Akhil's Passion

If you don’t know, water-transport is pretty popular in Australia. Around Sydney there are Ferry Stations to reach other points in the country. One such point of attraction where you can reach through the Ferry, is the ‘Manly beach’ . It takes a 40 minute long Ferry ride from Circular Quay ( very near to The Opera House).  The Ferry Journey We had to take an initial 10 minute Ferry ride from Darling Harbour to reach the Circular Quay. There were all-day passes for 23$ available in the station, we get to use it any number of times in any bus or ferry for 24 hour. Once we reached the Circular Quay Ferry station we took the 40 minute long Ferry to the Manly beach. The journey was a beauty, we get to see the Opera house up close in a different view. The Ferry stops right near the manly beach. There is a 10 minutes walk to the beach.On the way there are several shops and activities that tourists would love to explore. Surfing, is a common activity in Manly beach, many s...

If you are in Sydney the first place to see is the iconic Opera House. Does it take a whole-day visit? Well not really if you're in a rush, you could just have a glance and move on to other places like Botanical garden or Bondi beach. But if you have time and you love eating/drinking you've enough things to keep you pinned to the place for a day. There were two of us in the journey, and we started from our apartment in Pyrmont, Sydney.  Our journey started by 11 am . It was a 20 minutes walk.  The hop-on hop-off buses every 10 minutes ( 40$ for 24 hour pass) In Sydney there are red hop-on hop-off buses that circle through the main attractions in the city every 10 minutes. It costs 40$ for a 24 hours pass. You can hop-on and hop-off any number of times. We were tempted for the take one of those but we finally decided to take the walk and reach Opera.  Walking to the places around the Opera House It's better not to go near the Opera House as soon as you spot it....

The solution I'm going to describe striked me just as I was impatiently waiting for a 50MB pdf to be uploaded to an online tool that can split my pdf and give me the portion I need as another downloadable file. Why the mess? See below: Chrome Saves the Day! If you have Chrome there is an Option in Chrome to ' Print to PDF '. All you have to do is the following: Right click the PDF document and Open With -> Chrome In the Chrome go to File -> Print  Choose the Destination as 'Save as PDF'  Choose the Pages you need to print Eg: 0-200 Click Save. Done. Now you have split your pdf successfully without uploading it online or downloading a separate software to do it. :) Split PDF files Without any Online Tools

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 -...

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 ) blogge...

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...