The environmentalists have taught us the three Rs.
Reduce
Reuse
Recycle
Reduction makes us think about unnecessary items, such as packaging. Packaging is useful to protect items we purchase and to advertise the contents of the product.
Micropayments is a trend in consumer behaviour. Advancement in payment systems makes it common-place to purchase low-value items electronically.
Let’s say I want to purchase one litre of cooking oil. My only choice is to purchase a plastic bottle along with my oil. This is because there is no reasonable means to transport the oil from the supermarket to my home. Taking my old bottle for a refill doesn’t help, because oil is not sold on tap. This is because the cooking oil vendor has a barcode stamped on the bottle in order to collect payment. To persuade the vendor to sell me his oil on tap I need to replace the barcode with something else.
This is where micropayments can help. With an Near Fields Communication device (NFC) attached to a dispenser the point of sale and collection can be combined. Oil can now be purchased from the dispenser using any container of my choice. Given this option, I would choose to Reduce the number of plastic bottles going from my home to landfill 🙂
It was agreed as this had already been sent out to most attendees, new attendees could be sent the minutes individually after the meeting and this item was skipped. Action complete
Collate AOB discussion topics:
Some points regarding noise of students and some tenants not having carpet (as per stipulations of the leases) brought up were added to the scope of the “Review team” which will start work once the RA has been approved by the 1 st-tier Property Tribunal.
Whilst waiting for the “Review team” to start their work could all leaseholders ensure their tenants are as considerate as possible, particularly students, and that they are compliant with the lease and have noise-reducing floor coverings Action All
Major Works:
The residents’ association officially requested UP for a penalty-free instalment option for the “major works” – challenging the “Administration fees” on the 3-month & 6-month instalment plans, as per the letter sent to leaseholders on the 24th of Sept. An email was sent to UP from the bathchambers.ra@gmail.com email account on the 16th of Oct. No reply has been received.
Comments made in the meeting identified that some leaseholders have already negotiated penalty-free instalment plans for the major works.
Incorrect calculations: Discussion also covered discrepancies in the bill for the major works, where the mistake on some bills was only a typo (with the total being correct) and with others, UP have incorrectly calculated the total.  With regards inaccurate calculations that some are experiencing, discussion identified that some recalculations of apartment sizes happened between 15 and 20 years ago. This effort identified (based on the actual square footage of each apartment) what the correct share of costs should be for each apartment. It was speculated that some leases may not have been updated at this time to reflect the recalculated amount. If anyone is experiencing discrepancies like this – they should be flagged to the Residents’ Association so we can understand the full picture and work with UP on that.
Urbanpoint email to leaseholders
A request was sent to Urbanpoint on the 16th of Oct requesting assistance in contacting all the leaseholders. So far there has been no response.
It was suggested that representatives per house might be able to assist here and so the following groups were identified to contact leaseholders directly within the houses:
Bath House; Rom & Tota
Devonshire House; Joe, Jon & Roanna
Trinity House; Danielle & Rebecca
Residents Association registration Requirements & Costs
The following were discussed in the meeting as being required to set up a legally recognised Residents’ Association
The RA must have a Constitution which members sign up to  60% (51% absolute minimum) annually signed residents’ list
On contacting the 1st-tier Property Tribunal a judge confirmed that an electronic method of gathering signatures from tenants is acceptable and so this method will be used as the primary way of gathering signatures along with the subscription in the website we are working on.
Request of recognition from Urbanpoint must be made – even if it is not responded to
Legal recognition of a residents’ association by a Rent Assessment Committee costing c.£200
No two officers of the RA to live in the same household o A secured website for RA members is recommended which will have an ongoing cost – paid for out of the membership fee o Liability of RA – A note was made that mention in the constitution of indemnity should be modified to state that cover will be provided by insurance paid for out of the fee. Action Complete o Discussion identified that £5 annual charge is probably not enough and so £30 P/A charge recommended. Action to change the amount in the constitution complete
Residents’ review group update
No updates to report apart from additional scope items already mentioned previously in these minutes.
