NASA - Ares I

2008 was a mixed year for spaceflight. Let’s consider same shuttle releases, First, China carried out its first spacewalk, then India sent a probe to the Moon, and several private space vehicles took flight for the first time. What you think about NASA. News was NASA's long-term goals and a looming gap in US space access after the retirement of the space shuttle.

The year, which marked NASA's 50th anniversary, they begin with the new hardware and system for the Ares I rocket that will send future astronauts in to orbit build on cutting edge launching technologies. But it suffers from vibrations that could endanger astronauts. Some engineers said the agency should consider alternative shuttle replacement vehicles. But NASA said the vibration problem can be fixed by incorporating springs into the rocket's design.

Ares I, which will loft Apollo-like capsules into orbit, could be ready to fly as early as 2015. But the space shuttle is due to retire in 2010, creating a five-year gap in US access to space flight. This matter concerns by the both Barack Obama and John McCain pledged to do what they could to close this gap.

There was discussion about extending the shuttle's life, and Congress directed NASA to keep this option open for the next administration to consider. But some said an extension might not actually help matters, since it could pull resources away from the development of next-generation vehicles.

After the election, the US Government Accountability Office listed shuttle retirement as one of the most urgent issues facing Obama's incoming administration.

NASA was also sharply criticized for cost overruns by former associate science administrator Alan Stern. Days later, the agency announced that technical glitches would delay its ambitious Mars Science Laboratory rover, adding $400 million to the mission's cost.

With the prospect of a new administration and possibly new NASA leadership, various groups pushed for a focus on sending astronauts to Mars instead of the Moon, igniting a storm of controversy.

Nokia with Wibree Technology

Nokia announced the introduction of Wibree technology as an open industry initiative extending local connectivity to small devices.

Wibree Technology is a new radio technology that developed by Nokia Research Center complements other local connectivity technologies, consuming only a portion of the power compared to other such radio technologies, It takes more smaller and less costly implementation and It is very easy to integrated with Bluetooth.

Wibree is the first open technology that offers connectivity between mobile devices or Personal Computers, and small, button cell battery power devices such as watches, wireless keyboards, toys and sports sensors.

Nokia is planning to make the new technology available on the market as fast as possible. The company is defining the Wibree interoperability specification together with Broadcom Corporation, CSR, Epson and Nordic Semiconductor which are representing semiconductor manufacturers, device vendors and qualification service providers. The technology will be made broadly available to the industry through an open and preferably existing forum enabling wide adoption of the technology. The forum solution is under evaluation and will be defined by the time the specification is finalized. According to the current estimate, the first commercial version of the interoperability specification will be available during second quarter of 2007.

Wibree technology complements close range communication with Bluetooth like performance within 0-10 m range and data rate of 1 Mbps. Wibree is optimized for applications requiring extremely low power consumption, small size and low cost.
Wibree is implemented either as stand-alone chip or as Bluetooth-Wibree dual-mode chip. The small devices like watches and sports sensors will be based on stand-alone chip whereas Bluetooth devices will take benefit of the dual-mode solution, extending Bluetooth device connectivity to a new range of smallest devices.

The new chip that will let an iPod store 500,000 songs

Mobile phones, iPods and other consumer devices may soon be able to hold a hundred times more information than they do at present thanks to a breakthrough in storage technology.
Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films - and cost far less to produce.

In a paper published, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time", and would last for decades. So-called 'racetrack' memory uses the 'spin' of an electron to store data, and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives.

Like flash memory - the most advanced type of memory for small devices such as mobile phones - it has no moving parts, meaning that the problems associated with mechanical reliability are dramatically reduced.
Unlike flash, however, it can 'write data' - or store information - extremely quickly, and does not have the 'wear out' mechanism that means flash memory drives can only be used a few thousand times before they wear out.

"The promise of racetrack memory - for example, the ability to carry massive amounts of information in your pocket - could unleash creativity leading to devices and applications that nobody has imagined yet," Stuart Parkin, the IBM fellow who led the research, said. At present the most capacious iPod - the 160GB iPod Classic - can store 40,000 songs. For nearly fifty years, scientists have explored the possibility of storing information inside the walls that exist between magnetic domains, but to date manipulating such walls has been too expensive and complicated to achieve significant results.

In his paper, Mr Parkin describes a milestone in which he and his team were able to store data in columns of magnetic material arranged on the surface of a silicon wafer. The information moves around the columns at high speed, giving the technology its racetrack name.

IBM said the technology was still "exploratory" at this stage, but that it expected devices which used it to be on the market within ten years.

Web Apps Critically Vulnerable, Says Report

According to a new report by consultancy Corsaire, almost a quarter of Web applications have critical security issues or vulnerabilities.The paper, which analyzed applications from leading companies across the several countries like UK, Australia, Europe, the U.S. and Asia, puts the remaining three quarters into “medium” and “low” impact categories, reports vnunet.com. But still, these vulnerabilities present a high possibility of data loss or other security breach according to the reports.

According to the new report by consultancy Corsaire, Nearly a quarter of web applications have critical security issues or vulnerabilities. This based its findings on security assessments from the past six years.

