Aerospace & Defence

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Colossus Gallery – New and Improved!

Last year I wrote about the Colossus rebuild at Bletchley Park. This is a reproduction of the machine that was used to break the German Lorenz ciphers during World War Two, and has a strong claim to being the first electronic programmable computer.

I’m very pleased that the Colossus room has now been greatly improved, enabling visitors to walk all around the machine, seeing between the racks of valves. It’s now much easier to get a good sense of the size of this computer, and the number of components required to make it work. (more…)

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Social network analysis – making sense of spaghetti

Social network analysis has been around for many years now, but with the burgeoning amounts of network data available to both governmental and private organisations, the use of these techniques is becoming ever more popular and valuable for business and crime fighting purposes. As a lot of the technical terms come up repeatedly in meetings with customers, I thought it’d be useful to provide a very brief (and reasonably non-technical) overview of what these terms mean. (more…)

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Malware on a corporate network.

Almost every day new reports of companies becoming victims of malware in one form or another are reported. Most of us look at these stories and quietly hope the same fate doesn’t befall us. A recent example is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries where a reported 80 servers and computers were infected. Once 80 computers on a network are infected what confidence would I have that the problem was isolated to just those computers? When this is coupled with a report from Trend Micro (Trend Micro finds 100% of enterprises had undetected malware), it becomes worrying just how large the scale of the problem may be.

It will be interesting to see over the coming months whether malware designed to attack behind corporate firewalls becomes significant or whether it is just too hard a target for malware writers to worry about. (more…)

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Smartphone futures – Thank You, Beep…!

Military forces are increasingly interested in fielding smartphones. The old methods of procuring bespoke devices are time-consuming and expensive, while consumer smartphones have leapt way ahead of the technology in Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) built purely for defence organisations. Of course there are added complications for military devices, which have to be more rugged and have better security support than their consumer-grade cousins. Accreditation of Android and iOS devices is ongoing.

I like to think about where Smartphone technology is going next, because this can have an impact on the kind of applications that these devices will find in the defence world. It’s fun, as well as instructive, to look back at predictions from the past to see where they got things right, and where they got things wrong. (more…)

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Tony Sale and the Colossus Rebuild

When I’m using a modern computer to perform a task that stretches its capabilities to the limits, such as a hefty piece of mathematical analysis, the sheer speed with which it does it reminds me that electronic computing is still a very new field of engineering. On the other hand, when I’m using the computer to write a simple document, it can be hard to believe that there was ever a time that people didn’t have computers.

The recent sad news of the death of Tony Sale gives us an opportunity to think about the birth of electronic computing. Sale led the project to reconstruct a working Colossus machine at Bletchley Park, the home of World War 2 codebreaking in Britain. (more…)

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From OODA to AWOODAM2

A while ago I wrote an article about Agility and the OODA Loop – the “Observe, Orient, Decide, Act” method created by John Boyd. The concept is widely applicable not only to military activity, but also to competitive business. As with all such methods, however, there are situations in which it is inadequate to the task. (more…)

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Is your computer safe?

With the very significant media coverage of “Cyber” attacks it can be seen that being secure online is about more than just having the latest antivirus installed. However it is not always obvious how significant the risk is or what what be done to be more secure.

Here I look at  2 issues that are significant causes of users getting infected with malware and some practical advice about being more secure. (more…)

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Refreshing legacy systems

We live in a disposable culture; a world where electronic devices simply get thrown away and replaced every few years. However, there are legacy environments where this is simply not practical.

Not so long ago I refreshed a legacy “system” of my own as it didn’t support modern operational requirements. The issues that arose demonstrate clearly the difficulties that need to be considered when any component of a system is refreshed. (more…)

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Skylon spaceplane passes ESA technical review

I’ve just seen the excellent news that the UK Skylon spaceplane design has passed its technical review by the European Space Agency.

This is fantastic news for the UK space industry. Reaction Engines Ltd, the company behind Skylon, has come up with a truly revolutionary concept for launching payloads into Earth orbit. Rather than having a multi-stage rocket in which used stages are dropped as the craft ascends, Skylon has an air-breathing engine that works much like a jet while it is taking off, and then switches to its on-board oxygen supply when it gets so high that the air is too thin. The craft will take off from a runway, and will land on a runway too. If this can be made to work reliably, the cost savings for launching payloads into space will be enormous.

The SABRE engine incorporates some very clever technology for accomplishing this dual task, and there are some severe challenges to getting this working. That’s why this ESA technical review is so important for giving confidence that the design is on the right track. (The people I’ve spoken to at REL are very tight-lipped about exactly how their engine works!)

We would like to congratulate Reaction Engines Ltd, and wish them good luck for the future.

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The Arduino Revolution

We humans are simple creatures. We find it hard to hold more than a few thoughts in our heads at a time. Anything we can do to relieve the intellectual burden gives us a huge boost in our inventiveness and creative productivity.

The availability of the Arduino platform has brought us a very powerful hardware abstraction. Arduino is an open source electronics prototyping platform, containing a small computer module and connection points to hook up to the physical world via sensors and actuators (such as motors).

So what does Arduino give us? (more…)

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