Tushar Mathur's blog

I had booked my train ticket to Ajmer from Vadodara where I was staying with my aunt. The booking status was waiting and my berth was not confirmed. I had booked it a day before I was travelling and my aunt was getting paranoid about checking the status of my ticket again and again. She would come every 15 minutes and ask me to check the status of the ticket online and it wasn’t her fault actually, because even though Indian Railways is one of the biggest mode of commuting in the world most of the times you won’t get berth in the train. So with no fault of her own she was a little worried about it :) and I would have to go to this sucky website, enter my PNR Number, submit and wait for a response. Every time I would submit my PNR Number there would be popups all over the place. The overall experience of getting the booking status was just too pathetic for me. So I decided to make an app that would do this crappy work by polling the server every 15 minutes and show me the latest status of my ticket.

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I was learning words for GRE when I found this site - mnemonicdictionary.com. It uses mnemonics to aid you in memorizing words. I went through the Barrons GRE List of words but as I was going through it realized how poor the website was constructed. I wanted to put all these words on one page so that I can search the words quickly using the native browser search plus I wanted it to be available offline.

So I used my html-scraper to extract all the data and put it into a json file and then created this web page out of it. I will later add some more features to improve the performance of the page so that the size of the page reduces.

These are my personal notes from David Flanagan’s Javascript the Definitive Guide. I though I will share them with everyone in terms of a Q&A format. I will cover each chapter one by one but since Chapter 1 and 2 are very basic I have started with chapter three. If I get time I will put questions from Chapter 2 as well. Please note that these are my own notes and it is possible that I might have not explained certain concepts in great detail. In case you have more doubts about a question post it in the comments section or refer to the amazing book for more details.

Trust me on this, if you go through these questions diligently one chapter per day then in twenty two days there will be no interview that you can not crack :)

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Why would someone want to use segmented file transfer? Well, the answer is quite simple - To increase download speed. You could checkout this wiki to learn more about it or just read on to get a gist if what it does.

What it really does is, it makes multiple connections with the server from where the file has to be downloaded. Now since data is sent in packets on those connections. There is always little bit of a lag between these packets. This especially happens if you have a low speed internet connection or there are multiple applications using the internet at the same time.

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You don’t have any money left to buy Parallels or Fusion so you are stuck up with Virtual box for the time being. Virtual box unfortunately does not provide a support for retina displays (At the time of writing this document).

You will keep trying out different resolutions and will still not be satisfied because sometimes the content would be too stretched in the horizontal direction and sometimes in the vertical direction. You might then have to use a really low resolution which would look and feel pathetic !

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