Anand Rajasekar

The main theme of the book is to how to identify goals and stay committed to them. The author asserts that decisions are to be made based on the long term and once decided one should stay committed to them and constantly take actions to reach ones goals. Again an instance of the author stressing [...]

I was listening to the audio book “How to Raise Happy, Healthy, Self-Confident Children” by Brian Tracy, and the primary theme in the first chapter is to raise your child with high sense of self esteem. It got me thinking about my childhood where Ayya and Amma at every instance expressed how special and capable [...]

I have started using Timemachine to backup my computer. It was very simple to setup. One nice feature is that internally the incremental backups use links to refer to unchanged old files so opening the backup in finder shows the complete view.
For my secondary backup snapshot I use pync which synchronizes my data with my [...]

I have been using Microsoft’s synctoy a lot. After moving all my computing to a Mac, I still have been running synctoy on parallels to get my backups done. When moving from Vista to Windows 7 I found so many quirks in synctoy that I have finally settled with SyncBack. SyncToy maintains a database of [...]

Untitled from Anand Rajasekar on Vimeo.

A web application is configured using tomcat’s server.xml and the context.xml. There some configurations that cause web applications to initialize twice like

Duplicate definition of context in context.xml and server.xml
Bugs in tomcat launchers for eclipse that create duplicate context definitions
Duplicate definition of contexts when defining multiple hosts

In my case I had a proper definition of the [...]

Java Serialization is a easy way to persist the state of Java Objects. However if the structure of the class changes the serialized bytes is invalidated by the changes. This article suggest how one could implement serialization with Externalizable with support for versions.
Consider a simple java class

public class SimpleObject implements Serializable {

        [...]

Switching from a Mouse to a Touch Pad to save myself from the carpul tunnel syndrome, I found my hands still at a little discomfort. Taking the cue from some of the split curved ergonomic keyboards I invented the Erogonomic TouchPad Tilt. This ergonomic device acts as a base for a touch pad and tilts [...]

The most frustrating thing about web browsers is most of the navigating is done using a mouse. With my job revolving around web application development this is a sure path to a carpal tunnel syndrome ! Hit-a-Hint is a firefox extension that helps you navigate web pages by assigning keyboard shortcuts for every clickable entity [...]

I used Mark Lyon’s Gmail Loader to import my existing mail from thunderbird to gmail. If you have existing mail in yahoo try using Yahoo! Pops to download the mail using thunderbird and then exporting to gmail.