I spend a lot of time in the kitchen, I love to cook and so I am often in there with my phone listening to a podcast or, if it is a Saturday morning, watching Show of the week. I am not alone in this behaviour, everyone in my home does this and often at dinner we share youtube videos by propping a phone up on the toaster and huddling around it. This was clearly time to improve the experience with a kitchen screen - a smart TV would be perfect but their lack of support means it is a show stopper for me… so I put together a smarter screen.

Build List

Powering this is a Raspberry Pi 4. I grabbed the 4Gb model, just cause… I don’t have a smart reason for that decision. If you are in South Africa, I grabbed mine from PiShop and grabbed the essentials kit. Putting together the “case” was maybe the most head-scratching aspect since it is just screws, plastic and a fan… no instructions.

Also ordered from PiShop was the remote control since I want this to be like a TV, I do not want a keyboard or mouse. I opted for the OSMC Remote Control which has a small USB dongle and uses radio signals rather than infrared, which means it does not need line of sight. Since the Pi will be behind the screen, the line of sight will be an issue. The remote “just worked” which was so awesome.

For the screen, I ordered a LG 24MK400H which was the perfect side for my needs, wall-mountable and on special 😄 The mounting solution I grabbed a Brateck LDA18-220 Aluminum Articulating Wall Mount Caravan Bracket, which is really awesome and easy for mounting. This came with instructions but they were poor and going with experimenting first helped me find a happier setup.

With all of that, I had everything I needed to get running.

OS

The Pi kit came with a MicroSD card with NOOBS preinstalled on it and all I needed to do is when booting, hold shift and select the LibreElec OS to install. LibreElec is a really basic OS which is “just enough” to run the Kodi media centre software. Going through the setup on that got it up and running within about 30min.

Add-ons

I don’t have a “library” of media, rather I just stream the content I want so installing the add-ons I needed was key to set up, and I went with:

• YouTube
• TubeCast, this lets me cast from my phone to the Kodi
• Twitch
• Amazon Prime Video (VOD), this is for streaming Amazon and not for the buying of movies
• Netflix, this has a really great guide to getting started with 3rd party add-ons which are worth your time

Notes

The only strange part of the setup was that each time the Kodi booted, I got a prompt saying there is an update for LibreElec… but the settings for LibreElec had nothing in it for the update and no way to do the update. Thanks to Reddit I was able to switch it to manual and update the setup and then switch it back.

Go to Settings > LibreELEC > System. Change automatic updates to ‘manual’ (I’m not even sure if auto update works at all, I’ve had it set to that before and it never auto updates). Change update channel to LibreELEC-8.0. Select available versions and select the newest one (8.2.3 at time of writing this).

If this was how you were trying to update, then I’m not sure. I would say backup your LibreELEC install and then start fresh with a new version.

Today I was honoured to be part of the second DevFest in SA with a talk sharing about Kotlin, Micronaut, DataStore and other fun tech... but more on how we ended up where we are with our current project. It is a tech lead doing a retrospective with tech sprinkles to get everyone involved.

If you want the code it is on GitHub and slides are below:

Here is the story of all the work I did this week, and it is so odd I feel it needs to be shared… but lets talk about the world the problem can be found in.

The world

It is a µservice (that is the ohh, look how smart I am to use a symbol for micro) written with DropWizard and deployed in a Docker container, with Traefik in front of that. To hit it you go through a ingress controller and a load balancer.

 +---------------+
 |               |
 |   Internet    |
 |               |
 +---------------+
         |
         |
         |
 +---------------+
 |               |
 | Load Balancer |
 |               |
 +---------------+
         |
         |
         |
 +---------------+
 |               |
 |    Ingress    |
 |               |
 +---------------+
         |
         |
         |
 +---------------+
 |               |
 |    Traefik    |
 |               |
 +---------------+
         |
         |
         |
 +---------------+
 |               |
 | Microservice  |
 |               |
 +---------------+

The microservice acts a BFF (backend for front end), so it does some auth fun and makes calls to an internal API and manipulates them (e.g. changes the data structure). We have a number of different REST style calls across GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

In terms of environments, we obviously have a production environment and we have an integration environment which are setup the same way. We have a stubs environment where we fake out the internal API. Lastly we can run the microservice on our laptops, but there is just the microservice… no traefik etc…

The Problem

When we run our load test from outside everything works except 1 call which fails 98% of the time with a HTTP 500. Other calls (even the same method) all work. Load tests run against the stubs environment and the same call works perfectly on our laptops, in integration and production.

