’ve started working on during the first quarter of 2012. Initially I planned to release it before 2012, but due to some personnel setbacks (definitely not because of Mayans’s), I couldn’t. But I’m quite happy with its current progress. The 0.9 version of it ‘almost‘ ready and I’m hoping that the 1.0 version will see the light before first quarter of 2013.
2. Get a new job – I did kinda get a new job. I mean, I joined PayPal again. Even though I worked at PayPal for last 2 years, I was a CSC employee then. Last year, I directly joined PayPal. Not sure what 2013 has in its store for my career!
3. Improve skills in photography – totally nuked this. I hardly took out my Camera last year (apart from the time when I was in San Jose/San Francisco). Next year, SHOULD.GO.FOR.PHOTO.WALKS.

New year resolutions:

1. Release treesk. Make it reach people. 
2. Write. A lot. Get back to blogging. And, possibly an eBook.
3. Open source timethetask.

Some important events:

1. Launched and open sourced Twikural.
2. Became a DZone Most Valuable Blogger (MVB).
3. This blog crossed 1 million page views.

Stats for veerasundar.com/blog:

Happy new year!

I take this moment to wish every one of you and your family a happy and prosperous new year!

So, screw you Mayans and what’s up 2013?

Suppose if you want to deploy your web app to a location that is easily navigable, follow these steps.

1. First make sure you have removed all the web apps that are currently added to your server instance (In servers view, right click on the server name and then Add and Remove). After removing the web app, right click on the server and select clean. If you do not do this first, then the option to change the deployment location will stay disabled.
2. And then double click on the server instance in servers view which will open up that server’s configuration page.
3. On that page, see under Server Locations and select either the option Use Tomcat Installation to deploy the web app under the directory where the Tomcat server is installed or Use custom location to manually specify.
4. Save, Re-add the web application and then Publish.

Now the deployed web app will be under the directory of your choice.

So, I was following the approach to bind console.log function to shorter name. Here’s another technique which is specific to Sublime Text.

Using Sublime Text Snippets option, you can create a shortcut to a template and then you can insert that template in multiple places just by triggering the shortcut. Here’s how I did it so that every time, I type echo, Sublime Text converts it into console.log();

1. Go to Tools -> New Snippet…
2. Sublime will open a template in a new file. Now make sure you have this content in that file (or change it the way you want).

   <snippet>
     <content><![CDATA[
   console.log();
   ]]></content>
     <!-- Optional: Set a tabTrigger to define how to trigger the snippet -->
     <tabTrigger>echo</tabTrigger>
     <!-- Optional: Set a scope to limit where the snippet will trigger -->
     <scope>source.js</scope>
   </snippet>

3. Then save this snippet file as echo.sublime-snippet under Packages/User folder. To find the location of Packages/User folder, in Sublime, go to Preferences -> Browser packages and note the location.
4. Restart sublime and then in a JavaScript file, start typing echo and Sublime will provide you with a drop down to replace echo with the template you just created.

Except the keynote, rest of the sessions simultaneously happened in two tracks. So, I had to opt for one session while missing the other one. Anyway, the organizers seems to be recording the whole event. So, I hope I can catch up with the sessions I missed later in video format.

The first session I chose was “Scaling node at Errorception” by Errorception founder, Rakesh Pai. As I’m exploring node for my own web app, its very obvious for me to go for this. The speaker talked about how he’s running Errorception on Node + Mongodb stack. The highlights from his speech was:

1. Don’t write monolithic app. Instead break them into several micro apps (front end, queue processor, etc). This helps you to maintain it without much pain and deploy/take down the apps without affecting each other.
2. Build a Queue layer for inter-app communication. That way, even if you take down a app, the messages won’t be lost and they’ll just be there in the queue until your app pick them up. He seems to be using redis for this purpose at Errorception.
3. CPU bound app? Run away from node.

Then there was a 30 minutes of Q/A session about “Web Storage“. The presenter talked about different options for storing data locally at browser. It was new information to me that developers (ab)used the window.name property in order to persist data. This hack is totally an insecure way to preserve data and should never be considered for anything secure.

After a delicious lunch (I always complain about food in Bangalore, so when I say delicious, it is DELICIOUS!), I sit there in the “Create JS” session by Harish Sivaramakrishnan. He totally inspired the audience by building a game from scratch in 45 minutes using CreateJS library. This library lets you to draw objects on Canvas instead of directly manipulating pixels by hand. A totally cool JS lib and if you are into game/visual programming using Canvas, you shouldn’t miss this one.

The final sessions I attended were about using JQuery Deferred instead of inner-nesting callbacks and I18N Wikimedia libraries. Both provided some good information which I’ll be using in my next projects.

Final session of the day was from Rakesh Pai who demoed his project of Controlling a toy car using Node server. He’d integrated the toy car with the Raspberry pi computer and ran the node server in it. A cool hardware hack, received great appreciation from the crowd.

