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 Windows Phone 7

Took this picture in 2007 by mistake. And I love it.

Had a great time today. I’ve been talking to folks about teaching with Windows Phone 7. Saw some amazing XNA games produced by student teams and met up with some Microsoft people. Slightly marred by the four hour train journey back, but everything was on time, which was nice.

If you want to find out about teaching with Windows Phone or learn something about it (subtle plug) take a look at my Blue Book material which you can find on this link.

Heading to Reading

I like train travel. Which is good, because I’m going to be doing a lot of it over the next couple of days.  Got a Windows Phone meeting tomorrow at Microsoft Reading and so today I’m waiting for the first of a bunch of trains to take me down there.

Day 7: The Voyage Home

I’m going to miss this place. We’ve only been here a couple of days but I really want to come back. Today we caught a train, then a bus, then a plane and finally drove the rest of the way back home. Well worth it.

Day 6: What a difference a day makes

They were right about the view over the valley. It is amazing on the right day. As if to make amends for yesterday, today dawned bright and clear and we headed straight back up the railway to the top, caught the bus and then off again to the Faro lighthouse to see it properly. This is another monument to Volta. And you can climb it. I went all the way to the top and took the photograph above. It is a slightly stitched panorama which I’m rather pleased with.

This is the lighthouse, it looks much nicer when you can see it. We had another coffee in celebration, this time we sat outside and looked across the valley rather than cowering inside. Then we went back down and found ourselves a boat.

For around six euros you can get a “round trip” ticket which takes you to some of the nearer locations. The nice thing about this is that you can hop on and off the boat wherever you fancy. So off we went.

This is Torno, a village around half an hour on the boat from Como. I really envy the people who live here. We had a great lunch and then headed back. And we got to sit at the sharp end of the boat.

I’ve noticed that in Italy cameras are definitely used as fashion accessories. This year the trend is definitely for “big and black”. Anyone who was anyone had an enormous Canon or Nikon SLR round their neck or, more fashionably, grasped in one hand with the strap tied around their wrist.  I only had a small, shiny camera. Perhaps these will be fashion next year.

Day 5: Damp

Today we were bright and early. Even if the weather wasn’t. The forecast said there was a 90% chance of rain. I didn’t like those odds. If you go to Como you must (and I mean must) go up the funicular railway. The terminal was very close to our hotel and so we set off, bought return tickets (good value at less than 10 euros for both of us) and went up the mountain. The views from the top are awesome. I knew this because they had thoughtfully placed some pictures up there that showed the view when you could see it. For us it was nothing but cloud and rain.

So we took a bus along the top to the Faro lighthouse. At one point the bus stopped for us to get out and take pictures of the wonderful view that may, or may not, have been there.  We just sat inside steaming in our waterproofs and watching raindrops race down the outside of the windows. All I needed was a thermos of coffee and some warm cheese sandwiches and I would have been right back to my holidays as a child.

The good news was that we found an inviting little cafe at the top and had a quick drink before bussing back to the railway and down to ground level. The rest of the day centered around places we could go that had an indoors. Like for example Como Cathedral.

This has some lovely stained glass windows and tapestries. They also let you take photographs inside, which is nice. The next stop was the city museum, which was interesting, and then we went along to the Volta Temple, on the shores of the lake.

Allessandro Volta didn’t invent electricity, any more that Newton invented gravity. But he did explain how it worked and did a huge amount of work to make it useful. His work is commemorated in a temple in Como which contains some of his experimental batteries and other equipment.

After a good look round we headed back to our room to freshen up and then out for tea.

Como is a town at the end of a lake surrounded by hills. The weather can change in heartbeat. Just after I took the picture above it rained so much that we were trapped in a bar (a truly terrible experience) by some of the heaviest rain I’ve ever seen. And I’m from England. We managed to make our drinks last a couple of hours before the rain abated and we were able to head home. The only people we saw on the streets were selling umbrellas. 

Day 4 – Travelling to Como

Today it was time to change location. We got up bright and early and caught the train to Milan. There we changed onto another train and headed off to Como in the Italian Lakes. Como has two stations. One right next to our hotel, and the other one a cab ride away. Of course, trains from Milan Centrale (note the proper spelling with the e on the end) go to the distant station. For us that was the one with S.G. in the name. This stands for “San Giovanni” which might be either the name of a famous railway station builder or Italian for “Long way from Rob’s Hotel”. Either way, after our cab ride we ended up at the hotel.