AOB
N/A
Select a Chair, a Treasurer and any other roles for residents’ association
This point was deferred to the next meeting as a quorum of people, as defined by the constitution, was not present. Action deferred and quorum modified to 20%
Next meeting set for 21st of November – Venue and Date to be confirmed via posters in the hallways as upstairs at The Roebuck is already booked for another event
This is an account of how mc.fnarg.net was setup on Amazon as a distributed cluster of Minecraft nodes.
CREATING THE INSTANCES ON AMAZON
We logged into the AWS console and went to the EC2 console. Try https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/ and you should be redirected to a region.
Then we created two t2.micro instances. Each instance was created with an image size of 8GB. The linux distro was Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Both instances are in the same security group. Check that the VPC ID and Sub ID are the same for both instances. It should be similar to:
VPC ID Sub ID
vpc-34bf1523 subnet-e6543xyz
To help follow the story, the instance names and private IP adresses are shown below:
mc-gateway: x.x.x.164
mc-gamer: x.x.x.30
To complete the setup we connect to each instance as follows.
ssh -i ~/.ssh/aws.pem ubuntu@mc.fnarg.net
In this case we are using a Mac, you can use Putty on Windows.
INITIAL SERVER SETUP AS UBUNTU USER
Once we are logged on then we prepared each instances by installing some prerequisites.
The extermination of a single mosquito does not eradicate malaria
Another approach is to target the breeding grounds, rivers, swamps etcetera.
At the heart of the Manchester tragedy is a young man who decided to end his own life
Irrespective of subsequent events this itself is a tragedy
The same is true for any person who resorts to suicide.
Communities should adapt and defend against forces that lead to fragmentation
Prejudice is such a force
Society members must get better at reading the signs of alienation
All must develop more effective treatments to help those who become desperate.
This act of suicide, however was also an act of mass murder.
The simultaneous combination of these acts changes everything.
Ultimately only the murderer knows what influenced his fatal decision, but we can speculate that:
They were derived from the suicide bomber behaviour pattern
Or influences that emanated from his immediate peers and family members
Or solely from his own determination, from entirely within his own mind.
Although it is difficult to separate the external from the internal influences, they must exist
Such external influences are nothing to do with religion
Religious belief gives us reason to live, not to die or take-away life
The architects of this terrible act are not Muslim
Wearing the cloak of a Muslim does not make it so.
Within the broad church of our plural society such facades create confusion
Complex societies lack the precision with which to see imposters
To rescue religion from the parasites embedded within, we must re-focus
We need to re-align religion to society and society to religion.
Evicting the fake Muslims is necessary to constrain the influence of terror
To be a Muslim (or a Jew, or a Christian) should anyway not require access to  privileged enclaves
Such divisions do not exist amongst the victims of the Manchester Attack
Nor should not exist within the institutions of religion.
Removing terrorism demands interventions that are both micro and macro
The micro interventions are to reduce suicide through greater social cohesion
And at the macro level, the challenge is to prevent religion from being a safe harbour for terrorists.
As social cohesion is an attribute of religion then we can put it more simply and say that
To eradicate terrorism we have to promote spirituality over everything
CAS is a protocol for implementing Single-Sign-On authentication services Python is a programming languages often used to develop web applications
To protect a Python generated web page with a CAS session a client of the CAS server has to be added to the logic of the page. Users accessing the protected page are prompted to login unless a session already exists in their browser. There are many CAS clients written in Python and this blog is a review of them. Leave a reply if any are missing and I will take a look.Â
Most CAS clients are written in the context of a Python framework. Django is one of the most popular, so we’ll start there.
The original client for django supported CAS protocols 1 and 2. Ming Chen’s client inherits from the above and added support for version 3. The same author provides some Python CAS utils for testing. Another CAS client for Django is also derived from the original client but did not add support for version 3. Jerome Leleu is that author of the pac4j Java client and provides a python demo  also based on the original. Although not a client of CAS, it’s worth mentioning that Jason Bittel has a server implementation of the CAS protocol that runs on Django.
Another Python framework is Flask and Flask-CAS is a client for that framework. The client for Twisted looks like an incomplete effort at both a client and server.