With that the first day got over.

1. Adding curly braces around block level statements

It is often a good practice to wrap the block level statements with {curly braces}. But still, if there is only one statement in the block, then some developers prefer not to wrap them with {}. But Checkstyle will complain if you do so.

If you want to change this,

if(condition) 
    doSomething;

to this:

if(condition){
    doSomething();
}

Eclipse’s source cleanup is there for your help.

1.  In Project Explorer, right click on the source folder and select Source -> Clean up…
2. Choose Use custom profile and then click configure next to the custom profile section.
3. By default, clean up action is configured to do multiple cleanup task. Since we are focused only on adding curly braces, we will disable all other cleanup tasks. To do this, navigate to all the tabs in the Custom Clean ups window and deselect all the cleanups.
4. Then in the Code Style tab, select the Use blocks in if/while/for/do statements option and click OK.
5. Then in Clean Up dialog, click Next and the refactoring will occur. You’ll be presented with a review page with the changes made.

2. Joining to if statements into one

Lets say, you have a code like this:

if(isLoggedIn){
  if(isAdmin){
    doSecretStuff();
  }
}

It is safe to combine the two if statements into one, unless you have some other code in between the two if statements. Of course, you can manually edit the code to remove the second if and move the condition to up. But wait, when Eclipse can do this for us, why should we do it ourselves?

1. Place your cursor on the if keyword of the inner if statement.
2. Press Ctrl + 1 which will open a context menu.
3. Select the option Join ‘if’ statement with outer ‘if’ statement.
4. Voila! the two if statements are now combined into one.

You’ll get:

if(isLoggedIn && isAdmin){
  doSecretStuff();
}

3. Renaming a filed and its getter / setter methods

According to a this, renaming an element is the mostly used refactoring in Eclipse. So, when you rename a field which has setter/getter methods, you’d manually rename those method names. But Eclipse can help here to simplify this.

1. Place your cursor on the field name that you want to rename.
2. Press Ctrl + Shift and then press R key two times continuously which will open the ‘Rename Field’ dialog box.
3. Check the options ‘Rename getter’ and ‘Rename setter’ while providing a new name to your field.
4. On clicking OK, this will rename the field as well as its getter/setter methods.

4. Inverting if statement

Suppose you have a code like this:

if(!isLoggedIn){
  // ask to login
}else{
  // allow access
}

Above code is 100% valid. But code quality tools such as Checkstyle might complain, because we are using a negativity check in the first condition (i.e. !isLoggedIn). When you have only one case (just the if block), then we can’t do much about it. But when you have both if and else, then you can just invert the conditions to avoid this scenario.

1. Place your cursor on the first if keyword.
2. Press Ctrl + 1 and then select Invert ‘if’ statement.
3. Eclipse will invert the conditions and the corresponding blocks.
4. Finally you’ll get:

   if(isLoggedIn){
     // allow access
   }else{
     // ask to login
   }

Helps to improve the readability of the code.

Conclusion:

Of course, the above are just the tip of the iceberg. Eclipse is capable of doing much-more advanced refactoring. So, what are your secret refactoring techniques?

I wanted to experience a whole different view. So, I decided to walk along the San Francisco bay to reach the bridge instead of taking a bus/car ride. And to my surprise, there’s a well maintained walking trail that goes from Pier 39 to Golden Gate bridge. On a fine Sunday morning, I started at Fisherman’s wharf and walked towards the golden gate, on this route:

.

Just after crossing the heavily crowded market area, I reached Ghirardelli. If you like chocolates, then you don’t wanna miss this place. I have seen few of my friends who specifically came to SFO to buy chocolates from this place.

But anyway, I’m not a big fan of chocolate, so I continued my walk along the marina bay.

On the right hand side, opposite to the Hyde street pier, there were group of very old sailing ships stationed in the sea. These ships are used for transportation, commerce and war during the old times of San Francisco. For a small ticket fee, people go inside the ships and see the inner architecture of the ship. But, too bad they are not letting you to sail the ship anymore!

Anyway, if you are lucky, sometimes you get to see the street artists staging plays near the ship area. The theme of the play is mostly about how it is used to be in the olden days.

After crossing the Hyde street pier and walking past the Maritime museum, the journey became tougher. Because there’s a small hill/forest area that I have to cross in order to continue on the trail. At first I thought I lost my way. Because the place looked like a privately owned area. But then I saw people walking in the direction. So, I followed them.

That is one golden rule I follow if I lost in a unknown location – follow the flow of people. Works every time unless you are the only one in that place. In that case, you are totally lost and good luck getting back.

Jokes aside, I continued to walk and after crossing the steep road, the Golden Gate bridge came into my view along with the distance that I still had to cover. You can also see the Fort Mason center in the front.

Now I had few two different possible directions to choose: either go down the hill via Fort mason center or continue walking through the recreation area. I chose the later path as the road was easy to walk.

