stackoverflow - 50k rep

Five months after crossing the 40k milestone, I've now reached a reputation of 50k on stackoverflow!

The following table shows some stats about my journey so far:

	0-10k	10-20k	20-30k	30-40k	40-50k	Total
Date achieved	01/2011	05/2011	01/2012	09/2012	02/2013
Questions answered	546	376	253	139	192	1506
Questions asked	46	1	6	0	1	54
Tags covered	609	202	83	10	42	946
Badges (gold, silver, bronze)	35 (2, 10, 23)	14 (0, 4, 10)	33 (2, 8, 23)	59 (3, 20, 36)	49 (0, 19, 30)	190 (7, 61, 122)

As I mentioned before, I have really enjoyed being a member of stackoverflow. For me, it has not simply been a quest for reputation, but more about learning new technologies and picking up advice from other people on the site. I like to take on challenging questions, rather than the easy ones, because it pushes me to do research into areas I have never looked at before, and I learn so much during the process.

Next stop, 60k!

Selecting Specific Lines of a File Using Head, Tail and Sed

This post contains a few handy commands used to select specific lines from a file.

Print the first N lines

head -N file

Print the last N lines

tail -N file

Print all EXCEPT the first N lines

tail +$((N+1)) file

Print all EXCEPT the last N lines

head -n -N file

Print lines N to M (inclusive)

sed -n 'N,Mp' file

Print line N

sed 'Nq;d' file

Print all EXCEPT line N

sed 'Nd' file

Print multiple lines, I, J, K etc
Assuming I > J > K:

sed 'Ip;Jp;Kq;d' file

The last q tells sed to quit when it reaches the Kth line instead of looping over the remaining lines that we are not interested in.

Guava Table

Guava's Table<R, C, V> is a useful alternative to nested maps of the form Map<R, Map<C, V>>. For example, if you want to store a collection of Person objects keyed on both firstName and lastName, instead of using something like a Map<FirstName, Map<LastName, Person>>, it is easier to use a Table<FirstName, LastName, Person>.

Here is an example:

final Table<String, String, Person> table = HashBasedTable.create();
table.put("Alice", "Smith", new Person("Alice", "Smith"));
table.put("Bob", "Smith", new Person("Bob", "Smith"));
table.put("Charlie", "Jones", new Person("Charlie", "Jones"));
table.put("Bob", "Jones", new Person("Bob", "Jones"));

// get all persons with a surname of Smith
final Collection<Person> smiths = table.column("Smith").values();

// get all persons with a firstName of Bob
final Collection<Person> bobs = table.row("Bob").values();

// get a specific person
final Person alice = table.get("Alice", "Smith");

Coursera class: Functional Programming Principles in Scala

I thought I'd mention that one of my highlights of last year was completing the "Functional Programming Principles in Scala" class led by Martin Odersky, the designer of Scala. This Coursera class started in September 2012 and was around 7 weeks long. Learning about functional programming was a rewarding experience and I found the course and assignments quite challenging, but immensely enjoyable. I even managed to get a distinction! I believe this course will be running again this year and I'd highly recommend it to people who wish to discover functional programming and Scala.

I have committed my assignment solutions to my GitHub repository.

I am now looking forward to starting some new classes in 2013!

Related posts:
Stanford's Online Courses: ml-class, ai-class and db-class

fahd.blog in 2012

Happy 2013!
I'd like to wish everyone a great start to an even greater new year!

During 2012, I posted 31 new entries on fahd.blog. I am also thrilled that I have more readers from all over the world too! Thanks for reading and especially for giving feedback.

Top 5 posts of 2012:

• Analysing a Java Core Dump
• Spring 3 - JavaConfig: Loading a Properties File
• Using a NamedQuery with a Composite ID in Hibernate
• Sybase: How to BCP data in and out of databases
• Java 7: Fork/Join Framework Example

I'm going to be writing a lot more this year, so stay tuned for more great techie tips, tricks and hacks! :)