Akhil's Passion

On October 2013 Apple made the whole Mac OS X free and gave away the cool apps Keynote, Pages and Numbers for free with the OS. Anyone who purchased a Mac after October 1st 2013 has an option to get this deal. But, sadly the buyers before October 1st were left out. They still have to pay to get it from app store. If you are one among them, worry not. I am going to share the trick to get absolutely free on your old Mac OS X machine. All you have to do is download the Trial version of iWork suite for free from any 3rd party provider. Install it and then, you'll be shown and option to upgrade it to full version for free in your App Store. Follow the simple steps to do this :  1. Download the iWork '09 Trial (dmg file) from Softpedia link . Click Download and click External Mirror 1 . You have to download this from softpedia because Apple doesn't support Trial downloads of Apps any longer.  2. Go to your System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> General -&g

A re you a crazy about learning new things? Have your recent lifestyle made you busy all day long and you no longer get to do what you like the most - learning?  Now you spent the precious little time you get after all the busy works on the pursuit of finding new time management secrets that might magically help you find time to do all u ever wanted to do someday. Well, accept it you're never gonna that time-pausing machine.  However, on my search I've found out some interesting resources that could help you make the most of your time.  Josh Kaufman  is the name to remember. I stumbled upon his TED talk video one day, the video gave me some great insights.  How to Learning anything in 20 hours At the end of the video he demonstrates how he learned to play a musical instrument from scratch in 20 hours. That demo play being the end of his 20th hour. And few days after that Ramit Sethi ( author of a bestseller book ) blogged about him.  The &quo

I myself had several times pondered in online news sites and Google to find the theaters playing a specific movie. Google never seem to be very specific for our a local region say movies in 'Trivandrum'. Even on the drive connecting to mobile internet and search for the 'now playing' movies and their theaters is a hassle. This prompted me to use my coding skill for a day to develop an application the benefits everybody happen to go by this situation. Bringing Back SMS To the rescue.  With WhatsApp gaining dominance, We've almost forgotten about normal SMS. But when all you require is few words answer for your 1 word query, I think SMS is the most simple and easy solution.  The service is offered for free, but standard national sms charges might apply at your end (good thing if you still do an sms offer). Currently as the service is offered only for Trivandrum. Yes! that's it just sms @popcorn movie_name to 9266592665  ...

Recently I was researching on implementing lucene search (using Hibernate Search). Although I found success with it, I wanted to automate the process of passing the fields that are indexed and their respective index names. Hibernate Search uses a bunch of annotations in the getter to specify their index name and filters used. My Requirement I want to go through all the 'Field' annotation present in every method defined inside my class and get the value of the 'name' field from it. Sometimes 'Field' is present inside as a nested annotation inside 'Fields'. Here the tricky part is where you've to set YourAnnotation ann =  method.getAnnotation(YourAnnotation.class) and get an the annotation object from it. Here is an example problem: Here is the solution: And here is my output... 

In today's programming culture it's essential to know some more stuffs apart from the language you code with. I learned the importance of this insight as I was flipping through the book 'Well Grounded Java Developer' . I've come across the title of this book several times only to overlook it meaning  in depth, murmuring 'Ha! another book for java newbie'. But it turned out that I was totally wrong and it taught me a lot about programming (including Java) and other things like test drivent development, build and continuous integration (maven) etc. All these were the buzz terms I've been hearing a lot for the last one year but left unlearned so far. The WGJD was an awesome start-off. Maven, is one concept I got wrong from the beginning, we've bee using it at our work place as an eclipse plugin for around a year now and I was under the notion that it's 'just a plugin'. Later from the book I understood, maven is a continuous integration

Hibernate Search enables your Java based web application to search huge number of records in the database in a very short timespan. It gives you the functionality as good as the big players like Google and Yahoo. Due to the vastness of information available today and the chaos it makes, a search box has become an integral part of any application that's launched now. The Hibernate search is designed with to work for such kind of scenarios. The best thing is, its easy to integrate. Once you learn the concepts, you can integrate it to your current application while you sip your coffee and see the results in seconds. The complex areas of search index creation, traversal etc are done by Hibernate search silently behing the scenes. Amazon.com is a typical example of a web application offering brilliant search service. Most of the time users don't know exactly what they are looking for, it's the search engines responsibility to "guess" the users mind with the most releva

I'm a passionate java developer who just migrated from a Windows PC netbook ( Dell mini ) to a 13 inch MacBook Air. Before the netbook I owned a Dell inspirion 1501. I'm quite a bit of an avid blogger as well. I purchased Dell mini just as it was launched hoping that it's compact and mobile architecture would solve all of my need as a programmer and a writer. Unfortunately it turned out that it was a worthless device.The rest of the story goes... Do Not Compare a Netbook With MacBook Air MacBook's astonishing features far exceeds anything that of a normal Netbook. Before Buying a netbook for programming and blogging was one of the biggest blunders I ever made on choosing a machine. The screen was 11 inch and clumsy icons of the Windows were a disgrace all the time. The tightly arranged keys in the keyboard made typing a pain. It's slow Intel Atom Processor is too sluggish to run even VLC player. After  The Mac's backlit spacious keyboard layout,

Samsung Galaxy S4 The Samsung Galaxy S4 is launched with terrific features that exceeds the features in any other smartphone or may be even tablets available in market today. I'd say, they've focused more on the software side of the device this time and brought in several intutive features to make life fun n simple. Some of the interesting ones are:  Instantly preview and speeddial your contacts Preview videos by hovering finger above the screen.  Instantly preview and speeddial your contacts (even when you hover on top of the dial pad without touching the screen). Recognize your eye movement to know when to pause and play the video. Recognize information from images. This is one feature I always want and believed to be the future of computing. It helps recognize the information in newspapers, visiting cards etc. Touch and use even with gloves. Use multiple phones as speaker . No cellular data, Wi-Fi access point or bluetooth required!

After a long research I joined for the ICFAI distance MBA program in 2012. Now I've completed 2 semesters ( as of 2013 ). I wanted to write this review so that people who are looking for a good MBA program can get a hand-on review about the distance MBA offered by the ICFAI Sikkim. I've been through all the cycles of this program and this review might help you make the right choice about the program. This article presents my own ( and unbiased ) view of the program and is in no way associated with the course provider. Is the MBA ICFAI Sikkim Approved By UGC?  As per the latest AICTE regulations, a distance education program must have the approval of a joint commission of  UGC- University Grant Commission AICTE- All Indian Council for Technical Education DEC- Distance Education Council ICFAI Sikkim doesn't have this approval (don't get disappointed, it's not over yet). Only institutes and colleges affiliated to a University are required to take AICTE

IBM Innovate 2012 The event was held at technopark trivandrum on 22nd November 2012.  The whole event was divided into two streams Agile technology Has excellent rational tools that help team leads and project managers to effectively manage things from initial idea to the product development for the customer. Using simple OSLC to create the tools for things like in in-context collaboration and software lifecycle traceability. Software Quality Assurance This was the 2nd parallel stream which we left out . But from what we've hear it's excellent for optimizing QA in software development. Apart from the two sessions there were IBM certification programs for discounted rates. It was a really useful event and would love to attend it next time.