Bletchley Park Fun and Games

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.

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

We had a couple of presentations in the department today. Team Yellow and Team Purple (Tentacle?) gave the initial presentations for their group projects.  To say that the teams had been working together for  a week or so and it was their first stand up together they did very well.

One thing that did stand out though was some of the phrases that were used and this brought home to me how you need to be careful how you talk in front of an audience, particularly if you want to convince them you know what you are doing.

For example take the phrase “User Friendly”. It is all very well to say “We are going to produce a user-friendly solution”. You want to convey that you think this aspect of a system is important. However, saying it like this is pretty much meaningless. The customer is not expecting you to produce something that is “user-hostile”, but the phrase could also be expressed as “We’re not going to make something that acts as if it hates you”. 

It is far better to say what you are actually going to do to solve the problem. “We are going to closely involve the end user in the design and implementation so that they find the system easy to use.” is a much better way to express your intentions.  Take a similar approach when you talk about security. Rather than saying you think something is important you must say what you are going to do about it.

The other thing that came out from the presentations was partly my fault. I’d said earlier that it is very important to make the customer aware of those aspects of the system that you are not going to implement. For example, you might be expecting the customer to back up the data rather than providing data backup as part of your solution. You need get this over, but I’m not sure you should have have a slide with the heading “Things we are not going to do”.  It is far better to say things like “The server infrastructure that you are using will be used to back up our data along with that from other systems”. This puts the responsibility in the right place without sounding like you are avoiding work.

If all this sounds a bit like the dread “marketing speak” then I’m very sorry about that, but I do feel that it is important that you make sure that things you say are backed up with a some kind of action plan and you should avoid sounding negative about your intentions.

A Couple of Good Windows Phone Apps

When I had my iPhone I used to enjoy browsing the App Store and downloading and playing with little programs. You could pass an hour or so spending a couple of pounds on things that caught your fancy, searching for that neat app you could show of in the Tea Room the following day.

Windows Phone Marketplace is nowhere near as full as the App Store, but it has now reached the point where I can go in there and pull out some diverting programs. Here are a couple I’ve found recently. Both are free and both are fun.

This gives you your own personalised fireworks display on the phone, that you can drive by tapping the screen. There is a good range of different firework types and colours with satisfying explosions and even haptic feedback (the phone vibrates when the fireworks go off). You can capture images of the displays and also use any picture as the backdrop.  Great fun, if totally useless, and free. Search the Marketplace for Fireworks.

This program is excellent. It is a dictionary of British Slang. If you want to know the true British meaning for words like Gazump and Wally you can use this program to find out. It also defines some words that you might not want your kids using, but it might even be useful for those of you around the world not from these shores, and it is very amusing for us locals too. Another good, free app. Search the marketplace for “British Slang Free”.

First Open Day of 2011

The first “Lucky” winner of a copy of my book. Sorry about the picture, I didn’t take it.

We had our first Admissions Open Day of 2011 today. Thanks for coming folks, hope you enjoyed the day. I did my talk and then at the end we had a prize draw for a copy of one of my XNA books. I was going to have a second prize of two books, but I couldn’t find any more….

Some more of the assembled throng. Hope you had a good journey back.

Words of Wisdom from Rob

In celebration of my new book those nice people at O’Reilly asked me to share some words of wisdom on their Answers site. I’m not normally known for being wise. I actually asked my dentist to put in some wisdom teeth the last time I had a check-up. However, if you want to find out what I came up with you can go here:

http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/2456-robs-tricks-and-tips-for-a-better-programming-life/