Posts by Tammo Sminia

Value of tests

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Tammo Sminia

Testing is an important part of writing an application. There are many decisions to make about what, how and when to test. It often helps me to think of the costs and values of (potential) tests to reason or talk about them.

This text will explain what these costs and values are and some of the guidelines I derived from this.

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AI movie critic - part 1 - Reading the training data

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Tammo Sminia

This is the first of a series of posts. Where we will use machine learning to rate movies. For this task we're not going to watch all the movies. I assume it's good enough to just read the plot. We'll use Markov chains to rate the movies and as an added bonus we can also generate new movie plots for awesome (or terrible) movies. In this first part we'll get the data and change it into a more usable format. We can use the data from IMDB, which is published on ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/misc/movies/database/. Of interest are the plots and the ratings.

Plots look like this:

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"this" in javascript

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Tammo Sminia

In object-oriented languages, like Java, this refers to the instance of the class where you run the method. In javascript this is often also the case, but not always. In this post we'll explore some situations. And I give some tips on how to deal with them. The normal case. The function eat is defined on carrot. And we simply run it. this will refer to the enclosing object, which is carrot, with name "carrot".

var carrot = {
  name: "carrot",
  eat: function () {
    console.log(this);
    console.log("eating " + this.name);
  }
};

carrot.eat(); //result: eating carrot

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Throttling in Akka and Spray

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Tammo Sminia

When you want to limit the amount of messages an actor gets, you can use the throttler in akka-contrib. This will let you limit the max transactions per second(tps). It will queue up the surplus. Here I'll describe another way. I'll reject all the surplus messages. This has the advantage that the requester knows it's sending too much and can act on that. Both methods have their advantages. And both have limits, since they still require resources to queue or reject the messages. In Akka we can create an Actor that sends messages through to the target actor, or rejects them when it exceeds the specified tps.

object ThrottleActor {
  object OneSecondLater
  object Accepted
  object ExceededMaxTps
}
import ThrottleActor._

class ThrottleActor (target: ActorRef, maxTps: Int) extends Actor with ActorLogging {
  implicit val executionContext: ExecutionContext = context.dispatcher
  context.system.scheduler.schedule(1.second, 1.second, self, OneSecondLater)

  var messagesThisSecond: Int = 0

  def receive = {
    case OneSecondLater =>
      log.info(s"OneSecondLater ${DateTime.now} $messagesThisSecond requests.")
      messagesThisSecond = 0
    case message if messagesThisSecond >= maxTps =>
      sender ! ExceededMaxTps
      messagesThisSecond += 1
      log.info(s"ExceededMaxTps ${DateTime.now} $messagesThisSecond requests.")
    case message =>
      sender ! Accepted
      target ! message
      messagesThisSecond += 1
  }
}

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Iterating over a Map in Scala

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Tammo Sminia

Iterating over a map is slightly more complex than over other collections, because a Map is the combination of 2 collections. The keys and the values.

val m: Map[Int, String] = Map(1 -> "a", 2 -> "b")

m.keys    // = Iterable[Int] = Set(1, 2)
m.values  // = Iterable[String] = MapLike("a", "b")

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Chaining Options

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Tammo Sminia

When we have multiple Options and only want to do something when they're all set. In this example we have a property file with multiple configurations for one thing. A host and a port, we only want to use them if they're both set.

//The individual properties
val stubHost: Option[String] = Some("host")
val stubPort: Option[Int] = Some(8090)

//The case class I'll turn them into
case class StubConfig(host: String, port: Int)

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