Bletchley Park, Over the Air, and Enigma Kerplunk

Any modern re-telling of World War 2 has to include the exploits of Bletchley Park. It’s also home to the National Museum of Computing and is one of the heritage sites of modern computing.

And this weekend, the annual “Over the Air” mobile developers conference will be at Bletchley Park!

Naturally I’ll be there with a little hack/presentation that’s more about education and entertainment than entering the Hackathon. In previous years myself and others have taken on various tasks, including building a two-stage Spy Camera Rocket fuelled by Diet Coke and Mentos; prototyping a Star Trek Holodeck; flying round the world in a full-sized simulator built using web API’s and lots of wood; filming the last episode of Torchwood before it aired on TV; and building a real world Wipeout racetrack.

Myself and a plucky team of willing victims volunteers (some who are already recruited, others will decide it’s a good idea to join in on the day) are going to rebuild an Enigma machine. Except rather than code books and electricity, it’s going to be powered by… marbles.

I’ll also be taking part in the Ignite series of lightning talks at Over The Air. Given the focus on World War 2, I thought it appropriate to look at one of the post-war cultural efforts to bring Europe closer together. So my 20 slides in five minutes will be titled “Everything I ever needed to know about European politics I learned from the Eurovision Song Contest“.

There’s still almost a day before the event starts, which is lots of time to get yourself organised and signed up. Even if you;re not a hacker, the number of talks, demonstrations and presentations make this a fabulous event.