“The Web has been around forever and yet it is not in the blood of the executives who staff the top echelons of companies. Make no mistake, they are smart, they are successful and they want to do better. But the web is such a paradigm shift that if it is not in your blood it is very difficult to imagine its power and how to use it for good. How do you demand innovation & creativity & radical rethink if you can’t imagine it?” Avinash Kaushik, Google.
I’ll be joined by:
Jacqui Taylor – Founder of Flyingbinary
Steven Lai – Founder of Likeourselves
Lee Smallwood – “Lover of all things digital”
It’ll be tweeted – #llbs on twitter - but I know I’ll see a fair few of you there in person!
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Last year I went up to Bletchley Park during the veterans’ reunion. Last year was quite a year for Bletchley. Simon Greenish, the Director of Bletchley Park, recounted the events of GCHQ succeeding in getting the government to recognise the people who worked there during the war, with the foreign secretary giving out medals to some of the veterans. The government had also promised a permanent memorial (proposed for either the National Arboretum or Bletchley Park – I’ll let you guess which venue is favoured ;) ).
Bletchley is probably one of the hardest up museums in the country, but visitor numbers have been steadily growing over the last four years. For me, it is the birthplace of modern computing. If you aren’t familiar with what went of there in the 1940′s, you really should find out. There is a wonderful computing museum, with an array of computing artifacts to see.
Bletchley Park is full of fascinating stories that were once British national secrets. With each passing year, there are fewer and fewer veterans left to tell their stories. I was very sad to hear of John Herivel’s passing last week. He was one of the veterans that I spoke with last year, and he gave a talk during the reunion. A humble and gracious man, he was a delight to listen too.
Setting the scene for Herivel’s talk: In 1940 the main challenge was to break the codes of the German Enigma machines. The power of the Enigma was its use of rotors and dynamic wiring, which meant that each time a letter on the keyboard was pressed, there were different signal products. The German army and airforce used Enigma’s with rings that were numbered, while the navy used rings that were lettered. Each ring could be set to one of 26 settings, and each day these settings were changed.
To crack the Enigma code, both the ring settings and message settings are required. The initial Bletchley Park methods for cracking the codes were based on Polish ideas, acquired before the war. However, on the 1st of May, the Germans changed their methods, rendering the existing techniques inoperable. Alan Turing and his team had already anticipated this change, and were building a machine (the Bombe – in effect a computer) to decode the messages. That left a people from the 1st of May to the 1st of August, while the Bomb was being built. The Enigma machine was reciprocal – putting codes into another machine with the same set up reversed the code, but there were 158 million, million, million possible keys, so cracking the codes blindly wasn’t possible. That was, until John Herivel had an idea…
John Herivel, 91 at the time he gave this talk, was one of the senior code breakers, recruited from Cambridge by Gordon Welchman. The H tip (or Herivel Tip), which John conceived in Feb of 1940, was based on an intuition about a method that might work to accelerate the discovery of the codes. As John, put it, lots of ‘mights’ and ‘mays’!
The team humoured John, and give his method a go. Initially it didn’t work, but then suddenly it became effective, around the middle of May – very soon after the Germans forces changed their code method and the previous methods of cracking the codes supplied by the Polish failed. It was aided by a huge increase in message traffic after the Norwegian campaign, which made the H tip much more effective.
John’s method, taking advantage of errors in the way that some of the enigma machines were being set up, was used to crack messages in the critical window before the Bombes were complete. It was fortuitous timing, and made a significant contribution to the success of the code breakers. There was a sad part to John’s talk, for me at least. After the war, when his father asked him what he had done to support the war effort after university, John’s oath of silence prevented him responding – I guess leaving his father to think he had not done much than play maths. In fact, as noted by Winston Churchill, he was probably instrumental in changing the course of the war, together with his Fellows at Bletchley Park. So many of the stories are still untold, or uncaptured. There is a superb archive at Bletchley, but sadly most of it is still boxed up and not fully catalogued. Capturing the stories and making sense of the archive is very much a race against time.
