Tom Moertel's Weblog

Property checking with Python's nose testing framework

Posted by Tom Moertel Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:34:00 GMT

At work recently I was writing some tests with Python’s out-of-the-box unit-testing framework unittest. I’m new to Python and accustomed to Perl and Haskell’s testing frameworks, which are lightweight and let you write tests without much hoop-jumping. In particular, QuickCheck and LectroTest make it easy to test at the property level instead of the test-case level. With unittest, I was having to write a lot of code to get the same level of abstraction.

By “property level,” here’s what I mean. Say I’m testing this thing, let’s call it a subscriber pool. It has two fundamental properties:

1. Subscribe. For all initial states of the pool, if you call subscribe(user), then, assuming there have been no other operations on the pool, user must be in the pool.
2. Unsubscribe. For all initial states of the pool, if you call unsubscribe(user), then, assuming there have been no other operations on the pool, user must not be in the pool.

That’s it. If my implementation satisfies both properties, it’s correct. (This is a simplified version of my real testing problem, which required additional property checks.)

To test whether my implementation satisfies each property, I must write individual test cases that together “cover” the property. For example, to test whether the Subscribe property holds, I might write four test cases:

class SubscribeProperty(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        initialize_pool()

    def tearDown(self):
        destroy_pool()

    def testEmpty(self):
        load_pool_with_members([])
        subscribe("1")
        self.assert_("1" in pool_members())

    def testOtherGuyAlreadyInPool(self):
        load_pool_with_members(["2"])
        subscribe("1")
        self.assert_("1" in pool_members())

    def testSubscriberAlreadyInPool(self):
        load_pool_with_members(["1"])
        subscribe("1")
        self.assert_("1" in pool_members())

    def testSubscriberAndOtherGuyAlreadyInPool(self):
        load_pool_with_members(["1", "2"])
        subscribe("1")
        self.assert_("1" in pool_members())

Every one of the test cases has the same form. The repetition makes me want to refactor the whole thing.

Okay, let’s do it:

Posted in testing
Tags nose, properties, python, testing, unittest
1 comment
no trackbacks
 

How to download photos and movies from the Palm Centro to a Linux desktop

Posted by Tom Moertel Fri, 02 Nov 2007 19:32:00 GMT

I recently got a Palm Centro smartphone, and so far I love it. Like most modern cell phones, it has a built-in camera and takes decent snapshots and even records short movies. It’s great for spur-of-the-moment shots when I don’t have my real camera. The trick – and there’s always a trick when it comes to cell phones – is getting the photos off the camera and onto my computer.

To get at my pictures, Sprint would prefer that I sign up for their ludicrously expensive “PictureMail” service. Leave it to weasely telecom execs to come up with another way to squeeze money from teenagers: charge them $5 each month for the “privilege” of sharing their pictures with friends. This fee, of course, is in addition to the fee for “unlimited” mobile Internet use. I guess picture bits are somehow more expensive to move over the air than other kinds of bits.

In any case, my next goal after getting my Centro to hotsync with my Linux workstation was to figure out how to download my photos and movies.

After a bit of hacking, I figured out that the Centro stores images in a typical digital-camera-image (DCIM) hierarchy. For example, I have a 4-GB microSD card installed in my Centro, and I store my photos in the “Palm” album on it. This album ends up stored in the /DCIM/Palm directory on the card.

Using the pilot-xfer program from the pilot-link project, I was able to find the directory and its contents. The trick was to use the sparsely documented –D flag to work with the Centro’s virtual filesystem. Here, for example, is how I list the contents of the Palm album:

$ pilot-xfer -p usb: -D /DCIM/Palm -l

   Listening for incoming connection on usb:... connected!

   Directory of /DCIM/Palm...
        652 Fri Nov  2 08:17:06 2007  Album.db
     292053 Fri Nov  2 09:04:20 2007  Photo_110207_001.jpg
      78493 Fri Nov  2 08:17:06 2007  Video_110207_001.3g2
         20 Wed Oct 31 12:09:20 2007  Thumbnail.db

   Thank you for using pilot-link.

Here, you can see that I have one photo and one movie in the album. (Movies are stored in .3g2 files that contain MPEG4 video.)

To download the files, I again turned to pilot-xfer, this time using the –f (fetch) flag to fetch a list of files. Here, for example, I’ll fetch the image from the listing above:

$ pilot-xfer -p usb: -D /DCIM/Palm -f Photo_110207_001.jpg

   Listening for incoming connection on usb:... connected!

   Fetching '/DCIM/Palm' ... (292053 bytes)   285 KiB total.

   Thank you for using pilot-link.

So that’s the process. It’s kind of clunky, so I wrote a small Python program to automate it. (I’m learning Python. If you’re a Pythonista, please consider critiquing my code. I would be especially thankful if you could point out any helpful idioms that I may have overlooked.)

Here’s how to use the program:

$ get-pilot-photos.py --help
Usage: get-pilot-photos.py [options]

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s SRCDIR, --srcdir=SRCDIR
                        VFS dir on Palm device from which to fetch images
  -d DESTDIR, --destdir=DESTDIR
                        Where to save the images on your computer

Both the —srcdir and —dstdir options are optional. If you omit the first, the program will download photos and movies from the /DCIM/Palm album. If you omit the second, the program will save the downloads to a new, timestamped directory within your home directory.

That’s it. The code is below.

Posted in hacks
Tags centro, download, hotsync, images, movies, palm, python
10 comments
no trackbacks