One of the tenets in designing large multiuser systems like Yahoo! Messenger is that one user should not be able to overly disrupt another, or force another to take some action. Yahoo! Messenger generally does a good job with this, but has long had one failing that really bothers me.

For whatever reason, I seem to be a popular target for random people wanting to add me to their “friends list.” I wake up in the morning to find a Yahoo! Messenger dialog on my screen that looks like this:

99% of the time, I have no idea who the person is, and checking their profile has always lead to no extra information. Is this a long-lost friend getting in touch? A kook pestering hundreds of people a day? A crook trying to lure me to a phishing site? A spammer checking for “live” IDs? I generally have no idea, but considering that the number of evil people in the world exceeds the number of my long lost friends, chances are it's someone up to no good.

What I want to do is to just ignore the request, a technical equivalent of a “no comment.” If it's indeed someone who wants to contact me specifically (rather than someone trolling for victims), they'll try again, or send me a note introducing themselves.

However, Yahoo! Messenger has been designed such that a random person can force me into making a decision. There's no “ignore” or “close” or “cancel” button on that dialog.

I don't want to explicitly allow them because of the high probability it's someone being a pest, at best, or at worst, evil. I know that the default is that they can view me (and as such, doing nothing is the technical equivalent of allowing them), but it just feels wrong that I have no choice but to explicitly allow them.

Of course, I could go ahead and explicitly bar them from seeing me and from contacting me, but I don't want to do that due to the possibility that they are a long-lost friend, or, at least, someone clueful wishing a real discourse.

I don't know why Yahoo! has chosen to do it this way, but I wish they'd fix it. This aside, I really enjoy Yahoo! Messenger. It's an exceptional value for what I pay (nothing), so I have no real right to complain, but it's technically so wrong that the engineer in me has to speak up.

By the way, the bit of desktop background seen behind the dilaog above is my Colors of Kyoto background.

I finally solved a problem I was having with Japanese input into emacs, and thought I'd report it for the benefit of others that might be searching for a solution.

A month or so ago, emacs stopped accepting kanji in Japanese input, and stopped displaying kanji in files. Hiragana and katakana continued to input/display fine, but kanji no longer worked at all.

I spent a month testing all kinds of things (including some printf-debugging of the emacs source code!), but to make a long story short, it seems that all I needed to do was to add

   (require 'un-define)

to my .emacs file.

I'm not sure whether I previously had that line in my .emacs file and somehow accidentally deleted it, or whether an update to Debian's mule-ucs package (which is required for kanji to work in emacs) stopped doing that require for me. In either case, I've been bummed for the last month or two, and am now happy. やっと出来ました。

The top of my .emacs file now looks like this:

   (require 'un-define)
   (prefer-coding-system       'utf-8)
   (set-default-coding-systems 'utf-8)
   (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
   (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)

At the convenince store today, I noticed this way to get liquored up with a candy bar. The lower-corner says that it contains 1% alcohol, and that those driving a car should be careful. (No comments are directed toward those operating heavy machinery, though.)

In the interest of being thorough for this post, I purchased the little package for 150 yen and tried them. (I'll stop at nothing to be complete and accurate for my readers, you know.) They tasted like slighly crunchy, slighly orange-ish cherry cordials, but with only the most mild taste of brandy/alcohol.

Hopefully, the can of Yebisu “The Hop” beer I bought at the same time will taste better.

For completeness, here's the back of the box:

map & image data — nearby photos
Hmmmm, do you think that might be the exit?

Visiting the Kyoto Botanical Gardens in January with Anthony and Shimada-san, we noticed this somewhat funny sign over the entrance gate. The Japanese on it says “Entrance.” The English translation of that Japanese is as standard as can be, so one wonders what events transpired to make them choose the English shown.

The botanical gardens was where Anthony had his first preschool field trip (almost a year ago now), and are where I photographed the funky flowers I posted a few months ago.

On the trip in January, we saw something (we presumed a plant of some sort) wrapped with layer upon layer of straw mats.

map & image data — nearby photos
Not a “Cat in the Hat” Display

This wrapping was done, I'm sure, to protect whatever is inside from snow damage, and also perhaps to keep it warm, and to protect it from bugs (who prefer to nest in the straw rather than the plant itself).

In any case, it looked sort of freaky.

I had only my small point-n-shoot, and Shimada-san didn't even have his camera with him. That's too bad, because he's pretty good with a camera (see: here and here).