We can even run the fake internal API on the laptops, with the load tests and it works fine there. Basically, one call fails most of the time in one environment… 🤔

Grabbing logs

When we pull the logs for the microservice in stubs things get weirder… it is returning an HTTP 200 😐 This is the same experience we get everywhere else, it works… except in stubs to the load tests it gets a 500

+---------------+   500 Here
|               |
|   Internet    |
|               |
+-------+-------+
        |
        |
        /
        |
        |
+-------+-------+   200 Here
|               |
| Microservice  |
|               |
+---------------+

Further pulling of logs show 500s in the load balancer and the ingress so somewhere between the microservice and traefik the HTTP 200 becomes a HTTP 500… but we don’t have logs on traefik we can pull which makes this a bit harder to determine…

Logging onto Traefik

Next we logged onto Traefik and decided to curl the microservice directly and lo and behold… we get a 500 🤯 and to make it more interesting that the microservice logs still show it is returning a 200 - like what the actual?! Could there be an network issue or magic?

Interesting the 500 came with an error saying “insufficient content written”

Insufficient content written

This led me to looking at the content and looking at what we are sending and I see we are sending Content-Length and the body and guess what… the length of the body does not equal the Content-Length… oh 💩

This is a client side HTTP error… where the server sends the incorrect amount of body, so the client goes, well the server is wrong and raises a 500. I’ve always thought 500 errors were server error and thus could only be raised on the server.

The fix

The fix is simple, in our server we were using the Response.fromResponse to map internal API to the public API and so it was copying the Content-Length from the internal API and we were sending that along.

This meant the fix was to delete the Content-Length header before we call fromResponse to ensure it would rebuild the header and be correct.

The reason why it didn’t fail else where, the version of the mock API we use added Content-Length but newer versions and the real APIs used chunked encoding which never set the header so there is no issue there.

This was a long road to understand the issue, and one line to fix it, and totally a new experience in learning that server errors can occur client side too.

The two issues I did run into, were the need to reconfigure Google Drive (again, a minor 2-minute activity) and trying to get VSCode to work properly. This was a lot more annoying. The initial issue was that git, could not be found… this broke all of source control in VSCode. The fix was to run the following from the terminal: xcode-select --install and restarting VSCode.

Once that was fixed, the next issue was that I could no longer sign commits with GPG, this gave a similar issue as the initial Git not being found.

The correct fix for VSCode is to add it to the list of Developer Tools which you can find under Security & Privacy. Once a restart of VSCode everything just worked. I added Terminal to the list too which also stopped autocomplete from Fish Shell from constantly prompting too.

(I tweeted this story today, and some wanted to be able to share it so here it is)

Everyone gets along well at work, except Jim

He never comes to after-work drinks. He doesn’t go get Friday burger lunch with the team. He doesn’t chip in for Sarah’s farewell gift. When he gets unicorned (i.e. he left his machine unlocked & someone emailed everyone), he doesn’t buy the punishment cake. This annoys everyone. Why doesn’t he just play along? It is harmless fun.

Jim sucks… Right? He just isn’t trying to be part of the team… Right?

Well, Jim can’t afford the transport from after-hours drinks or the expensive burgers or the cake.

He would like to.

Financial diversity is a hard one to spot in a team, but it is a real thing. Are you excluding people because they are not privileged like you?

A lot of introductions to Kotlin start with how null is opt-in because that makes it safer, we even looked at this way back in post 8. The problem though is that sometimes we do not know what we want the value to be when we initialise the value and we know that when we use it we don’t want to worry about nulls. The ability to change from null to never null might seem to be impossible but Kotlin has two ways to do the impossible.

