Seven years of blogging

Posted: 11 Jul 2014 12:21 PM PDT

Hey everyone! Another year has passed and it's been 7 years since I've been blogging here at catonmat.net! In this post I want to summarize this year's statistics.

See the one year of blogging, two years of blogging, three years of blogging, four years of blogging, five years of blogging, and six years of blogging for the previous years' statistics.

Let's start this year's stats with traffic:

Traffic statistics from Google Analytics for Jul 1, 2013 - Jun 30, 2014.

This year: 784,992 uniques. 983,890 visits. 1,376,933 page views.
Last year: 903,468 uniques. 1,191,596 visits. 1,695,544 page views.
Delta: -118,476 unqiues. -207,706 visits. -318,611 page views.

I haven't been blogging much at all and that explains the negative delta. I've about 200 articles in drafts so stay tuned for some quality articles soon!

Feedburner stats: At 16,500 rss subscribers this year. Last year 16,343. Delta 157. subscribe.

Feedburner is a dead service now, so the rss subscriber count has become a meaningless, random number that changes daily. It fluctuates around 16,500 subscribers.

Github stats: At 1700 followers this year. Last year 1400. Delta +300. follow me.

Twitter stats: At 4130 followers this year. Last year 3774. Delta +356. follow me.

Total articles written: 20. Top 10 articles:

ASCII Cheat Sheet (62656 views)
Perl One-Liners has been published by No Starch Press (29926 views)
Top 10 Inventions at Browserling (28126 views)
How we added invoices to Browserling (18673 views)
How to run unkillable* (persistent) programs in Linux (16073 views)
How to make unprivileged programs listen on privileged ports (15301 views)
CodeProject Interview With Me (14543 views)
How to save read-only files in vim (14091 views)
How to access Windows through ssh (9966 views)
How to run multiple node versions side by side (9295 views)

My top 5 favorite articles:

That's all folks! Now let's have some 7 year birthday cake,

And let's meet for the cake next year again! See you!

splice() can be used to push(), pop(), shift() and unshift() and more

Posted: 11 Jul 2014 11:29 AM PDT

Someone asked me today about Perl array operations and it turned out he didn't know that all basic array operations, such as push, pop, shift, unshift can be implemented with just splice. So I thought I'd write a blog post that shows how awesome splice is.

splice

Splice has the following prototype:

  splice(array, [offset, [length, [list]]])

Splice replaces length elements in array at offset with list. Offset, length, and list can be omitted, which makes it a really powerful function that can do a bunch of array operations.

push via splice

To push to an array via splice, you need to set offset to the end of the array, length to anything, and list to the list of values that you want to add.

Let's say you've array @a:

  my @a = ("foo", "bar", "baz", "rms", "lbt", "esr");

Then you can push to it via splice like this:

  splice(@a, @a, 0, "val1", "val2", "val3")

The @a array now contains:

  ("foo", "bar", "baz", "rms", "lbt", "esr", "val1", "val2", "val3")

pop via splice

To pop an element from an array via splice, you need to set offset to the end of the array.

Let's say you've array @a:

  my @a = ("foo", "bar", "baz", "rms", "lbt", "esr");

Then you can pop it via splice like this:

  splice(@a, -1)

The @a array now contains:

  ("foo", "bar", "baz", "rms", "lbt")

Here splice replaced the last element of the array with nothing, effectively removing it.

shift via splice

To shift a value off an array via splice, you need to set offset to the beginning of the array, and length to 1.

Let's say you've array @a:

  my @a = ("foo", "bar", "baz", "rms", "lbt", "esr");

Then you can shift a value like this:

  splice(@a, 0, 1)

The @a array now contains:

  ("bar", "baz", "rms", "lbt", "esr")

Similarly you can shift more than one value, if you increase length:

  splice(@a, 0, 5)

This shifts first 5 values off the original array and it now contains:

  ("esr")

unshift via splice

To unshift values to an array via splice, you need to set offset to the beginning of the array, length to 0, and list to the list of values that you want to add.

Let's say you've array @a:

  my @a = ("foo", "bar", "baz", "rms", "lbt", "esr");

Then you can unshift a new list to this array like this:

  splice(@a, 0, 0, "val1", "val2")

The @a array now contains:

  ("val1", "val2", "bar", "baz", "rms", "lbt", "esr")

replace i-th element in an array via splice

To replace i-th element in an array via splice, you need to set offset to i, length to 1 and list to the list of values.

Let's say you've array @a:

  my @a = ("foo", "bar", "baz", "rms", "lbt", "esr");

Then you can replace the 2nd element ("bar") via splice like this:

  splice(@a, 1, 1, "ror")

The @a array now contains:

  ("foo", "ror", "baz", "rms", "lbt", "esr")

Similarly you can replace the i-th element with a list of values:

  splice(@a, 1, 2, "ror", "zoz")

The @a array now contains:

  ("foo", "ror", "zoz", "baz", "rms", "lbt", "esr")

There are more operations that you can do with splice, such as deleting all elements in the array, adding elements at the i-th position. I'll leave these other operations as an exercise to the reader.

I think you can do the same in other languages as well, such as JavaScript, as it also has array.splice operation.

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