Bletchley Park – Terence Eden’s Blog

Book Preview: Bletchley's Secret Source - Churchill’s Wrens and the Y Service in World War Ⅱ by Peter Hore ★★★★☆

@edent — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 12:01:11 +0000

This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y-Service, a secret even more closely guarded than Bletchley Park. The Y-Service was the code for the chain of wireless intercept stations around Britain and all over the world. Hundreds of wireless operators, many of them who were civilians, listened to German, Italian and Japanese radio networks and meticulously logged everything they heard. Some messages were then used tactically but most were sent on to Station X – Bletchley Park – where they were deciphered, translated and consolidated to build a comprehensive overview of the enemy’s movements and intentions.

Meticulously researched, drawing on lots of interviews with those who survived. This book aims to be the definitive history of the women who helped win the war.

The first part of the book, somewhat oddly, focuses on the men who set up the Y Service. While the background is important - I'm not sure there needs to be quite so much of the thrilling-adventures-of-manly-men.

There are amazing tales of high adventure and low skulduggery. But what interested me most was the way that sexism almost completely collapsed the war effort. From refusing to accept women, to preventing them from having uniforms, it seems like the British military did everything in its power to reduce its strength by 50%. When women travelled overseas to help the war effort, some were simply shipped back!

Frankly, it seems improbably that the British won the war. Everything was done on a shoestring budget, there was very little co-ordination, and it was led by lots of posh men who couldn't see past their own blinkered existence.

There are some lovely personal stories tales in the book. From women falling in love, to single-handedly delivering crucial signals intercepts - it really is a glorious romp.

It does descend slightly into a list of events - battles, telegrams, and executive orders. And some of the military terminology - and outmoded British slang - is a bit dense to wade through. But, overall, it's a great retelling of the experiences of a group of people who have been overlooked for too long.

At its core is a story of the power of appreciation.

Even in wartime, the SD Wrens were under-appreciated, and it is a common theme in their memoirs that they were kept in the dark, Rosemary Lyster joining the chorus of women who grumbled ‘No one, of course, told us if our work was valuable – we did not need to know!’

How do you keep up morale when you never tell people how vital their work has been? How do you encourage the next generation if you can never tell the story of success? How do you honour people when their existence is both sacred and scandalous?

This book goes some way to setting the record straight.

Thanks to NetGalley for the preview copy. The book is published later this year and is available to pre-order from the links below.

Episode 4: The National Museum of Computing

@edent — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 07:50:06 +0000

A brief chat with Lynn from TNMOC - go visit it up in Bletchley Park.

🔊 TNMOC
🎤 Terence Eden

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Intro music "Gran Vals" performed by Brian Streckfus. Stopwatch Icon by Ilsur Aptukov from The Noun Project.

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Over The Air 2012

@edent — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 08:22:49 +0000

Another brilliant event from Over The Air. The perfect mix of lectures, hacking, and relaxing in a country manor / museum. And, to top it off, my hack won a brace of prizes!

The Wifi just about held up. Although I think it's fundamentally impossible to provide decent connectivity to 200+ people. Especially when they're geeks.

Which, in turn, lead to this:

As per my post of two years ago, I tried to encourage people to record video or audio of the talks they were in. It was a reasonable success. We captured several great sessions, but others have been lost to the æther.

I honestly believe that BarCamps, unconferences, and hack-days are part of our culture and should be preserved. There's a selfish element in that I want to see the talks that I missed - but more than that, I want to ensure that what we're doing isn't lost forever.

So, here are my thoughts (and videos) of the day.

Everything You Know About QR Codes is WRONG!🔗

The devilishly handsome Terence Eden gave one of his excellent talks upon the subject of QR codes.

I was really pleased with how this went, a packed room and lots of great questions. Thanks to Craig Heath for videoing it.

Responsive Web Design - the Specs Behind the Sex 🔗

Bruce Lawson talked through some of the issues with RWD especially when it comes to adaptive images.

My thoughts on the subject are still developing, but I think that it ought to be the server / CDN which adapts the images, rather than the handset relying on JavaScript and CSS. I've two primary reasons for this,

There are billions of phones already on the market which don't support CSS or JS sufficiently to handle this. There's no realistic way to upgrade their browser.
Programmers and web designers are lazy. I don't believe that the more complex mark-up will be used, nor that they will generate several different images.

A Means to Interact: A Guided Tour of Arts Programming Platforms 🔗

I must confess, I misread the subject of this talk - I thought it would be about artistic APIs. Instead, it was a fascinating talk about different ways to create graphics programatically. Becky Stewart stepped us through the pros and cons of each platform and showed us how they worked. I love interactive sessions - so coding along was great fun. She wisely distributed Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of the SDKs on memory stick so we wouldn't spend half the session downloading them.

Mobile Websites Can Have Nice Fonts Too 🔗

I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to fonts. I have the vague feeling they're important, but I don't really know why - nor how to implement them on a website. Laura Kalbag to the rescue then!

After the session, I was talking to my friend Saqib (who is blind) about fonts. He wanted a better understanding of how they affected the reading of text. I realised that fonts are like the background music in a film. It's the music which makes Star Wars as much as the dialogue and special effects. Imagine watching a Schindler's List with a jaunty comedy score - it would completely destroy the meaning of the film. As well as readability, picking a font changes the emotional engagement that a reader has with your text.

TheLab: Demo Cool Things!🔗

I say! Those chaps from O2's TheLab are rather clever, aren't they? Just goes to show what a bit of ingenuity can do when applied to a telco. We saw a demo which tracked which country people were in based on whether their phone was roaming, HashBlue which backs up your text messages and provides an API to access them, and O2 Connect which routes your calls over WiFi if you're out of signal. Evidently lots of smart thinking going on in Slough!