John Herivel’s obituary has been published in The Telegraph, and you can hear more of the code breaker’s stories, and find out about the ancestors of the computer you are reading this on, by visiting Bletchley Park. Rest in peace John Herival. I am glad that I had the privilege of meeting you, so many of us own you and your co-workers a debt of gratitude that can not be quantified.
“I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+."
As it happens, my parents bought me a video Genie (a TRS-80 clone) as my first computer, but that included schematics too. It wasn't long before I was designing and building my own software and peripherals, and even making a bit of a living from some of them. Computing wasn't a passive experience, it was an active, engaging, creative one. I don't see my kids doing that as much today. Sure, they play with Scratch, but it really doesn't feel like the same thing. It has something about it of the cut and paste mentality that has become so prevalent these days [boy I'm sounding like a grumpy old man - did I mention I've noticed I have more grey hair recently?].
To me the iPad is “Infantalizing hardware” as Cory puts it. In fact, around the same time I read “The Real iPad Review“, which gives a 3 year old’s view of the iPad (via the child’s dad - Adam Kmiec ). It says this:
“Is the iPad a killer device? Is it a game changing device? Will you love it? The simple answer is YES…so long as you have the mindset of a 3 year old. Harsh? Yes. But, it’s the truth.”
Yes, that is harsh. I mean no disrespect to the dear friends who have rushed out and bought one, but it is slightly distressing watching them going jab-jab-point-shiny-shiny. Adam also points out the hardware short comings that kill the iPad for me:
“No USB, no camera, no replaceable battery, no ability to create content and heck no cleaning cloth. I could deal with all of these shortcomings and flaws if the price was something like $349.99 (in line with iPod Touch), but not at $499.99 (minimum). At $349.99 it would be a nice affordable stretch and step up from an iPod and complimentary to a laptop. But, at $499.99 I just don’t see how a current iPhone or MacBook user will find value in a device that does less than both of those devices.”
The lack of cleaning cloth is definitely a killer. What where Apple thinking?!? More seriously, the other features are a big issue… You see, my Windows Tablet PC has all of these features, and more, and it cost me a fraction of that price. Does it have the app store? No. Can I play angry birds with a multi-touch interface? No. Can I write my own apps on it (in a multitude of development environments)? Yes. Can I create my own rich content with it? Yes. Of course some have converted the iPad into a maker’s device, but there are other cheaper iPad alternatives out there. By the end of the summer there will be a veritable ocean of touch-screen web tablets.
I love Maker things. I love Dan’s Internet catapult. I love the devices people make with Arduino kits. I love the creative ideas of the kids at Teentech. I’m not a fan of things that make us passive consumers of information. I like creating things and planning things with people. Not everyone agreed with Cory, of course, and I’m coming from a slightly different angle. I don’t think we all need to be coders and soldering-iron-wielding-pcb-making geeks, but I do hope we can be a generation that doesn’t just consume, but that engages and creates!
It’s all too easy to take it for granted that people know about something. In the last day or two a few people have asked me what Twestival is. Now, some of you will all ready know about the Twitter Festival, but some won’t, so here is a little background.
Fast forward six months, and I found myself in the BBC’s London television studio (thank you Jaz and the team), explaining why thousands of people, may of whom had never met in real life, were gathering in towns and cities around the world at Twestival events to raise money for Charity:Water.
If you are unfamiliar with the regular Twitter cook-offs, then check out the Summer Pudding Twitter Competition post for a bit of background. Dozens of people from around the globe in an on-line cooking competition, co-ordinated via social networking site Twitter, watched by thousands.
This month’s competition has less to do with cooking and more to do with making. Last month’s winner chose a Summer Sandwich for this month’s competition, so the only heat was in the competion, rather than the food… Well, apart from the occasional chilli in one of the sandwiches. Continue Reading…
The aim, is to bring people together in person who know each other through Twitter, but don’t necessarily know each other well in person. Given that, of the people coming, there is the full spectrum of people who have never been to an unconference style event before, aren’t technical, and just use twitter as a social tool. There will also be hard core geeks and techies who make social platforms that use twitter, and regularly go to unconference style events. It’ll be an interesting mix of people, with one thread in common we all use twitter. Continue Reading…
