Anand Rajasekar

Awaken the Giant Within

anandsekar — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 05:03:44 +0000

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 the need to stay committed and not merely interested in your goals. The author goes on to summarize how we as human beings react to pain and pleasure, and how one could leverage this small fact to stay committed. The author also acknowledges the role mental models and beliefs play in our decision making and how important it is to revaluate our beliefs so that we make sound commitments. Finally the author encourages one to write down their goals so that it forms a strong cognitive purpose in our daily lives.

After listening to this book I decided to write down my goals. I will also be soul searching to “why” I pursue the journey of success. The latter is influenced by the book “Three Feet From Gold”.

Self Esteem

anandsekar — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:04:58 +0000

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 was, and till date I carry a good sense of self esteem that helps me with every moment of life. I feel so thankful and hopefully myself and Priya will be able to do the same for Aradhana.

Timemachine and Psync

anandsekar — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:36:35 +0000

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 network hard drive.
I had bad experiences with all the GUI frontends to psync, so I would recommend to stay away from the GUI and stick to scripts.

SyncBack vs SyncToy

anandsekar — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:24:30 +0000

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 the file meta data and hence has the ability to find out which files were deleted in a synchronized folder, however since it has a database using your existing backup with a new synctoy installation just does not work. You have to redo the entire backup, which was not an option as I had about 40 GB of data.

I tried SyncBack and I I have been very happy. It is much much faster than sync toy, always consistent and simple. Since it does not store the file metadata, and you delete a file in the primary folder, you need to specify specify if you want to delete or copy over the file from the passive folder pair.

Optimizing Windows Vista for Parallels

anandsekar — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:38:06 +0000

I have finally moved all my computing to my MacBook. I used Parallels to run Windows Vista in Mac mostly to run Quicken. It was painfully slow. To speed up Windows Vista open up the display performance settings and set it to “Adjust for Best Performance”. With this setting Windows Vista is considerably faster

Time Lapse of Sunset from Milpitas Hills

anandsekar — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:24:50 +0000

Untitled from Anand Rajasekar on Vimeo.

Tomcat Initializing Servlet Twice

anandsekar — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:44:21 +0000

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 context and the problem was I was using a exploded war deployment format and my root directory was named .war , This was causing tomcat to treat it as a war file and a directory and initializing it twice.

The problem vanished after removing the .war extension to the directory. This happened to me on tomcat 6.0.16

Three makes it perfect

anandsekar — Mon, 18 May 2009 04:31:11 +0000

Sometimes creating a collage of similar photographs adds a stunning effect. Here are three photographs of Aradhana stacking blocks.

Photographing Running Children

anandsekar — Mon, 18 May 2009 04:17:16 +0000

Capturing a sharp photograph of a running child can be quite a challenge. Canon has a focusing mode called AI Servo that makes focusing moving objects very easy. This mode uses the auto focus motor to continuously focus on the object in the center of the view finder.

This photograph was taken with my Digtal Rebel XT, 50mm prime lens at f/1.8 ISO 200 1/400s

AI Servo mode makes photographing running children much easier, especially when you are shooting with a high aperture in low light.

Java Serialization Versioning with Externalizable

anandsekar — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 05:39:06 +0000

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 {
private int field1;
private int field2;
}

If the structure of the class changes, then the serialized bytes becomes incompatible and you would get the dreaded ClassCastException

public class SimpleObject implements Serializable {
//private int field1; removed
private int field2;
private int field3; //added
}

A good way to get complete control of the serialization and support version is by implementing Externalizable instead of Serializable.

Externalizable gives the programmer full control over how the class is serialized and de-serialized. It is common practice to add a version variable to support representations of the same class over time.

Consider first version of the same class

public class SimpleObject implements Externalizable {
private int version=1;
private int field1;
private int field2;
@Override
public void readExternal(ObjectInput in) throws IOException,
ClassNotFoundException {
version=in.readInt();
if(version==1) {
field1=in.readInt();
field2=in.readInt();
} else {
throw new IOException(“Invalid Version”);
}
}
@Override
public void writeExternal(ObjectOutput out) throws IOException {
out.writeInt(version);
out.writeInt(field1);
out.writeInt(field2);
}
}

Now if the next version of the class needs to add a String and remove field2 the class would look like

public class SimpleObject implements Externalizable {
private int version=2;
private int field1;
//private int field2; removed
private String version2String;
@Override
public void readExternal(ObjectInput in) throws IOException,
ClassNotFoundException {
version=in.readInt();
if(version==1) {
field1=in.readInt();
in.readInt();// ignore
version2String=“”;// initialize to default
} else if (version==2) {
field1=in.readInt();
version2String=(String) in.readObject();
} else {
throw new IOException(“Invalid Version”);
}
}
@Override
public void writeExternal(ObjectOutput out) throws IOException {
out.writeInt(version);
out.writeInt(field1);
out.writeObject(version2String);
}
}