Section 6 Criminal Law Act 1977, as amended by Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (United Kingdom, applies to England and Wales)

Take notice

• That we live in this property, it is our home and we intend to stay here.
• That at all times there is at least one person in this property.
• That any entry or attempt to enter into this property without our permission is a criminal offence as any one of us who is in physical possession is opposed to entry without our permission.
• That if you attempt to enter by violence or by threatening violence we will prosecute you. You may receive a sentence of up to six months imprisonment and/or a fine of up to £5,000.
• That if you want to get us out you will have to issue a claim in the County Court or in the High Court, or produce to us a written statement or certificate in terms of S.12A Criminal Law Act, 1977 (as inserted by Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994).
• That it is an offence under S.12A (8) Criminal Law Act 1977 (as amended) to knowingly make a false statement to obtain a written statement for the purposes of S. 12A. A person guilty of such an offence may receive a sentence of up to six months imprisonment and/or a fine of up to £5,000.

Signed

The Occupiers

(To be posted at the entrance of a squatted property, also valid if not signed by name)

This states the current squatter’s rights in England and Wales and basically means that the owner or landlady/landlord of a property can not evict you from your squat without going through court, proving that they have plans to actually use the property again. Court procedures usually take weeks or months, so once you are in you will have a home for a while. If they try to evict illegally they can end up in prison for 6 months and having to pay £5,000 (currently around €6000) in fines. This makes squatting more or less legal in England and Wales. Sweet.

We have an upcoming court case for one flat in our squat on 3 September 2010. Visiting the Advisory Service For Squatters (ASS) office at Whitechapel today should allow us to get a good defense going. We suspect that the owner (council) wants to save some paperwork by getting an eviction warrant for one flat and evict the other flat while they are at it on eviction day. Which, of course, is not legal..

Until then we will continue to take good care of the building: keep it clean, fix little damages, trim plants in the garden, prevent decay and be good neighbours – while enjoying a free home with a garden in Brixton. :)

During the last days I was playing around with a Javascript web chat application using strophe.js. To save user preferences on the ejabberd XMPP server I use Private XML storage (XEP-0049). The specification is pretty straight forward, but due to the lack of a real world example it still took me a while to get it working — hence this post. Thanks to badlop from the ejabberd@conference.jabber.ru XMPP chat room for valuable pointers. Here is how I did it:

1. Make sure mod_http_bind and mod_private are activated in ejabberd.cfg:

{modules,
 [
  {mod_http_bind, []},
  {mod_private, []},
  ...
 ]}.

2. Open BOSH connection to XMPP server (in your Javascript application):

sc = new Strophe.Connection('/http-bind/');
sc.connect('user@example.org', 'password');

3. Build and send IQ stanza for storing data:

var stanza = $iq({type: 'set', id: '_set1'})
  .c('query', {xmlns: 'jabber:iq:private'})
  .c('myclient', {xmlns: 'myclient:prefs'})
  .c('mypreference', 'yes')
  .tree();
sc.sendIQ(stanza);

Replace “myclient” and “myclient:prefs” with your own invented namespace and use your key/value names instead of “mypreference”/”yes”.

The IQ stanza sent to the server will look something like this:

<iq type='set' id='_set1' xmlns='jabber:client'>
  <query xmlns='jabber:iq:private'>
    <myclient xmlns='myclient:prefs'>
      <mypreference>yes</mypreference>
    </myclient>
  </query>
</iq>

Server response:

<iq xmlns='jabber:client' from='...' to='...' id='_set1' type='result'>
  <query xmlns='jabber:iq:private'/>
</iq>

4. Build and send IQ stanza for retrieving data:

var stanza = $iq({type: 'get', id: '_get1'})
  .c('query', {xmlns: 'jabber:iq:private'})
  .c('myclient', {xmlns: 'myclient:prefs'})
  .tree();
sc.sendIQ(stanza, parsePrefs);

function parsePrefs(element) {
  ...
}

Sent to server:

<iq type='get' id='_get1' xmlns='jabber:client'>
  <query xmlns='jabber:iq:private'>
    <myclient xmlns='myclient:prefs'/>
  </query>
</iq>

Server response:

<iq xmlns='jabber:client' from='...' to='...' id='_get1' type='result'>
  <query xmlns='jabber:iq:private'>
    <myclient xmlns='myclient:prefs'>
      <mypreference>yes</mypreference>
    </myclient>
  </query>
</iq>

5. Write parsePrefs() function and enjoy your XML storage! :)

Questions?

I am so glad to have met Robin Upton at this year’s FOSDEM conference in Brussels. Robin initiated Altruists International a few years back and is doing elaborate non-formal research in the field of gift economies.

While at FOSDEM (where the only other talk I attended was about strophe.js, an XMPP library designed for the real-time web I was playing with recently) and visiting a chocolate factory outlet a bit outside Brussels, Robin, Dante and I mainly discussed his ongoing project Friend2Friend — a possible technical back-end to a fully independent and distributed gift economy. The software is still a prototype, but I believe it is important pioneering work that encourages new ways of thinking about our data, how it is processed and stored.