And it was a really good view to see the San Francisco skylines from the park. There was a statue of a man in the park whom I couldn’t identify from the distance. Also, there’s a weirdest tree in the park which I would name it as the retarded tree!. Seriously, the tree looked like a melted and frozen plastic material without using any molds.

Anyway, I continued to walk towards the Golden Gate. After sometime, I reached the San Francisco Exploratorium. From the outside, the building looked like an ancient Greek palace. Being an techie, I was tempted to go inside the building. But, I didn’t have much time to spend there, as my goal was to reach Golden Gate as early as possible. But to explore the Exploratorium, one need at least a one full day. May be another time..

After the exploratorium, the walking trail went very close to the beach. I could see people jogging, walking, riding all the way in the pathway.  Looking back from there, I could see the bay bridge in the distance.

From there, the Golden Gate was just a few minutes walk away (well, the ‘few’ stands for 30, though). I continued to walk on and it was real good view of the bridge which I’d never seen in my previous visits.

As I (and the others) were nearing the bridge,

And, finally I got the photo of the day which totally worth the One and half hour walk.

The list is not in any particular order and all derived from the rules enforced by code quality tools such as CheckStyle, FindBugs and PMD.

Here we go!

Format source code and Organize imports in Eclipse:

Eclipse provides the option to auto-format the source code and organize the imports (thereby removing unused ones). You can use the following shortcut keys to invoke these functions.

• Ctrl + Shift + F – Formats the source code.
• Ctrl + Shift + O – Organizes the imports and removes the unused ones.

Instead of you manually invoking these two functions, you can tell Eclipse to auto-format and auto-organize whenever you save a file. To do this, in Eclipse, go to Window -> Preferences -> Java -> Editor -> Save Actions and then enable Perform the selected actions on save and check Format source code + Organize imports.

Avoid multiple returns (exit points) in methods:

In your methods, make sure that you have only one exit point. Do not use returns in more than one places in a method body.

For example, the below code is NOT RECOMMENDED because it has more then one exit points (return statements).

private boolean isEligible(int age){
  if(age > 18){
    return true;
  }else{
    return false;
  }
}

The above code can be rewritten like this (of course, the below code can be still improved, but that’ll be later).

private boolean isEligible(int age){
  boolean result;
  if(age > 18){
    result = true;
  }else{
    result = false;
  }
  return result;
}

Simplify if-else methods:

We write several utility methods that takes a parameter, checks for some conditions and returns a value based on the condition. For example, consider the isEligible method that you just saw in the previous point.

private boolean isEligible(int age){
  boolean result;
  if(age > 18){
    result = true;
  }else{
    result = false;
  }
  return result;
}

The entire method can be re-written as a single return statement as below.

private boolean isEligible(int age){
  return age > 18;
}

Do not create new instances of Boolean, Integer or String:

Avoid creating new instances of Boolean, Integer, String etc. For example, instead of using new Boolean(true), use Boolean.valueOf(true). The later statement has the same effect of the former one but it has improved performance.

Use curly braces around block statements.

Never forget to use curly braces around block level statements such as if, for, while. This reduces the ambiguity of your code and avoids the chances of introducing a new bug when you modify the block level statement.

NOT RECOMMENDED

if(age > 18)
  result = true;
else
  result = false;

RECOMMENDED

if(age > 18){
  result = true;
}else{
  result = false;
}

Mark method parameters as final, wherever applicable:

Always mark the method parameters as final wherever applicable. If you do so, when you accidentally modify the value of the parameter, you’ll get a compiler warning. Also, it makes the compiler to optimize the byte code in a better way.

RECOMMENDED

private boolean isEligible(final int age){ ... }

Name public static final fields in UPPERCASE:

Always name the public static final fields (also known as Constants) in UPPERCASE. This lets you to easily differentiate constant fields from the local variables.

NOT RECOMMENDED

public static final String testAccountNo = "12345678";

RECOMMENDED

public static final String TEST_ACCOUNT_NO = "12345678";,

Combine multiple if statements into one:

Wherever possible, try to combine multiple if statements into single one.

For example, the below code;

if(age > 18){
  if( voted == false){
    // eligible to vote.
  }
}

can be combined into single if statements, as:

if(age > 18 && !voted){
  // eligible to vote
}

switch should have default:

Always add a default case for the switch statements.

Avoid duplicate string literals, instead create a constant:

If you have to use a string in several places, avoid using it as a literal. Instead create a String constant and use it.

For example, from the below code,

private void someMethod(){
  logger.log("My Application" + e);
  ....
  ....
  logger.log("My Application" + f);
}

The string literal “My Application” can be made as an Constant and used in the code.

public static final String MY_APP = "My Application";

private void someMethod(){
  logger.log(MY_APP + e);
  ....
  ....
  logger.log(MY_APP + f);
}

Additional Resources:

• A collection of Java best practices.
• List of available Checkstyle checks.
• List of PMD Rule sets