My travel tip for trains in Italy is don’t use the ticket machines. They tend to confuse you about your route (for example arriving in one Milan station and then leaving from another) and then fail to accept your credit card.  But the folks on the ticket sales desk were unfailingly helpful and pleasant, and left me with a good feeling about where we were going.

We had a third floor room in our hotel of choice, the In Riva Al Lago.  As there was no lift this did mean a bit of a heft with the cases, but the view from our window was worth it.

Although the grey skies didn’t auger well. After unpacking (or more accurately - pushing our cases into a corner of the room) we went out for tea.

These folks to good grub at reasonable prices.

..and they have really cool sugar wrappers too.

Cafe culture by the lake. I could get used to this.

Day 3 – Arts and Crafts

Today was our second day in Venice. We had the air of seasoned travellers as we got our tickets from the correct place and even found a train that had seats available.  We took in a couple of galleries, because I have always wanted to acquire more culture. And it looked like it might rain.

The first was the Accademia. This has some stunning pictures in it. You have to keep reminding yourself that these were made by people slapping on coloured paint using brushes. Very impressive. Then we went on to the Peggy Guggenheim gallery for some more modern stuff.

This sculpture hadn’t been bolted down. I don’t think they are too worried about it moving in the wind.

View from the gallery over the the river

They had this neat sign on the wall. Inspired by all the artistry around me I bought a 5 euro plastic lens from the souvenir shop and held it in front of the camera.

Great fun

Artistic boats

And then, it was time to head back to the train and our tiny room for well earned sleep. We are heading for the Lakes tomorrow.

Day 2 – Introducing Venice

To get from Venice Mestre to Venice you have to take a 10 minute train ride. Don’t try and buy a ticket from the ticket machine in the station though. This just means that you get to wait in a queue for 20 minutes to get a chance to read a tiny notice on the machine that tells you these tickets are available from a little office with the words “Venice Tickets” written outside on a big sign. Which of course we hadn’t seen. Oh, and get your tickets validated before you get on the train,  or the ride might be more exciting than you really want.

Venice is like nothing on earth. Except Venice. Someone must have said “What if we had canals rather than roads?” and a bunch of other people must have gone along with this. The thing that I loved was the way that people actually live here. Going to work on a boat and treating all the fantastic architecture and stuff around them as part of the furniture.  Some bits are rather annoying though. There is nowhere to sit apart from at cafes. And when you do you are very aware that a clock has started ticking, and at some point a bill will have to be paid. It is expensive, but we managed to eat for reasonable prices.

What you get if you ask for “the fish”.

We didn’t go on a boat. It looked a bit expensive and I don’t believe in spending good money just to be made to feel queasy. 

You could buy silly hats. Although it wasn’t compulsory.  They also had a lot of masks.

Since I, perhaps rather surprisingly, don’t have much need for a mask I didn’t get one.

At the end of the day we staggered onto the train and rumbled back to our tiny room. I’m not sure if I’ve got much more culture, but I did take loads of photographs.

Day 1 – Heading for Venice

..in which our hero has a go at travel journalism for no good reason.

Today marks the first day of my proper holiday. We are heading off to a couple of places we’ve never been to before, Venice and one of the Italian Lakes. We flew out of East Midlands airport this afternoon courtesy of Ryanair. We fly with them because we quite like the colour of the seat backs in the plane (a particularly garish yellow) and because they are by far the cheapest way to travel. There are no other reasons to fly this way. Having said that, and ignoring the scrum to get the seats with legroomthe cabin crew were pleasant and the plane arrived on time.

My travel tip for Ryanair: Have the “double drink and chocolate muffin” deal”. This only costs 10 euros for two of you and almost represents good value.  Oh, and don’t buy the lottery tickets. You are almost as likely to win these as you are to be involved in an air crash. And you shouldn’t tempt fate to go for the double whammy. Imagine how fed up you’d feel fingering your winning scratch card as the plane plummeted towards the earth.

Once we arrived at the airport (which is almost, but not quite, near to Venice) we grabbed a coach to the hotel. Another tip. Make sure you have a 10 euro note (preferably a newish one) to buy a couple of coach tickets. Get them from the machine while you wait for your luggage to turn up.

Staying in Venice is very expensive. So we didn’t. We found a hotel in Venice Mestre (I think Mestre is Italian for suburb). This place is only around 10 minutes or so from Venice proper.  We stayed in Hotel Aaaron.  This is both a hotel and an experiment in capsule living. Our bedroom was exactly that. A room just big enough to hold a bed, a tiny desk and bathroom. But everything was shiny new, the staff were great, the WIFI worked and the breakfasts were lovely. And since you don’t go on holiday to sit in a hotel room, it is perfect. Tomorrow we head for Venice proper.

