Space Station Sunday: Kick The Tires And Light The Fires

This week, activities on the ISS included a diverse array of scientific tests as well as the arrival of a Russian cargo ship bearing supplies. The Russian ship Progress 55, which had been docked aboard the ISS since April, was filled with trash and set free to de-orbit on Monday. Its successor Progress 56 launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazahkstan on Wednesday, arriving at the ISS only six hours later with a payload of food and other supplies.

As reported by NASA, scientific tests of note on the ISS this week included:

-analysis of intra-ocular pressure of astronauts' eyes to determine and improve how long-duration spaceflight affects astronauts' vision (microgravity forces bodily fluids upwards towards the skull, often applying unwanted pressure to ocular nerves.)

-the Aquatic Habitat for Zebrafish Muscle Study environment was tended to by German astronaut Alexander Gerst. This experiment examines at a molecular level the atrophy of muscles in microgravity by using zebrafish (small freshwater vertebrates) as test subjects. The fish live in two aquariums with a closed-loop water supply, and analysis of their muscles as well as those of the astronauts may help prevent the loss of muscle mass in space.

-the BASS (Burning And Suppression of Solids)-II Experiment was worked on by flight engineer Reid Wiseman. The experiment, which has a special Combustion Integrated Rack equipped with a combustion glovebox, 100 fuel samples, fuel and oxidizer controls as well as five cameras, aims to assess which materials may be MORE flammable in space than on earth, and how the reactions studied can aid fire detection and prevention on both Earth and the ISS. As stated by NASA, "BASS-II tests the hypothesis that materials in microgravity, with adequate ventilation, burn as well if not better than the same material in normal gravity with other conditions being identical (pressure, oxygen concentration, temperature, etc.). The main variables being tested are the effects of ambient oxygen concentration, ventilation flow velocity, and fuel type, thickness, and geometry." The spherical shape in which flames burn in space allows for more thorough analysis of the combustion's possible effects.


The ISS astronauts also took time to respect the history of their institution, citing the Apollo missions as early inspirations as they spoke via radio with Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins as well as Apollo 13 astronaut (and Apollo 11 backup commander) Jim Lovell. The vintage astronauts had gathered for the renaming of the Kennedy Space Center's Operations and Checkout Building in honor of Neil Armstrong as part of the moon landing's 45th anniversary celebrations.

A  customs form from our early astral immigrants, celebrating 45 years of repatriation to Earth.

Unit Testing and Test-Driven Development in Python

There are both advantages and disadvantages to being self-taught in any given discipline. In certain cases, the advantages and disadvantages can overlap or even coincide. For example, when you are self-taught, you are not confined by institutional structures and courses of study. On the one hand, this allows for a distinct measure of freedom to pursue one’s own interests in the field, which would not necessarily be afforded to a person following a traditional disciplinary curriculum. On the other hand, this also means that it can be quite easy to develop gaps in one’s basic knowledge of the discipline, for the simple reason that these areas of study did not fall within your area of interest.

I discovered one such gap in my study of programming in general, and Python in particular, a number of months ago when I came across a quote online that went something like this: “Code that is not tested is broken by definition.”  Testing? “You mean running the code to see if it works?” I thought to myself. Within the next hour I had my first exposure to the method of test-driven development and the Python unittest module.

This was literally the exact opposite of how I had approached my own programming projects up until then, which might be termed “error-driven development”: write some code; run it; see if it works; if it doesn’t work, tinker at random until it does; write some more code and repeat. I quickly realized that, according to the above quote, all my code was broken, by definition. 

The test-driven development model is the reverse of this: write a test, run it and watch it fail; write some code to make the test pass; refactor; write another test and repeat. It was an enlightening experience to attempt writing even a simple program under a test-driven model, as it was immediately obvious that I had only the vaguest notions about things that I thought I knew fairly well.

Since then, I’ve re-written a number of programs I’d created for myself under a completely test-driven developmental model, and have integrated testing into my everyday coding practice. I’ve also collected a bunch of resources that I've found helpful along the way, which you can find below. Also, as you may know, of late there has been something of a controversy brewing on the merit and value of test driven software development. Some links on this are supplied at the end. As always, further recommendations are welcome in the comments!

