Toru Maesaka

Despite almost missing my flight to Malaysia due to unfortunate reasons, I successfully managed to get on the plane and make it to Kuala Lumpur last friday. My suggestion from this experience is to not arrive at the airport 30 minutes before your flight…

It was pretty cool to arrive in Kuala Lumpur on the same day as RPK’s release day and experiencing the delicious Ipoh white coffee at the KL airport was a great start of my conference trip.

The conference was fun and it was nice meeting new people in this region. As for my sessions, the interest in memcached was astonishing and it was great to get mixi’s name out there. Hopefully “slow” media sites in South East Asia (which shall remain nameless) will start utilizing memcached

I also managed to get the word out for Drizzle in this region which was also fun with lots of questions coming my way… the funniest was being asked “hang on, is that David Axmark?” with a totally surprised look.

Here are the slides from my memcached talk though my presentation style is less words on the slides and more talking so you may not find it informative by itself. Other than that, here are my thoughts from the stay:

• People are friendly and helpful
• Hotel prices there are awesome
• Great to hear that the Malaysian Gov supports Open Source
• You can get around with just English in Kuala Lumpur
• Their curry didn’t seem hot at start but gradually kicked in
• mixi loads much faster than facebook in KL (I still love you guys)

For those that are interested, I’ve taken lots of photos and they are now up on Flickr. Thumbs up to the event organizers and thank you for taking care of me while I was there

I’m flying to Malaysia tomorrow to speak at FOSS.my and hey, until ten minutes ago I didn’t even bother finding out how to get to the hotel from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Originally I was hoping for a courtesy shuttle from the airport to the hotel since the hotel looks fairly upclass or just grab a taxi. The problem is that there is no courtesy shuttle and I don’t know how and what to instruct the taxi driver. Sure, a printout of Google Maps could help but I didn’t feel too comfortable about it.

So, after searching for ways to get to Mid Valley (where I’m staying) it turns out theres a fancy Train Station there which I can get to by first getting on the KLIA Ekspres from the International Airport to KL Sentral and transfer on to Rawang-Seremban Line, where Mid Valley is the next station.

I think I’ll give this route a try tomorrow and needless to say, I’m going to print this entry and carry it with me. Programmers love to solve problems and finding your way to the hotel in a country that you’ve never been to and can’t speak the language seems to be no exception. Totally looking forward to this mini adventure

The last couple of days have been really fun. I was at the University of Aizu visiting the ACM ICPC Asia Regional Contest representing mixi as a sponsor. It was really nice to be somewhere in Japan thats not Tokyo for once though the three hour train ride wasn’t the most exciting transport in my life. Fortunately I got a bit of programming done and had Mario Kart DS with me

Getting to mingle with Computer Science students from all over Japan at the closing party was awesome. I was never told about the speech that I had to make but I think the crowd liked my last minute “if you’re not then you should get involved with open source” speech. 

Congratulations to all the contestants and thumbs up to all the staff!