On all of my MSN / Live Messenger accounts I disallowed, that people not on my contact list, can send me messages. Still I keep getting IMs from strangers. How come???

No, I didn’t google for this phenomenon. Actually I’m not sure, how to express this with 3 to 5 words to be put in a Google search, so that I don’t receive mostly irrelevant hits.

Actually I mostly don’t use the Live Messenger client itself but pidgin. But of course: the client shouldn’t make a difference there. (Actually it does, as I found out later during my research. See below!!)

Anybody any idea?

Update: now that I expressed this thing here, I was able to do a Google search (with the title of this story here), and found this. Didn’t help me either, but maybe others will find it helpful.

Another update: looks like actually the client IM software needs to do the blocking, and I found the right settings in pidgin to do that. There is a privacy menu entry (Tools > Privacy), and you have to select “allow only the users on my buddy list” on every single account, if that’s what you want — and I certainly do.

In Hamburg (Germany) you can use mobil.hvv.de, in Berlin (Germany) you can use mobil.bvg.de.
For Berlin there also exists a very nice iPhone app by the name of fahrinfo, which I really make use of a lot.

I was really afraid, it would take me a long, long time to seriously get familiar with my Mac keyboard, but finding the Keyboard Viewer and having a closer look at it wiped out all these fears.
Whatever I thought would be missing on the Mac keyboard, now I find it easily.

If you read this title, how mad do you think I am? Honest!

Alright, “as you know” (so of course this article only applies to some sort of computer nerds), my router is a FRITZ!Box 7270, it’s also the base station for my (wireless) phones, and a lot more … — certainly one of my most important toys or gadgets. And I have 2 of them, one for at home, one for anywhere outside, where I can only connect to the Internet through UMTS.

So alright, back to the title of this article!

• It’s nice to record your incoming and outgoing calls in your diary, right? (my diary is emacs style)
• It’s nice to get something descriptive displayed on your phone, when somebody calls, right?
• It’s nice to extend your phone book through time as easily as possible, right?

Well, my router is running Linux as its operating system kernel, and BusyBox on top of it. On each incoming phone call it runs a shell script with a few parameters, of course the caller’s phone# (if available) and also the callee’s phone#. (I do have more than one phone#, and why not also record the called phone#, just for the record?) It tries to associate a name with the caller’s phone#, if there is a matching entry in the phone book.

Quite a while ago I started implementing such a shell script, and obviously (as it is almost an ordinary (bash) shell script), I can develop and test it on any of my computers, that can run shell scripts, like any of my openSuSE computers, any WinXP computer running cygwin, a Mac running OS X, … . Yes, I cannot create a full blown shell script, I will not pipe a lot through one-liner perl or ruby scripts on my router, but still: it’s a handy and useful, not so tiny shell script.

So far it appears to me, as if no such executable gets called on the router for outgoing calls, but I can still mimic this behaviour by calling that script on my main development box.

Having said this, my script (fritz_box_calllog.sh) fulfills all the requirements, that I listed above in that bullet list.
For incoming calls without caller id and/or without a matching entry in the phone book it creates a piece of XML text, that I can paste into my FRITZ!Box XML phone book, and where I can fill in a phone# and a name or any descriptive text, so next time, I want to dial that phone# myself, I can select it from the phone book. And maybe another time that person will call you with caller id, and then you will be able to greet that person with her/his name. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The implementation of this software also got inspired by Matthias Hühne’s “Dial!Fritz“, that I run on my iPhone. But of course his software is far completer and nicer, and it’s well integrated.