Kellen’s client is for the lightweight bottle.py framework. Bottle.py can be either Python version 2 or 3. This client was written for Python 2.7.
The remaining clients in this review are designed to work in either a CGI or WSGI context.
Ian Wright has a fairly recent client that support protocol 2, 3 and Python version 3. It is designed for an Apache context. The earliest client (2011) seems to be by Jon Rifkin and runs as a Python CGI Web app (although the install failed for me). Ryan Fox has a package of the Rifkin client for pip installers. This client can also be found adapted for WSGI and embedded in a PriceHistory project. And for completeness here is link to an ancient version that looks best forgotten.
Summary
The client that worked for me was Kellen’s client which installed easily with pip. Having a working bottle.py installation was the biggest factor influencing my choice. Ian Wright’s client was next in line and for someone with a working Django environment then the Ming Chen version looks good.
On Sunday I mowed the lawn in the new house.
After that I had to take anti-hystamine, due to the pollen.
Feeling extremely drowsy I crashed out on the sunlounger in the garden.
In my sleep I dreamt about the last time that I took anti-hystamine.
This was last summer, when we went canoeing and I fell asleep in the canoe.
But in my dream this was due to natives on the riverside firing tranquilisers through blowpipes.
And somehow I mixed this up with what my son had said about a bush in the garden.
A bush in the garden that was next to the sunlounger where I was sleeping.
A bush in the garden that had .. what was it again, a nest of insects?
I awoke with a start in a cloud of wasps.
One of them had just stung me in the arm.
But it didn’t hurt too much, because anti-hystamine is also a form of insect repellent.
I moved the sunlounger and went back to sleep 🙂
There is a joke in this, but first I need to set the scene. In Sept 2013 I visited my local bank in Spain, Andalusia. After subjecting my status to some minor inquisitions I departed with a quotation for a mortgage. Yay! Actually, I learnt retrospectively that the quote was not legally binding but nonetheless Our Great Property Hunt was officially underway. Sometime later, my family and I found our dream home and I returned to the bank to refresh the quotation against the agreed sale price. No problemo. Armed with the confidence of an approved budget we set out to fulfill our part of the bargain and source the deposit (forty two percent of the sale price).
dream home
This meant selling our family home back in the UK. Given that we lived in a small community with some of the most fantastic people I have ever met, this was definitely the toughest part. But we did it, paid a deposit to the Spanish seller (ten percent of the sale price) and returned to the bank to seal the deal. What happened next was a mysterious series of:
Computer system failures
Banking staff absent
Zero response to communications
Ambiguous and conflicting messages from .. Madrid
Time passed. We recruited a Spanish lawyer. A great guy, very determined with oodles of experience, but even with this mighty assistance we were still unable to find a resolution. We tried again with another bank. Much the same story, but after forty days we received this email (translated from Spanish).
The appraiser (TINSA) gives me a very low value, 20 percent of the sale price. I understand that with this value we cannot provide the mortgage. Thank you and regards
I contacted TINSA directly to try and understand what had happened. Like the banks, there was no response. We kept trying with other banks but it was agonisingly painful as all followed a pattern that I can best describe as a strategy of procrastination.
So what’s the problem here?
Well really there are only two possibilities. Either they don’t like my house or they don’t like me. Despite an increasing sense of paranoia I can’t accept that it is anything to do with me. None of the banks have raised any concerns about my Age, Income, Nationality or any other aspect of my status. The house is the problem. It could be that it is because the house is classified as a Casa Rustica (Country House). Of the 2,823 mortgages granted in Andalusia last month only fourteen percent were Rusticas. The remainder were Urban Dwellings.
To put those mortgage approval figures from INE into some context, In April this year, La Vanguardia reported that:
The signing of new mortgages for home purchases fell by 33% last February over the same month of 2013 and has already accumulated 46 months of declines, according to data released today by the National Statistics Institute (INE ).
But nevertheless 408 mortgages were granted to lenders buying Casa Rusticas, so why do the banks decline my business? The other possibility is that the bank doesn’t like my house because it is not owned by them.
Spanish banks to get up to 100bn euros in rescue loans.