Before we look at the two solutions, let us look at a non-working example. Here we have a class to represent a physical building and we want to store the number of floors which we get from calling an API (not shown). The problem here is there is no good default value. A house with just a ground floor is 0, a multistory office building could have 10 floors, and an underground bunker could have -30 floors.

fun getBuildingInfo(erfNumber : String){
    // call municpality web service to get details
    numberOfFloors = 0; // 0 cause 0 = G like in elevators
}

fun main(args:Array) { val house = Building() house.getBuildingInfo(“123”) println(“My house, up the road, has ${house.numberOfFloors}”) }

This will not compile as it states Property must be initialized or be abstract for the number of floors.

notnull

Following on from our previous delegates we have the notnull delegate we can use to allow the property to not be set initially and then

fun getBuildingInfo(erfNumber : String){
    // call municpality web service to get details
    this.numberOfFloors = 10; 
}

fun main(args:Array) { val house = Building() house.getBuildingInfo(“123”) println(“My house, down the street, has ${house.numberOfFloors}”) }

This example will print out that we have 10 floors. If we were to comment out line 14, we would get the following exception: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalStateException: Property numberOfFloors should be initialized before get. - so not exactly a null exception but close enough it makes no difference.

lateinit

Another option is lateinit which we can add before the var keyword, but we cannot use it with Int, or other primative types so we need to change that as well to a class. This is a really nice and simple solution.

fun getBuildingInfo(erfNumber : String){
    // call municpality web service to get details
    this.numberOfFloors = Floors(2, 40); 
}

fun main(args:Array) { val house = Building() house.getBuildingInfo(“123”) println(“My house, in the middle of the avenue, has ${house.numberOfFloors}”) }

Once again, if we comment out line 14 we get an exception as expected ‘Exception in thread “main” kotlin.UninitializedPropertyAccessException: lateinit property numberOfFloors has not been initialized’.

lateinit vs. notnull

As we can see in our simple examples both achieve the goal but they both have their own limitations and advantages too:

• notnull being a delegate needs an extra object instance for each property, so there is a small additional memory/performance load.
• The notnull delegate hides the getting and setting in a separate instance which means anything that works with the field, for example Java DI tools, will not work with it.
• lateinit doesn’t work with primitive types (Int, Char, Boolean etc…) as we saw above.
• lateinit only works with var and not val.
• when using lateinit you gain access to the.isInitialized method which you can use to check if it was initialized.

The vetoable delegate is usable with variables only (i.e. you need to be able to change the value) and it takes a lambda which returns a boolean. If the return value is true, the value is set; otherwise, the value is not set.

As an example, we will have a User and ensure the age can never be lowered (since time only goes forward)

import kotlin.properties.Delegates

class User() {
    var age : Int by Delegates.vetoable(0)  { property, oldValue, newValue ->
        newValue > oldValue
    }
}

fun main(args:Array<String>) {
    val user = User()
    user.age = 10;
    println(user.age)

    user.age = 15
    println(user.age)

    user.age = 10
    println(user.age)
}

This produces:

10
15
15

The next delegate is actually built into something we have looked at before, map and if you use by to refer to one when you get the value it goes to the map values to look it up.

As a way to illustrate this, we will take some JSON data and parse it with the kotlinx.serialization code. We then loop over each item and convert it into a map which we use to create an instance of User.

import kotlinx.serialization.json.*

class User(userValues:Map<String, Any?>) {
    val name: String by userValues
    val eyeColour: String by userValues
    val age : String by userValues
}

fun main(args:Array<String>) {
    val json = """[{
        "name":"Robert",
        "eyeColour":"Green",
        "age":36
    },{
        "name":"Frank",
        "eyeColour":"Blue"
    }]""";

    (JsonTreeParser(json).read() as JsonArray)
        .map{  
            val person = it as JsonObject 
            person.keys.associateBy({it}, {person.getPrimitive(it).content})
        }.map {
            User(it)
        }.forEach { println("${it.name} with ${it.eyeColour} eyes") }
        
}

This code outputs:

Robert with Green eyes
Frank with Blue eyes

However, if we change line 25 to include the age we get a better view of what is happening.

