One stop sport shop www.mysportcart.com

Recently I came across a sport website www.mysportcart.com. I was about to order few items from it. At the time of final checkout, I was surprised to see the payment options available. It has only 2 types of payment options. Either you can pay by cash on delivery or do bank transfer (cash, cheque or NEFT transfer). I generally pay via my credit card because it is convenient. I called up the customer support number to know why they had few payment options as compared to other online e-commerce website. I got following response

"Sir, we are starting up our portal, it's around 2.5 month old fast growing company. We are trying to integrate with payment gateways very soon. In the mean time you can opt for cash on delivery option. We are offering huge discounts to our customer because at present we are not paying up any transaction fee to payment gateways."

I placed my order using cash on delivery option and received my items in good condition.

I would suggest my friends to shop online form such website because every facility provided by them comes with some cost and if someone is passing on that benefit to you then use it.

Interview questions

Go through the given link, It really have good set of Java, j2ee interview questions.

Current Reservation in Trains in Kanpur

Hey I am not going to tell you how the current reservation should be implemented in Trains. It is just that how I got current reservation in my last visit to Home. I hope that you know meaning of current reservation in trains ;).

I had a very urgent work at home so I need to visit home. I could not book my tickets though I tried almost every possible combination available on online booking. There are around 12 types of reservation available and I was applicable for 8 of them but unfortunately none did work.
I was without ticket when I was going from Delhi to Kanpur. Somehow I was able to get a birth. Its detail may not be so interesting so I am leaving this section.
When I was returning, it was really a challenge to travel from Kanpur to Delhi on Sunday. It is so rush on this day. You can’t even find place on platform. One advice if you don’t get confirm ticket on last day, get a sleeper waiting ticket. At least you can sit inside sleeper compartment.
So I was telling that when I was returning from Kanpur to Delhi, I had a sleeper ticket. Waiting list on my ticket was score of India cricket team playing against Kenya with all the batsman in form. Yes the Indian team’s score was 240 around. I didn’t check the reservation chart.
Still I had a hope that may be I can get a ticket in Current Reservation, so I was at platform around 3 hrs before the train timings (11:30 PM) . Then I saw current reservation hoarding and I headed towards it. On reaching there I found a lady waiting there with her baggage. I thought may be counter has been shifted to some other place so I started searching it.
I looked all around the platform but could not find any such hoarding. Then I asked to a coolie.
Me: Bhaiya yaha current reservation kaha hota hai?
Coolie: shahib wo to itni late nahi ho paye ga.
I started imagining my night journey, though I came prepared for it with some newspaper in my bag.
It was not over here, it was just starting of a new current reservation system. Another type of current reservation system which I think works well in UP only
Coolie: kaha jana hai shahib?
Me: Delhi.
Coolie: Ticket chahiye kya?
Me: ha
Coolie: Kaun si train aur class ka?
Me: mere pass shram skakti ka waiting hai, leking tum mujhe AC III, AC II, Sleeper , AC I me se kisi ka dila do (mind the order of class) .
I was not able to think that it is still possible to get a ticket while I have a ticket of waiting list 240. Suddenly I realized that I have 600Rs in my pocket and debit card. In 600 Rs I am not going to get any class of AC Ticket.
Me: bhiaya wo debit/credit card chale ga kya?
Coolie: with a naughty smile, shahib ye kaam black ka hai, isme kewal aadmi kaam karte hai (no machinery interruption).
Me: bhiya sleeper ka hi dila do.
Coolie: theek hai, leking 150 Rs extra pade ga.
Me: I said OK. With a calculation in my mind (217 + 150 < 600)
Coolie: Theek hai phir abhi jaha pe wo current reservation wala hoarding hai wahi wait karo.
Me: theek hai

Now I was waiting there, I realized that 2 ~3 more people are waiting. Coolie went to another coolie and after five minute he came to me.
Coolie: Shahib wo 30 Yr age ka ticket chale ga.
Me: Theek hai.
Then he given me a ticket and asked 350 Rs. And told me that the person’s whose ticket you are taking is Praveen Kumar.
I was little worried and was not sure if I got the right ticket. Actually it was difficult to imagine that in this crowded situation one could get ticket. There were many question in my mind. I was thinking that do I look a person of age 30? If TT asked me to show age proof?
Though I never thought of this kind of question in life while traveling on train. But that day I was thinking. I was tense so I called one of my friends. I talked around 12 minutes to change my mood.

I got a different name for a night and was trying to feel little elder.
If you see the whole system, I don’t think that any body was in loss. I was surly going to get a Current Ticket, so I got a current booking no matter who was on reservation counter.
Government: It is also not in any loss. All the seats were booked. They were anyway not going to help.
Coolie: He was a winner.

By The way, I was observing coolie and his business, I saw at least 20 people using the new current reservation counter. So coolie was doing a great business. No queue first time and you are sure of getting it. The only difference would be you will have a different name and different age. Who cares? Until you haven’t changed your sex.
I was inside train at 11:20, and was looking towards all the the young face passing by seat, It may be possible that original owner of ticket is joining me.
After 15 minutes train left the station, TT came after 10 minutes and asked ticket; He could not see my face as I was on side upper and I don’t want to see his face. TT Checked the ticker and marked my ticket valid.
It was really a different experience; different people were assigned different roles.
Coolie was working as a Current reservation in charge. I was playing a role of Praveen Kumar who is elder than me. We both were not feeling comfortable in our new role. Coolie was scared from police and I was from TT.
Is kahane se hame kya education milti hai ;)
don’t try to change your role, do what ever you have assigned to do. Be original.
By the way, new current reservation facility is available in Kanpur Only; If some one find it at some other place do post a comment.

