Softwire news | Softwire Blog

Archive for the ‘Softwire news’ Category

Softwire develops CMS for BBC’s Festival Coverage

16 May 2012, by Chris Harris

This week sees the launch of the first of many BBC microsites to be created using the Content Management System (CMS) we developed for music festival coverage – Radio 1′s Hackney Weekend.

The BBC develops dedicated microsites for the major music festivals it covers. These sites provide lots of useful information: practical advice on how to get there; live coverage; profiles of the acts performing; and tips on who to watch. They also contain a large amount of audio and video content and, in many cases, offer live multiscreen viewing.

To date, these microsites have been built on a constantly improving template. The BBC wanted to commission a CMS that would radically reduce the amount of effort and time needed to get a new event site up and running. Softwire were very proud – and excited – to be selected to develop this CMS, in collaboration with our design partner Picture.

These live event sites are extremely popular, with usage spikes in the region of 100 requests per second. You can read about how we met this and other challenges involved in this project in our case study. In the meantime, enjoy the festivals and we hope you find the websites useful!

Softwire Speed Coding Challenge – Question 3 Discussion

14 May 2012, by Chris Williams

previous article in series

In our last coding challenge post, we posted question 3 from our coding challenge. Did you try it yourself? Here’s the question again, as a reminder:

Softwire Speed Coding Challenge – Question 3

6 May 2012, by Chris Williams

previous article in series

Welcome to the next in our series on Softwire’s coding challenge! Last time, we discussed the winning answer to the second question. This time round we’ve got a cryptography question for you (although you won’t need to know anything special) - I’ll post the winning answer and some further discussion in a week or so.

Truly Unbreakable Security

Inside the linked zip file (Secret.zip) is a file (secret.dat) I have encrypted using the “truly unbreakable” security offered here.

Short summary of the encryption: XOR each byte of the plaintext file with the next byte produced by a new instance of System.Random in C#
I have linked the source code of the encrypting app as Vernam.zip (NOTE: you do not need to read this)

I would like you to decrypt secret.dat (feel free to unzip it manually first).

To aid you in this, here are the 7 most common “magic numbers” from Wikipedia. These are byte sequences which appear at the start of a file to mark the file format:

CAFEBABE    class
47494638    gif
FFD8FFE0    jpeg
89504E47    png
4D546864    midi
25504446    pdf
504B0304    zip

As if that weren’t enough, you also get these two enormous hints:

There are two constructors for System.Random – the default no-args constructor uses Environment.TickCount as a seed
I rebooted my system less than an hour before encrypting this file

Best of luck with this one, we’ll post the winning solution and the answer in a couple of weeks!

next article in series

Softwire’s work with the BBC on The Listening Project

4 May 2012, by Chris Harris

Softwire recently worked with the BBC on an audio recording archive to run alongside The Listening Project.

The Listening Project is an ambitious, large-scale BBC initiative, in partnership with the British Library. It’s based on an American initiative called StoryCorps, and its mission is to preserve, in an audio format, the stories and experiences of as many UK citizens as possible. As well as making these stories easily available online, they will be broadcasting a selection on Radio 4 and a number of regional radio stations.

Softwire Speed Coding Challenge – Question 2 Discussion

30 April 2012, by Chris Williams

previous article in series

So, in our last speed coding post, we set you the second question in our challenge. Here it is again, just to remind you!

Softwire Speed Coding Challenge – Question 2

23 April 2012, by Chris Williams

previous article in series

Welcome to the next in our series on Softwire’s coding challenge! Last time, we discussed the winning answer to the first question. Here’s question 2 for you to try, which may require a bit of mathematical knowledge – I’ll post the winning answer and some further discussion in a week or so.

Softwire Speed Coding Challenge – Question 1 Discussion

16 April 2012, by Chris Williams

previous article in series

Last time out, we set you the first question from our recent Speed Coding Challenge, giving you the opportunity to answer it yourselves and compare your efforts to our winning answer. Here’s question 1 again, just to remind you what it was!

World Water Day Fundraiser

29 March 2012, by Chris Harris

Thursday 22nd March was World Water Day, and since Softwire’s official charity this year is Water Aid, we thought we’d better do something to mark the occasion.

To remind us how lucky we are to have access to safe water, and to raise some money at the same time, we asked colleagues to give optional donations whenever they used water in the office. That included toilet trips, making tea and even washing hands – although we were very careful not to discourage any of these practices!

In total we raised £251.50 for Water Aid, which was great considering all we were selling was water… there was some discussion about whether we should also charge for all the soft drinks in the fridge, given how much water is used in their production, but we decided that it would bankrupt us!

Goings on at Softwire, technical and otherwise

Archive for the ‘Softwire news’ Category

Truly Unbreakable Security