Robin is a kind and loving altruist and an inspiring thinker with a strong mathematics background. Believe it or not, his black framed glasses are actually fixed with sticky tape, hehe. Please do invite him to talk about his ideas! He will roam about Europe a bit longer and return to East Asia at some point.

Thanks to Petter, Dante and Kasper for connecting us.

meinhard@monkey:~$ date
Sun Nov 22 22:22:20 CET 2009
meinhard@monkey:~$ date
Sun Nov 22 22:22:21 CET 2009
meinhard@monkey:~$ date
Sun Nov 22 22:22:22 CET 2009


I just uploaded the first public release of my Resize Image Nautilus Script. It’s a small extension to GNOME, the desktop manager used by Ubuntu. The script allows you to easily shrink image files to a sane size with two mouse clicks:

Right-click a photo, choose “Resize Image”, done. The files size of pictures will be reduced to around 50 – 150 KB, depending on the selected target size. This one is for all you people that send me 3 MB holiday snapshots by email — who needs 10 megapixel photos anyway? ;)

Thanks to Ani and Tino, who hosted me at Pension Sighisoara while I was finalising my first fully documented GPL software release.

Throwing together a quick hack for your own use is one thing, but preparing your creation to be used and extended by others (translation: make idiot-proof) takes a good few more hours. Add comments and safety nets in the code, polish the interface, think of future extensions, test on other computers (I should have done that, but I leave that part to you, hehe), write documentation, make screenshots, create a software homepage and announce the release — quite some overhead. But I feel it was worth to go that extra mile.

So, if you use GNOME, please try out the script and leave a comment.

Last night I came back to Brussels from the Hacker Space Festival in Paris, which I greatly enjoyed. Big cheers to the people of the Hacker Space Brussels for the lift and the short tour of their romantic small artisan space!

For people interested in my lightning talks about PowerTOP, BeWelcome and the TransHackMeeting Istanbul 2010 I uploaded the presentation slides to my sandbox. Wow, that was a sentence with a lot of links. :)

I just got this art piece by email from a person unknown to me. It contains a HTML table with coloured cells that form the letters V I A G R A.

To trick spam filters spammers always need be one step ahead of filter maintainers, which results in a constant creative arms race, letting both sides dive deeper into existing technology. Our spam filter at Ecobytes for example looks into PDF attachments of emails, finds images with text and tries to read the text to search for offending words. I find that quite a performance for a machine a.k.a. toaster. But in this case the spammer actually used some retro thinking. Bravo! Good luck finding spam signatures in coloured tables, dear spam assassins. :)

Spam has been inspiring artists since a while now. Check out Alex Dragulescu’s beautiful Spam Plants, Linzie Hunter’s typographic Spam One-liners or the Spam Garden. On the other hand there is ASCII art spam too now.

Here is my response: I just wrote a table text generator, which you can use to create pretty text like in the image or to scramble your email address. :)

PS: Yes, this is the first post with an image on this blog. There will be more!

Maybe some of you have heard of such thing as the Unix time, counting the seconds since the 1 January 1970 – something like the beginning of the Unix age. This number is around 1234519870 right now and will reach 1234567890 tonight, Friday, 13 February 2009 23:31:30 GMT! I just spotted this while finding my way through database entries. If you are into numbers at all and into Unix-like things this will blow your mind, if you are not, you simply won’t care or even notice. :) However, it appears that completely normal people celebrate this day around the world. Join the party!

Unfortunately the environmental activist summer camp that I attended the last seven years all over Europe, the gathering of idealists, mavericks and tree-huggers that changed my life into a nomadic hacktivist existence, is not going to happen this year. Unfortunately?

After some 20 years of Ecotopia the organising NGO EYFA, which I am part of as a board member and web-monkey, has decided to discontinue their annual summer camp under the name of Ecotopia. Some people on the EYFA board have not been so happy with this decision, but since the folks working in the office — who are doing most of the hands-on work — wished to radically change the summer meeting, including finding a new name, we found consensus on the issue.

According to what I heard last, EYFA will organise a different, much shorter meeting focussed on activism this summer and possibly the years to come. I heard the term conference-style somewhere. It’s all a bit vague and I’m curious to find out what’s it going to be. Update May 14th 2009: The new event is called Climate Action Camp and will take place near Antwerp 3rd to 9th of August 2009.

However, the Ecotopia biketour 2009 will take place in a similar fashion as before. Check the Biketour website for updates (no 2009 info at time of writing). As for Ecotopia 2010 the Ecotopian community is working hard on what in software development would be called a fork by the name of “Ecotopia?” — taking place near Belzig not far from Berlin. I’ll be there! :)

Renew, question, evolve, flow. Always.

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