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
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 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