Overview of Test-Driven Development (Video Lectures)

• Understanding Test Driven Development
• Unit Testing Best Practices
• Test Driven Development: That's Not What We Meant (Critical review of TDD practice)

Unit Testing in Python (Video Lectures)

• Introduction to Unittest
• Unit Testing Makes Your Code Better
• Units Need Testing Too

Python Unittest Module Docs

• Python 2.7 unittest
• Python 3.4 unittest

Python Unittest Intro Tutorials

• Dive Into Python: Unit Testing
• Dive Into Python 3: Unit Testing
• Learn Python the Hard Way: Automated Testing
• Introduction to Unit Testing in Python and Ruby
• Introduction to Unittest
• Unittest Introduction
• Unit Testing with Python
• Improve Your Python: Understanding Unit Testing 
• Testing Python Command Line Apps

Test Driven Development in Python

• TDD in Python in Five Minutes 
• Beginning Test Driven Development in Python 
• Unit Testing and TDD in Python
• Test Driven Development in Python Part 1
• Test Driven Development in Python Part 2

Unit Testing Today

• Is TDD Dead?
• Is Test Driven Development Dead?
• TDD is Dead. Long Live Testing!
• Examining the 'TDD is Dead' Controversy

Congressional Vandals Blocked from Wikipedia

As the old saying goes, there is no distinctly criminal class in the United States, except for the Congress.  BBC reports that the US Congress IP address space has been banned from making edits on Wikipedia for repeated acts of intellectual dishonesty and digital vandalism.  Perhaps they should be arrested under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and sentenced to decades in prison.  Excerpt:

Wikipedia administrators have imposed a ban on page edits from computers at the US House of Representatives, following "persistent disruptive editing".

The 10-day block comes after anonymous changes were made to entries on politicians and businesses, as well as events like the Kennedy assassination . . .

Edits from computers using the IP address belonging to the House of Representatives have been banned before, following similar acts of vandalism . . . Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, told the BBC that the incident did not surprise him, and vandalism has "always gone on and it always will".

ProPublica Report on Browser-Based Spyware Leads to Removals

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Apple Responds to Claims of Backdoor in iOS Devices

 Just in case you were still wondering if your devices are secure.  From The Next Web:

Apple has published new information about the diagnostic capabilities of iOS, in what appears to be a response to suggestions that it includes a ‘backdoor’ that could enable governments and other third-parties to access user data.

The controversy arose after security consultant Jonathan Zdziarski documented a vulnerability that could leave usage data on iOS device exposed. Rebutting subsequent reports that linked the vulnerability with government data collection, Apple told iMore that it has “has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services.” . . .

Following his initial findings, Zdziarski has been in contact with Apple. Citing the company’s response to his claims, he said that he “doesn’t buy for a minute that these services are intended solely for diagnostics.” That’s to say that he found the type of data available to the diagnostics services to be “of an extreme personal nature,” which seemed out of place given the focus.

For all you folks out there who "have nothing to hide", I suppose you have nothing to be afraid of.  But in that case, feel free to leave your bank account information in the comments!

Cryptography vs. Cryptanalysis: Black Hat Talk on Hacking Tor Pulled from Conference

Historians of cryptology often describe the development of the discipline of "secret writing" in terms of a dialectic between cryptography and cryptanalysis, that is, between code makers and code breakers.  Cryptographers seek to create ever more indecipherable encryption schemes and cryptanalysts seek to break them.  An article on the cancellation of a Black Hat conference talk on the Tor privacy service from Reuters provides us with an interesting glimpse of how this tension is currently playing out among hackers and security researchers within the US government.  From Reuters, on the cancelled talk:

A highly anticipated talk on how to identify users of the Internet privacy service Tor was withdrawn from the upcoming Black Hat security conference, a spokeswoman for the event said on Monday.

The talk was canceled at the request of attorneys for Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where the speakers work as researchers, the spokeswoman, Meredith Corley, told Reuters . . . a Carnegie Mellon attorney informed Black Hat that one of the speakers could not give the Tor talk because the materials he would discuss have not been approved for public release by the university or the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). . . .

Its abstract, titled "You don't have to be the NSA to Break Tor: De-Anonymizing Users on a Budget," had attracted attention within the security and privacy communities. The abstract had been published on Black Hat's website but has since been removed.

While the media often identify Tor as the preferred browser of child pornographers, criminal cartels and terrorist groups they often fail to note that it was actually originally developed by US government researchers. Or perhaps their implication is that the US government naturally falls under one of those umbrella terms? Whatever the case may be in that regard, the Reuters article hints at the state of the arms race between US government cryptographers and cryptanalysts. Another excerpt:

The U.S. government funded the creation and much of the operation of Tor as a communications tool for dissidents in repressive countries. But Tor has frustrated the U.S. National Security Agency for years, according to documents released by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.

That revelation has helped increase adoption by those seeking privacy for political reasons, as well as criminals, researchers say. 

Some criminal suspects on Tor have been unmasked by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement or intelligence agencies using a variety of techniques, including tampering with software often used alongside Tor.

Check out the EFF for more information on Tor.

Space Station Sunday: Apollo 11 Anniversary Salute

***No Roses On The Moon Haiku***

RE: human life:
Planet Earth is Number One!
Let's start acting it.

Before the Space Station, there was the Eagle.  Happy 45th anniversary Apollo 11!

Freedom claims another victory.