Hello Seattle (again)

Nice view from the plane

The lady at US Immigration looked at the stamps in my passport and said “You come here a lot, don’t you”. I suppose I do, wouldn’t have it any other way.

Anyhoo, we had a very smooth couple of flights thanks to Continental airlines (although the airline food version of a cheeseburger is something I only want to experience once in my life) and finally arrived in Bellevue in time for a walk around. During which I broke my shoes in half. Fortunately they had a huge mall just around the corner which had loads of shoe shops and so I was able to get something I’ve always wanted, a pair of Converse All Stars. Excellent.

Downtown Bellevue looking good.

Then Sharon arrived at the hotel with a Windows Phone each for Andy and me. Truly, the day could have got any perfecter.

XNA Materials

Before I went to give my talk yesterday we dropped in at the Microsoft offices in Schipol. Very plush.

They have these amazing lamp shades in the restaurant.

Time around the world, Microsoft style.

The presentation was great fun and the audience was lovely. I really like these trips out. Thanks to all the folks at Microsoft Netherlands for looking after me

You can find the presentation and all the XNA content that I used during the talk here.

XNA Netherlands

What a great audience looks like

Got up bright and early this morning to fly to Amsterdam and give a session on XNA. I also got to take a look around the splendid Microsoft HQ in Schipol. More pictures and the presentation slides and program content tomorrow. I’m off to bed now.

London Town

Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery

Went to London today. Early start on the train and then a good walk round. The rest of the family acquired some culture at Wicked while myself and number one son took in the gadgets on Tottenham Court road.

Horse guard

Kerbside political comment

Not sure where the other hand went….

York Pictures

Went to York today. The weather was great for photographs, although it did change very rapidly.

We parked in the engine sheds near the station. I found this wall very interesting for some reason.

Blossom near York walls

York Treasure House gardens.

Steam tubes in York Railway Museum.

Taking the Wrong Train Home

Waiting for the Wrong Train

After the fun and games last night it was time to pack up and go home. Having successfully negotiated the tram to the station I was feeling quite happy. I know the Dutch for “Schipol Airport” (it contains the word ‘Schipol’) , and having heard the announcer use the phrase in reference to the train on the platform I was quite happy to leap aboard in the confident expectation of going there. Unfortunately I don’t know the Dutch for “does not go to”, which meant that after 45 minutes or so I had to leap out of the train and find one that did.

Thanks to a very helpful lady who not only understood panic-stricken English but also knew where the right train was I was able to change direction and get to the airport in time for the flight.  I’m taking a phrase book next time…

Hello from DevDays 2010

Setting up for Geek Night tonight. I just love those groovy chairs. Yes, that is a Windows Phone on the desk. And a robot…

It turns out that writing code in airports at 5:00 am actually works sometimes. I was able to get a new version of my program working and even find the source of all my hardware troubles. A dodgy network cable……

My first session is at 3:05 this afternoon, if you are at DevDays 2010 in the Netherlands then feel free to drop along and see more demos than you could shake a stick at…

For those of you not at the conference, I’ll be putting all the sample code and the presentation up on here later today.

Update on 2010-03-30 11:36 by Rob

Oops. Earlier version of this post (there have been a few) incorrectly referred to the event as Tech Days. Wrong. This is Dev Days. Sorry about that. It's not as if it isn't written just about everwhere around here...

Flying Home

Nothing like an 18 hour journey. Nothing. When we got to Amsterdam we found that the weather had laid on some special fog just for us.

With a two and a half hour stopover I had plenty of time to take pictures.

This is all we saw of the sun all day..

Smashing Seattle Sunset

We are getting some lovely sunsets at the moment. I took this picture from our hotel window (lots of frantic setting up of tripod before the light faded). If it wasn’t for the crane this would be a perfect shot.

MVP Summit Sessions Again

I met another MVP in the lift today on the way to the sessions on the Microsoft campus. He asked me how I was getting on. “Fine” I said. “Yesterday they opened the top of my head and poured a whole bunch of stuff into it”. “Oh”, he replied. “With us they opened our heads and took a whole bunch out”.  Perhaps that will happen to me.today  Not sure what they will benefit from in my case though…

The weather is lovely again. Although we had some frost last night, the morning looks great.

Redmond Shuttle.