Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 08:28PM 
Having hardware fun today preparing for the lab tomorrow when some of our second year students will get control of my little Micro Framework robot. We are writing serial port code that we are sending through the Xbee radio interface to make the robot dance across the carpet.
I love my job.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 09:15AM 
Early morning guitar shop.
I did another paper review for Radio Humberside this morning. It seems that I’m doing a lot of early rising at the moment. And there is a surprising amount of traffic at 6:30 in the morning.
Anyhoo, we had fun talking about some tech stuff and Twitter. I tweet as RobMiles and Andy Comfort, the breakfast presenter, as andycomfort (which shows we both have the same level of originality I guess).
Andy even let me have some time to chat about PlatformExpo, which is going from strength to strength. It all happens on 27th March and you can find out more here:
We are going to have the results of our 24 hour game development competition, live interactive music and art, demos of 3D technology, digital showcases and I’ll be giving a session about Microsoft Kinect – having not slept the night before. One of those rare occasions where the audience has to keep me awake….
Life Monday, February 14, 2011 at 08:57PM 
I’m treading the virtual boards again. There’s a Microsoft Certified Career Conference on Thursday and I’m doing a session about Windows Phone development. You can find out more, and sign up, here:
http://www.mscareerconference.com/
The title of the session is “60 Minutes Rock Star: Find out how to become a Windows Phone Rock Star”. It as at 2:30 pm GMT. I might even get my guitar of the wall and lay down some riffs.
Then again, I might not….
Sunday, February 13, 2011 at 08:49PM I’m really pleased that I took the camera on the trip yesterday. Loads of photo-opportunities. Here are a few more. The rest of the images will appear over time I’m sure.
They had this in the Computing Museum. It is of special importance to me, because it is how I wrote my first programs. It is an IBM card punch. We wrote our program on coding sheets which were then punched onto cards and handed them in to get them run. We used to get three runs a day. I started writing Algol 60 like this, before too long I was using run length encoding to produce Snoopy calendars on the line printer. Happy days.
I had one of these too. A tin calculator that was almost as fast as writing things down on paper.
Then I got one of these. Somewhere in the loft I have “Boots the Chemist” branded slide rule…
This is an ICL (International Computers Limited) 2966 mainframe computer. There is almost as much computing power here as in, say, your MP3 player. The disks on the front can store 80MB each. To put that in perspective, that’s around enough to hold one MP3 album in reasonable quality. We had something similar at the university for a while.
They even had some model railways on display. This is fairly heavily “Thomas the Tank Engine” themed.
Little People
Finally, for now, one of the great highlights. This is the office where Alan Turing used to work. Apparently he used to chain his mug to the radiator so nobody would walk off with it. You really should find out more about the chap. One of the cleverest people there has ever been and an object lesson in how horribly countries can treat their heroes.
Saturday, February 12, 2011 at 10:25PM 
We’ve been meaning to go to Bletchley Park for ages. Today, thanks to the efforts of Emma, we managed to get there. It meant that we had to set of really early from Hull, but nobody minded that much.
This is us, gathered in the “Music” room for a briefing. If you don’t know about Bletchley Park, you should. It is how we won the Second World War. All the way through the war this place was effectively a “decoding factory”. Great minds like Alan Turing figured out how to break the German cyphers and an army of engineers, technicians and clerical support staff produced thousands of decoded messages every day. They even managed to build the first electronic computer to read the messages sent by German High Command.
The secrets of what went on in this unassuming country estate only started to come out in the nineteen eighties, over forty years after the end of the war. Now you can walk around, meet up with some of the people who were there and see the machines that were built to crack the codes.
This is what we were up against. A battery powered, portable encoding machine called “Enigma”. By a cunning combination of a plug board and encoding wheels this mapped whatever the user typed onto a meaningless sequence of letters. All the receiver has to do is set up another Enigma machine with the same arrangement of plug board and wheels, type in the encrypted text and out comes the original. The encrypted messages were broadcast so that anyone could receive them (including us) but unless you knew the settings of the the sender all you would see is guacamole.
However, the clever folks at Bletchley Park built machines that could try thousands of possible settings of the machine, looking for stock phrases and exploiting the few weaknesses in the Enigma machines. These devices, called “bombes” (apparently because the Polish mathematician that first thought of them did so at an ice-cream shop and bombe is Polish for a type of ice cream) would click through combinations looking for a “stop” which might be the code settings for that message. And it worked. On an industrial scale. Thousands of people worked on site receiving, analysing and finally sending a steady stream of intelligence back to UK commanders.
Not content with cracking “every day” signals they then moved on to cracking encrypted teletype signals used for high level communication. These were manually transcribed onto paper tape which was then analysed by an electronic computer called Colossus, the world’s first.
This is the five hole paper tape containing the incoming message. This was decoded by hand from graphs of the teletype signal that were read by human eye.
The front of Colossus
Some of the valves
Some of the wires….
That it worked at all was astonishing, nobody had built anything of its complexity before. But work it did, on one memorable occasion the UK high command was able to read messages before they arrived at their German counterparts.
Bletchley Park is also home to a Museum of Computing and a whole host of other interesting exhibitions. But these are for another post.
We clambered aboard the coach just as the museum closed and made our way back to Hull. Great day. Thanks again to Emma for sorting it all out.
Travel 