}.forEach { println("${it.name} with ${it.eyeColour} eyes and is ${it.age} years old") }

This simple adjustment changes the output to be:

Robert with Green eyes and is 36 years oldException in thread "main"
java.util.NoSuchElementException: Key age is missing in the map.
        at kotlin.collections.MapsKt__MapWithDefaultKt.getOrImplicitDefaultNullable(MapWithDefault.kt:24)
        at sadev.User.getAge(blog.kt)
        at sadev.BlogKt.main(blog.kt:27)

As you can see, the map is not initialising the values ahead of time. Rather it is merely being used to look up what value in the map when the properties getter is called.

Following on from our introduction to the by operator and delegates, this post looks at the second of the five built-in delegates, observable.

The next built-in delegate is observable - this allows intercept all attempts to set the value. You can do this with a setter, but remember you would need to duplicate that setter code every time. With the observable, you can build the logic once and reuse it over and over again.

Once again let us start with the way we would do this without the delegated property:

class User() {
    var name: String = "<NO VALUE>"
        set(value) {
            DataChanged("name", name, value)
        }

    var eyeColour: String = "<NO VALUE>"
        set(value) {
            DataChanged("eyeColour", name, value)
        }

    fun DataChanged(propertyName: String, oldValue: String, newValue: String) {
        println("$propertyName changed! $oldValue -> $newValue")
    }
}

fun main(args:Array<String>) {
    val user = User()
    user.name = "Robert"
    user.eyeColour = "Green"
}

Note, that we need to do the setter manually twice and in each one, we will need to change a value, which you know you will get missed when you copy & paste the code.

In the next example, we change to use the observable delegate which allows us to easily call the same function.

While I don’t recommend this for production, I did in the example call it in two different ways. For age, as the second parameter is a lambda I just create that and pass the parameters to my function. This is how all the demos normally show the usage of this. For name though, since my function has the same signature as the lambda I can pass it directly to the observable which seems MUCH nicer to me. However since we need to pass a reference to our function we need to prefix it with ::.

package sadev

import kotlin.properties.Delegates
import kotlin.reflect.KProperty

class User() {
    var name: String by Delegates.observable("<NO VALUE>", ::DataChanged)

    var eyeColour: String by Delegates.observable("<NO VALUE>") { property, old, new ->
            DataChanged(property, old, new)
        }

    fun DataChanged(property: KProperty<*>, oldValue: String, newValue: String) {
        println("${property.name} changed! $oldValue -> $newValue")
    }
}

fun main(args:Array<String>) {
    val user = User()
    user.name = "Robert"
    user.eyeColour = "Green"
}

Following on from our introduction to the by operator and delegates, this post looks at the first of the five built-in delegates, lazy. Lazy property evaluation allows you to set the initial value of a property the first time you try to get it. This is really useful for scenarios where there is a high cost of getting the data. For example, if you want to set the value of a username which requires a call to a microservice but since you don’t always need the username you can use this to initial it when you try and retrieve it the first time.

Setting up the context for the example, let us look at two ways you may do this now. The first way is you call the service in the constructor, so you take the hit immediately regardless if you ever need it. It is nice and clean though.

constructor(id:Int){
    // load service ... super expensive
    Thread.sleep(1000)
    name = "Robert"
}

fun main(args:Array) { val user = User(1) println(user.name) }

The second solution is to add a load function so we need to call that to load the data. This gets rid of the performance hit but is less clean and if you forget to call load your code is broken. You may think, that will never happen to me… I just did that right now while writing the sample code. It took me less than 2 min to forget I needed it. 🙈

Another pain is I need to make my name property variable since it will be assigned at a later point.

fun load() {
    // load service ... super expensive
    Thread.sleep(1000)
    name = "Robert"
}

fun main(args:Array) { val user = User(1) user.load() println(user.name) }

The solution to this is obviously lazy - this gives us the best of all of the above (clean code, no performance hit unless I need it, can use val, no forgetting things) and none of the downsides.

fun main(args:Array) { val user = User(1) println(user.name) }