Connecting Microcontrollers to the Cloud 🔗

The guys from Vodafone were showing off mbed. It's a micro-controller similar to the Arduino. The idea is that you can rapidly prototype sensor data, send it via a data or SMS connection and do other cool stuff with it. The session I attended went into the C code behind it (which was a little over my head) as well as demoing practical uses for it. It's great to see kit electronics like this and the Raspberry Pi become popular - hopefully it will make hardware more accessible.

An Illustrated History of Computation 🔗

What a delightful session! Professor Bernie Cohen took us through a history of computing, mixed with personal anecdotes, and live algorithm solving. He seems to know a thing or two - I predict the lad'll go far!

ePatient 101: An Introduction to the Asymmetrical World of Technology and Healthcare 🔗

Mark Kramer (AKA Mamk) joined us via a dodgy Skype connection from the US, where he has just finished being treated for cancer. Fuck cancer. Seriously, fuck it. Mark was talking about the disparity between the technology which the medical profession has access to versus that of their patients. Doctors may have MRI machines - but they're often stuck with handwritten notes, or ancient PCs. Patients have more CPU power in their phones than a whole office full of medical staff.

Hacking

Over The Air is where geeks come to play. Some of the inventions on display were simply marvellous. I think there were 39 hacks presented - I'm going to highlight the ones I thought were exceptional.

Sam Machin built a tool to allow you to send tweets via a DNS lookup! As he said during his introduction:

Without going into too much detail, you do a lookup on my-message-is-this.example.com, when the server receives the NS, it tweets on your behalf. So, as long as you can do a DNS request - even if the response is blocked - you can tweet. Amazing!

🔊

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Tom Hume built an app which lets you post your call history on Facebook. It's not as creepy as it sounds! Remember "poking"? Well, a phone call is a private poke, in essence. So, your friends can see that you called X to wish them happy birthday.

Jatrobot was the scariest looking hack I'd seen! Herx The Vampire Slayer! The team had built a modern farming tool. It measured soil moisture, weather, gps, and a bunch of other stuff via mbed - then reported it all back via Android.

Finally, my hack! This was the first time I'd entered a hack at OTA and I was unusually nervous!

I took inspiration from Ariel Waldman's mesmerising keynote about creating accessible interfaces to science. I was reminded of the Music of the Spheres (not the Doctor Who episode!) - which is the idea that the movement of the planets and celestial bodies can be thought of as a musical arrangement. We can also tune in to the background radiation of the universe and turn that into music. My phone doesn't have a gamma ray detector - but it does have a solar radiation sensor - the Lux Meter! It also has a proximity sensor - so it can tell how far away my hand is from the screen.

So, I created an ersatz Theremin! Having created a musical instrument (despite having no musical talent) I set about composing a work to be played via the medium of light.

I'm chuffed to say it worked really well and the crowd seemed to like it!

The app won one of the awards for Best Android App and was crowned Best In Show! Utterly gobsmacked, truly humbled, and over-excited to receive a Galaxy Nexus and a Raspberry Pi.

You can download the theremin and read all about the technology behind it.

Massive thanks to Dan, Maggie, Matt, and all the others involved in the highlight of the mobile geek calendar.

I cannot wait for next year!

Bletchley Park

@edent — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:13:21 +0000

Bletchley Park stands as a testament to the power of mathematics. It represents the idea that brains, not brawn, are vital to winning any conflict.

Like many Brits, I learned about the Second World War at school. I devoured books - fiction and non - about the war. What interested me wasn't the tales of derring-do, of men fighting for their lives, bombs, guns, bullets and knives. No, what interested me was the idea about intelligence. The concept that by learning about your enemy you could understand and counteract their efforts.

I don't remember where I first heard about Bletchley Park and the Enigma Machine. I certainly remember it from Simon Singh's The Code Book and Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. What I do remember is being astounded by the mathematical brilliance of the people involved in designing the first computers. That a bunch of mathematicians and - as we'd call them today - computer programers could shorten the war by an estimated 18 months. They never fired a single shot. They never dropped a bomb. They never designed a killing machine. They sat and thought. Then built. Then thought some more. Then they defeated their enemy. And they did it all an hour away from London. How could I resist the urge to go?

The event was unOrganised by Big Geek Day Out.

Big Geek Days Out are "unEvents" - one person organises a time and place for people to meet and that's it. Everything else is done by the people coming to the event.

An annual ticket to Bletchley Park is a mere £8.50. An utter bargain.

The tragedy of Bletchley is three-fold. The work it did was kept secret for so long that many of those involved died before they could receive proper recognition. The secrecy robbed Britain of a competitive advantage in designing the next generation of computers. Finally, the park has been ignored by the Government and been allowed to decay.

This is perhaps the only second world war battleground that exists on British soil. This museum is a national treasure and should be treated as such.

Here are some images and video from the day. You can also view the entire set on Flickr.

Alan Turing

It's no exaggeration to say that Turing is the father of the computer. It's also no exaggeration to say that he was betrayed by his government.

An Original Enigma Machine

Bletchley holds an original Enigma Machine. I was lucky enough to help one of the guides demonstrate its formidable encryption and decryption capabilities. Had the Wehrmacht better understood cryptography and its limitations, the Enigma could have been their deadliest weapon. As it was, the weaknesses were discovered and exploited by a remarkable team of people.

Russian Fialka M125 Cypher Machine

They also have an amazing array of historical encryption devices, including this Russian example.

Finally, the tour guides at Bletchley are quite magnificent. Here's our guide talking about Colossus.

If you have even the slightest interest in the history of computing, you owe it to yourself to visit Bletchley Park.