I just got back from a vacation in Hong Kong and Macau. It was my first visit to Hong Kong which tuned out to be a really enjoyable one. I’d certainly love to visit Hong Kong again. People were nice, beautiful scenery and cantonese food was delicious. Getting a free business class upgrade definitely made the trip better too.
However, what truly made our trip was the taxi driver we met on the last day. He was hardly looking at the road and kept talking to us in the back by turning around and facing us. We were all freaked out when he started drawing pictures to communicate with us while doing over 100km/h (62mph) on the highway.
It was also nice to catch up with an old University friend who is living in Hong Kong. It’s always great to see that your fellow alumni is doing well. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to visit Hong Kong again but I hope for it to be soon.
You can see more pictures here.
Toru Maesaka travel travel
I’m a little behind in announcing this but I’m going to be speaking at O’Reilly’s MySQL Conference this year. My presentation is a three hour tutorial titled, Drizzle Storage Engine Development. Practical Example with BlitzDB. Three hours is a long time but I assure you that there will be a break.
This session isn’t solely about going through Drizzle’s Storage Engine API. Various performance topics like B+Tree structure, memory handling and concurrency control will be covered. I will also go through BlitzDB’s design concept and it’s internal stuff. So, needless to say I’ll talk a lot about Tokyo Cabinet and it’s internals as well.
Hopefully those that come along will walk out of the tutorial standing far ahead of the start line. It will help you get started on reading the implementation of other storage engines in the MySQL ecosystem (MyISAM, InnoDB, PBXT, Federated and so forth). Better yet you will start writing one.
Looking forward to seeing you there :)
Toru Maesaka drizzle, event, oss, travel conference, drizzle, mysql, travel
Recently I took a late summer vacation to Oahu, Hawaii for a week with my coworkers. We rented a car (a Dodge to feel more American!) so we were able to visit various places like Swap Meet, Farmers Market, Hanauma Bay, Hale’iwa, North Shore and Mountains in the east.
I totally loved my stay there and I think I can now understand why Hawaii is by far the preferred travel destination among Japanese. Personally, snorkeling at Hanauma Bay was the highlight of the trip. Swimming there was simply astonishing. I’ll gradually add photos to my set on Flickr.
The above is a sunset shot I took at Waikiki beach on my final evening.
Toru Maesaka travel hawaii, vacation
Despite living in Tokyo for almost three years, I haven’t really had the opportunity to take a good look around Yokohama. So, being an active individual I decided to go sightseeing around Yokohama and have dinner in Chinatown. Chinatown at night is really nice to walk around but the problem is that there’s too many restaurants to choose from. Unfortunately I chose the wrong restaurant but hopefully I’ll get it right next time with prior research.
Picture of a cool looking object outside JR Yokohama station.
Next stop? Hawaii.
Toru Maesaka travel chinatown, travel, yokohama
I’m writing this entry on my way back to Tokyo from Narita. So, I was in the US all week for MySQL UC, Percona Performance Conference and the Drizzle Developer Day. It was great to meet new people and also catch up with developer friends from all over the world. These events are great excuse to bring together folks that work together online and receive the free beers that were promised on IRC. Looking back, the week just flew! I can’t believe I’m back in Japan already.
What wasn’t pleasant however was Drizzle being introduced as “MySQL Drizzle” and described as MySQL’s technology incubator at the opening keynote. The truth is, Drizzle is a community driven project that is not affiliated with any commercial organization. The project is shepherded by the community and that is the whole point of our model. Jay and Baron has expressed this on their blogs too:
Guess there is no point in getting worked up about this so I will say no more.
Drizzle developer day turned out to be a great success with over 60 developers (including new developers) turning up. We covered wide variety of topics from “how to download bzr” for all levels of contributors which I thought was nice. Why? well this means that everyone has something to do and it creates a welcoming atmosphere. As a result, it makes the event active. Here are some photos I uploaded to flickr in the last few minutes I had in the US. I’ll get more up there asap.
Compared to these stimulating events and the discussions we had, Oracle’s acquisition tale that many people seemed to like talking about at the conference breakfast/lunch/boozing was uninteresting.
Toru Maesaka drizzle, travel conference, drizzle, mysql
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 :)
Toru Maesaka event, travel foss, malaysia
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 :)
Toru Maesaka event, travel malaysia, transport, travel