At the time, Senor de Guindos (Spain’s economic minister) said
We hope that as a result of these injections [of capital] families and companies will have more solvent banks which are able to offer them credit.
So the intervention of Senor de Guindos should have helped me right? Let’s look at some numbers. These are extracted from The Bank Lending Survey, published by the Bank of Spain.
The Bank Lending Survey is an official quarterly survey that has been conducted in coordination by all the euro area national central banks and the European Central Bank (ECB) since January 2003.
From the survey, I became interested in the following question.
Over the past three months, how have your bank’s conditions and terms for approving loans to households for house purchase changed?
The following chart shows the share of banks reporting that terms and conditions have been tightened, minus the share of banks reporting that they have been eased.
So that’s pretty clear, the banks basically shut-up-shop after they got the bailout. Senor de Guindos’s hopes were not realised and the reason for the lockout is because the banks tightened their T&Cs. But can we go further? Does any of this show that Spanish Banks are actively obstructing mortgage applications in order to promote the sale of their own toxic stock? Well not necessarily. To know that for certain we’d need to know whether the mortgages that were approved were on properties owned by the banks. And to the best of my knowledge, the banks don’t publish figures to show that. Looking more broadly for circumstantial evidence however, The Economist wrote that
With more than 600,000 new homes still unsold, a flood of new properties onto the market would hurt both banks and house prices.
And this Bloomberg article about how the EU smiled while Spanish banks cooked the books strongly suggests that there has been little or no pressure from the EU to pass funds from the European Social Fund onto lenders (in spite of Senor de Guindo’s good intentions).
But perhaps the most compelling clue about the true destiny of those European funds is revealed by the announcement this week from Spanish news agency EFE.
Banco Sabadell earned between January and September this year a net profit of 265.2 million euros, 42.5% more than in the same period of 2013
Banco Sabadell is my bank and where my search began over twelve months ago. My family is stuck. We are anxious about the security of our ten percent deposit and as temporary residents we are not properly integrating with our local community. And now there is another family stuck behind us, waiting to move into the property that we should have vacated months ago.
Anyway, here’s that joke.
Q. At the end of the Spanish crisis who will own the bigger villa, the Estate Agent or the Bank Manager? A. Neither, they both end up in la prisión.
Once again I was lucky enough to attend an API Days event. This year the conference was in Barcelona. The scale of the event was noticeably increased compared to last year’s conference in Madrid. This time the venue was the Mobile World Centre in Plaza Catalunya, opposite the Bank of Spain. This in itself is perhaps an indication of the rapid evolution of the API industry.
This post is a reconstruction of my scribbles over the two days.
Another example, the Brit Awards peaked at 78k tweets per minute. The endpoints are simple.
POST https://stream.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/filter.json
POST https://stream.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/sample.json
(links needs to be within an Authenticaton context)
The sample endpoint streams one percent of the entire Firehose. You need some serious infrastructure and commercials to consume the whole thing. The Twitter Streaming API uses long polling to hold a connection open. The Twitter recommendation is that stream consumers use a single client running on their network (something like Node.js) to harvest and filter tweets. The client would then use web sockets to push notifications out to website visitors.
Another cool thing is the Amazon integration with Twitter allows users to add items to their shopping cart through #AmazonBasket.
Insightful review of the API design process undergone by Heroku. The APIs control access to the Heroku platform and prior to the release of v3 was extensively re-designed. The API is innovative through it’s use of JSON Schemas. Heroku have generously published the API guidelines that were developed as a result of the process.
More on PATCH. Use a 202 response for non-deterministic operations.
DELETE /things/1
202 # accepted for further process
{ "rel":"/things/1/AD234" }
… some time passes
GET /things/1/AD234
200 # deletion request processed
Ronnie Mitra from Layer 7 presented a tool for prototyping API designs. Using a drag-n-drop interface the tool allows an API designer to create API endpoints as “cells”. There is some automation for the process of creating dummy request / responses and also support for Hypermedia-style linking. Ronnie promised me that it will export to WADLs and other API specification formats.
Finally here’s a picture of the main man, KinLane.
