Naver’s LINE is basically the mobile communication platform in Japan at this point. Teens aren’t sharing email addresses anymore, it’s their LINE usernames. Just a while ago, we had new recruits coming to the studio for training, and they’d all write down their names, phone numbers and LINE names.

Obviously I use it too. Thing is, it’s not so obvious how to use it on a computer. There is an official client for Windows that works, but there’s none for Linux. I hate writing long messages on my phone, so the effort of having to compile a Pidgin plugin for the LINE protocol is worth the effort.

It was quite an effort too, since I purged my system a while back, and I had no dev packages, or even git installed. Needless to say, it took almost an hour to get everything up and running. Most time taken by the Apache Thrift install, that would keep failing with C++ when using the 0.9.1 tarball, no matter what I did.

Luckily the git latest worked fine, and the plugin seems to work okay too at this point.

People don’t like ads, yet they keep the online world rolling. Showing ads is pretty much the only source of income for free social networks. I don’t know how it works on facebook, since I don’t ever use that on my phone and on my computers everything is adblocked, but twitter has promoted tweets showing up every now and then. At this point I turned off adblock on twitter, because some of those ads are actually interesting.

For example I found the cloud host the blog is running on through such a promotion, and promo codes are still paying for it as well. While there is also the occasional irrelevant promo, those can be just dismissed, and judging from how they tend not to show up again, I guess the site learns what I care about. Which is good.

Ads like this, I don’t mind.

Today one of my co-workers called in a sysadmin. I noticed that for a good while now he’s been running “cure my PC” kind of “anti-malware” software on a daily basis. You know, the kind that does more harm than good.

The internet’s been loud about this new social network called Ello. At this point it’s invitation only, so I didn’t have high hopes of (ever) getting in when I signed up, but then I got invited by a tweetmate.