The State of the Web white paper analyzed samples of security assessments of applications from leading companies in a number of sectors across the UK, Australia, Europe, the US and Asia.
Corsaire found that, despite a general improvement in security over the past six years, just fewer than 25 per cent of the problems could have a 'critical' or 'high' impact on application security, representing a significant likelihood of data loss or other security breach. The remaining three quarters were split between 'medium' and 'low' impact.

Martin O'Neal, managing director of Corsaire, argued that web application attacks are becoming ever more sophisticated, and that security in this area is still being overlooked by many firms.
"These vulnerabilities can often be eliminated through a more structured approach to security during development," he said.

"In fact, by employing rigorously specified security requirements, backed by developer education and regular security testing checkpoints, businesses can effectively define what security is, and can help to ensure that personnel have the understanding and skills to deliver improvements."

Broadcom Launches Combo Chip for Mobile Devices

Broadcom Corporation is an American supplier of integrated circuits (ICs) for broadband communications. Founded in 1991 by Henry Samueli (chairman and CTO) and Henry Nicholas, it became a public company in 1998 and now employs over 6,800 people worldwide. Broadcom is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.

Broadcom has launched a new 802.11n chip that also enhances the data rate for Bluetooth and FM radio in mobile phones and mobile devices. According to Computerworld and itbusinessedge, the BCM4329 chip will enter volume production next year and be made available for product use by the end of 2009.

Because the chip is more energy-efficient than current 802.11g chips, Chris Bergey, director of Broadcom’s embedded wireless line of business, believes it will be quickly adopted in cell phones. EE Times reports that nearly one-third of mobile phones and other wireless devices will use chips that support multiple wireless links. Broadcom’s combo chip provides common memory and power management blocks for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and FM.

Visual Studio Test Attributes

When we built our test in the previous section, we were required to use the following two attributes:
· [TestMethod] – Used to mark a method as a test method. Only methods marked with this attribute will run when you run your tests.
· [TestClass] – Used to mark a class as a test class. Only classes marked with this attribute will run when you run your tests.
When building tests, you always use the [TestMethod] and [TestClass] attributes. However, there are several other useful, but optional, test attributes. For example, you can use the following attribute pairs to setup and tear down tests:
· [AssemblyInitialize] and [AssemblyCleanup] – Used to mark methods that execute before and after all of the tests in an assembly are executed
· [ClassInitialize] and [ClassCleanup] – Used to mark methods that execute before and after all of the tests in a class are executed
· [TestInitialize] and [TestCleanup] – Used to mark methods that execute before and after each test method is executed
For example, you might want to create a fake HttpContext that you can use with all of your test methods. You can setup the fake HttpContext in a method marked with the [ClassInitialize] attribute and dispose of the fake HttpContext in a method marked with the [ClassCleanup] attribute.
There are several attributes that you can use to provide additional information about test methods. These attributes are useful when you are working with hundreds of unit tests and you need to manage the tests by sorting and filtering the tests:
· [Owner] – Enables you to specify the author of a test method
· [Description] – Enables you to provide a description of a test method
· [Priority] – Enables you to specify an integer priority for a test
· [TestProperty] – Enables you to specify an arbitrary test property
You can use these attributes when sorting and filtering tests in either the Test View window or the Test List Editor.
Finally, there is an attribute that you can use to cause a particular test method to be ignored when running a test. This attribute is useful when one of your tests has a problem and you just don’t want to deal with the problem at the moment:
· [Ignore] – Enables you to temporarily disable a test. You can use this attribute on either a test method or an entire test class

Unit test in VS 2005

If you didn't know it already, it is not a difficult one to learn.Tremendous progress is being made on several fronts: IDE integration, process integration, and new test fixtures. In here I will cover unit testing in Visual Studio 2005, including VSTS unit testing, NUnit and MBUnit--the Superman of unit testing. First post I’ll cover NUnit testing.

NUnit
NUnit is the unit testing framework that has the majority of the market share. It utilizes attributes to identify what a test is.
The TestFixture attribute is used to identify a class that will expose test methods.
The Test attribute is used to identify a method that will exercise a test subject.
Let's get down to business and look at some code. First we need something to test.
public class Subject
{
public Int32 Add(Int32 x, Int32 y)
{
return x + y;
}
}
That Subject class has one method: Add.
We will test the Subject class by exercising the Add method with different arguments.
[TestFixture]
public class tSubject
{
[Test]
public void tAdd()
{
Int32 Sum;
Subject Subject = new Subject();
Sum = Subject.Add(1,2);
Assert.AreEqual(3, Sum);
}
}
The class tSubject is decorated with the attribute TestFixture, and the method tAdd is decorated with the attribute Test.
You can compile this and run it in the NUnit GUI application. It will produce a successful test run.
That is the basics of what NUnit offers. There are attributes to help with setting up and tearing down your test environment:
SetUp, SetUpFixture, TearDown, and TearDownFixture. SetUpFixture is run once at the beginning when the fixture is first created; similarly,
TearDownFixture is run once after all tests have completed. SetUp and TearDown are run before and after each test.
NUnit tests can be run several different ways: from the GUI application, from the console's application, and from a NAnt task. NUnit has been integrated into Cruise Control .NET as well. In the last product review, you will see how it has been integrated into the VS.NET IDE as well.