IWM Duxford

On my way to KatFest, I took the family to the International War Museum at Duxford. We had taken mou youngest there when she was 10 days old (as part of a UK Empeg meet) but no-one had really had a chance to look around.

This time we spent nearly 6 hours there, and could still have spent more time (tip - start at the furthest hangar, the one with tanks, the Somme and the Land Warfare exhibits, and work back down - that way you won't queue to see anything, even at busy times) Getting there around 9:30 for an opening time of 10am helped as well.

Of particular interest to me are the hangars with the Navy exhibits (as my father and brother both served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm) and the USAF hangar (as it has the Lokheed SR-71 Blackbird)

We saw a Spitfire being wheeled out of the 'flying aircraft' hangar so thought we'd see one of them flying around, but it was just to let out another aircraft. There were biplanes and world war two aircraft flying all day.

Anyway - a few pictures of my favourites:

The Blackburn Buccaneer

The SR-71 Blackbird from a couple of angles

Some suspended aircraft - can you identify all 9 in this picture?

De Havilland Sea Vixen

 One of 4 Spitfires at Duxford

De Havilland Twin Otter belonging to BAS, and stationed at Duxford when in the UK

The De Havilland Dragon Rapide - would have been nice to go for a flight

A Panavia Tornado

An Avro CF 100 MK4 Canuck of the Royal Canadian Air Force 

Hawker Siddeley Harrier

A De Havilland DH9 bomber in beautiful condition

My middle daughter took photos of every jet engine she could find - think she plans an art project

An F16 undergoing extensive work

Some instantly recognisable jets in a famous wing

Securi-Tay 2

Spent January 16th up in Dundee, at the University of Abertay, at Securi-Tay 2. It was a very well run conference - it was organised by students on the Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures course, but was better organised than some professional conferences I have been to.

I saw some excellent speakers, and gave a talk on career planning in information security, so mine was by far the least technical talk there. Once the video is up online I will add in a link here...I was going to attach slides but it seems this blog software doesn't understand attachments that aren't pictures or video.

Highlights for me:

• Rory and Marion McCune gave excellent presentations on using the Windows Surface for security testing, and for automation of security testing. 

• Graham Sutherland's talk on attacking office hardware ranged from simple and relatively harmless, to pretty hardcore hacking via chip removal and analysis. Excellent fun.

• Nick Walker's talk on Android Security Assessments, while slightly too technical for me, was very interesting, and reminded me to pop Cyanogenmod on my Galaxy S3 this weekend.

• The" Rory track" - of the two lecture theatres, one had 3 Rorys presenting, which just goes to confirm one of the Memes of Meta...

Security Stack Exchange managed to supply me with a few T-shirts, pens and stickers so quite a few speakers presented their talks wearing them, which was nice :-)

And the good folks at Securi-Tay kindly donated this bright red t-shirt to my con swag collection.