Firefox bookmarks

If you want to use a new browser and use your existing bookmarks from your older browser, say, firefox, all you have to do is Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks -> Import and Backup -> Export HTML. Save the bookmarks.html on your desktop and import them into your new browser. Done !!

Timeouts when launching tomcat in eclipse

Sometimes, when launching tomcat in eclipse over a slow internet connection, you might face a timeout, especially if tomcat is trying to establish connections to database servers. In such cases, you can increase the timeout value as follows:
* Right click on the 'Tomcat Server' in your 'Servers' tab in the 'Fast View'
* Click on 'Open'
* Expand the 'Timeouts' tab and specify a higher value for 'Start'

Spring - Context Initialization failed

Sometimes when trying to launch a spring app on your webserver, it might not launch due to a context initialization failure. An obvious reason for this failure is that the applicationContext cannot be found or the DB login credentials are incorrect. However, this wasn't the problem in my case. It finally struck me that the app might be expecting the jdbc password to be encrypted (base64 in my case) and not in plain text. Once I substituted the base64 version of my password in the properties file, I was able to launch the app successfully.