Reservation: Should it be or Not?

I have reservation for reservation however I am against the current reservation policies. Reservation is crucial to accelerate growth of India. It might be possible that as an individual one may have disadvantage.

Why do we need reservation?
The stated reason for the implementation of reservation is the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens, such as the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, who had been subjected to thousands of years of discrimination by India's upper castes.
This was said after independence and reservation should have been ended after 10 yrs as proposed earlier. In my opinion this was a fair enough decision for the advancement of India.

We can’t ignore it, here is example
Take Tamil Nadu, for example. It’s well known that the students from BC/MBC have made significant inroads into the general category, for which there is open, unfettered competition. These reports in the Hindu (2004, and 2005) show clearly that BC/MBC students have done extremely well to capture the bulk of the open competition seats in medicine. The fraction of seats that went to the reserved categories is larger than their share in the population. Two years in a row!

To me, this is a clear indication that the rather aggressive reservation policy in that state has done a great job: it has brought a lot of groups up to speed, and made them mainstream. In other words, it is time to start thinking about (a) scaling down BC/MBC reservation, and (b) eliminating from the BC/MBC list the castes that have truly (and, probably disproportionately) benefited from reservation.

Do we need still need reservation?
Yes, we still need reservation. There is a large sector which is still backward in terms of education.

My reservation policies:
In my opinion there should not be reservation on the basis of caste. It should be on the basis of economical and regional background.

Economical basis: An economically weak person can’t afford expensive study. Please don’t say that government is providing basic education free of cost. I know the quality and environment of such educations. There are still many areas where classes are run under the shadow of tree and many areas where there are hardly classes taken in such institutes. If you want to see such areas do let me know. In these circumstances, an intelligent boy also will suffer. It doesn’t matter what caste he belongs to.

Regional basis: More that 60% population is still in villages and small towns and those people don’t have a good environment. For example I don’t expect a boy (from any caste) living in village can give a fair competition to the boy who is living in a city. The reasons are obvious. The environment in which one is brought up makes difference. The one who is living in rural areas will lack good schools, guidance, teacher, competition.
So if we give an opportunity to such candidates by providing a seat, which in a true sense he doesn’t deserve. By doing this we are making his next generation advance and hence country.

There are few rules which must be followed so that we can get rid of this reservation system in future. I have few in mind and they seems reasonable to me.

1. If a person has taken advantage of reservation, his descends are not eligible for reservation again. My point behind reservation is that major people don’t have awareness and that put them back in time. If you have taken advantage of reservation system, I do believe that your next generation will be modern enough to know what is going on current world.
2. There should be some basic criteria for defining a region and economic condition of the groups which are eligible for reservation. They could be as simple as Personal per capita income from a region, literacy rate of an area.

I am confident we can get rid of the reservation in future by using these policies. Reservation will decrease number of economically weak person’s percentage each year and will make rural areas more developed hence will decrease number of people who need reservation while in caste system these figures are going to increase daily.

Sun turns JavaScript into Java. Google turns Java into JavaScript

JavaScript is said to be World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language. Why is the language so misunderstood? It may be the name JavaScript ;). It doesn’t have any relation with Java.
No programming language is perfect. JavaScript has many errors like overloading of +, reserved word policies are too rigid, Semicolon insertion and some more.

When I started working on JavaScript, I felt it an easy language but sooner I was facing many issues like browser compatibility, memory leaks and many other common problems.
There are many sites discussing about all these. I would refer few of them in this post.

Being a scripting language, support of object-oriented programming is quite impressive. Even though there are no classes and instances, there are objects, prototypes, and implicit inheritance.
Browser compatibility issue can be handled using object level detection (Don’t check browsers rather check objects).
Memory leak is a challenging problem. The browsers try to work well with broken web, making it look fine and behave well. This is a very difficult task. If browser fails to collect the garbage that we left, is a buggy browser (memory leak). Most browsers don't do a very good job about memory leak.

I would like to say thanks to Google and many other companies which are writing JavaScript libraries and making JavaScript hot. A good JavaScript Compiler would definitely make JavaScript library implementation easier. Check Google’s web development toolkit.
Mozilla's (Venkman) JavaScript engine has built-in support for debugging, and thus can provide powerful tools for JavaScript developers.

Check following links

if one closure is buggy, then use more closures
http://www.bazon.net/mishoo/articles.epl?art_id=824

Memory Leaks

http://talideon.com/weblog/2005/03/js-memory-leaks.cfm

Javascript library
http://www.thingsthemselves.com/~jeff/computing/jslib/
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/jslibs/

The Event Object
http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/jsevents3/jsevents3.html

Obejcts
http://developer.mozilla.org/

Google JavaScript APIs
http://code.google.com/apis.html


DISCLAIMER
This Blog includes links to other sites operated by third parties. These links are provided as a convenience to you and as an additional avenue of access to the information contained therein. I have not reviewed all of the information on other sites and are not responsible for the content of any other sites or any products or services that may be offered through other sites. If you are the owner of any of these links and have any objection please do let me know I’ll remove the link.

My Jim Corbett Visit

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