Posts Tagged ‘japan’

Speaking in June 2017

I will be at several events in June 2017:

  • db tech showcase 2017 – 16-17 June 2017 – Tokyo, Japan. I’m giving a talk about best practices around MySQL High Availability.
  • O’Reilly Velocity 2017 – 19-22 June 2017 – San Jose, California, USA. I’m giving a tutorial about best practices around MySQL High Availability. Use code CC20 for a 20% discount.

I look forward to meeting with you at either of these events, to discuss all things MySQL (High Availability, security, cloud, etc.), and how Percona can help you.

As I write this, I’m in Budva, Montenegro, for the Percona engineering meeting.

Speaking in December 2016

I neglected to mention my November appearances but I’ll just write trip reports for all this. December appearances are:

  • ACMUG MySQL Special Event – Beijing, China – 10 December 2016 – come learn about Percona Server, MyRocks and lots more!
  • A bit of a Japan tour, we will be in Osaka on the 17th, Sapporo on the 19th, and Tokyo on the 21st. A bit of talk of the various proxies as well as the various servers that exist in the MySQL ecosystem.

Looking forward to discussing MySQL and its ecosystem this December!

Speaking in July 2016

  • Texas LinuxFest – July 8-9 2016 – Austin, Texas – I’ve never spoken at this event before but have heard great things about it. I’ve got a morning talk about what’s in MariaDB Server 10.1, and what’s coming in 10.2.
  • db tech showcase – July 13-15 2016 – Tokyo, Japan – I’ve regularly spoken at this event and its a case of a 100% pure database conference, with a very captive audience. I’ll be talking about the lessons one can learn from other people’s database failures (this is the kind of talk that keeps on changing and getting better as the software improves).
  • The MariaDB Tokyo Meetup – July 21 2016 – Tokyo, Japan – Not the traditional meetup timing, since its 1.30pm-7pm, there will be many talks and its organised by the folk behind the SPIDER storage engine. It should be fun to see many people and food is being provided too. In Japanese: MariaDB コミュニティイベント in Tokyo, MariaDB Community Event in TOKYO.

Upcoming MariaDB/MySQL events: Tokyo, Buenos Aires

To bring to attention those who will be in Tokyo, Japan or Buenos Aires, Argentina:

  1. MariaDB/MySQL Community Event – 9 October 2013 – Tokyo, Japan. Come see Michael Carney, Ivan Zoratti, Kentoku Shiba (creator of the SPIDER storage engine) and Colin Charles at this event. It is from 12.30pm – 8pm, and includes evening cocktails to some extent. It should be free to attend.
  2. MySQL NoSQL Cloud – 15-16 October 2013 – Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is the second such conference happening in Buenos Aires, and this time there are plenty of speakers who didn’t make it around the first time. Cost is nominal.

Furoshiki

I’ve never been much of a Japanophile, but the couple minutes or so that I saw Preetam demonstrate the use of the Furoshiki, I was hooked.

Preetam did a lightning talk demo at BarcampBKK3, where he demoed how you could hold books in it. Later, Satoko (@31o5) mentioned that you could also hold bottles of wine, and more. Naturally, I was intrigued, so I hopped on and found a bunch of cool things you can do with it.

For one, the Ministry of Environment in Japan has published a guide on how to make use of it. All the various different knots, and methods, for you to carry items of varying sizes, and volumes. Very useful. I also found it most interesting to note that there are stores that specialise in this – take a look at this post from Kyoto.

Want to buy one? All hail Furoshiki.com. They seem to be about USD$12-$70, not including shipping and handling, depending on the styles available.

Further links: a bit of history, how to gift wrap (video), usage etiquette, history, folding guides and more (very useful resource), a video of a store in Kyoto, and how to use it to carry your bento boxes.

I have to admit, that Japanese culture and custom is starting to interest me these days. Seems like there’s a lot to learn, as there are things I’d consider innovative, that is part of daily Japanese life. I wonder if a book like Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan will help?

(photo by Preetam Rai)

Tab roundup for December 2008

Om Malik’s blog design, and themes as a business
I stumbled upon Om.Is.Me…, Om Malik’s private blog, and was taken away by the design. For one, its hosted at wordpress.com (something I’m thinking I might do at some stage, if it was less rigid). But more importantly, what I noticed was the design – I was really taken away by the blog theme. Its designed by GNV & Partners, and it looks snazzy.

Is there big business in WordPress themes? If their website was in English, I’d be a little more interested… Largely because I have to theme at least two WordPress sites in the near future, and I’m not looking forward to mastering CSS, etc.

What do custom WordPress themes go for? How many folk pay for themes?

Hackerspaces
Found this via Twitter (thanks @achitnis), and it Hackerspaces reminded me a lot of coworking. When in Melbourne, I always pined of a co-working space (I believe, Joe’s Garage came close to it – upstairs, anyway). Now that I’m in Kuala Lumpur a lot more, I am wondering if a warehouse somewhere, might make sense…

Cybercafes in Japan, offering physical addresses to the homeless
Read Cyber cafe offers address to homeless. I didn’t know that cybercafe’s in Tokyo gave away a free email address (maybe they don’t, but they might give you access to one), but I was impressed that comic books and unlimited beverages were a norm. Kudos to Cyber @ Cafe offering long-term lodging and an official registered address (important, when PO BOXes aren’t acceptable or you’re homeless).

Takemitsu Karitachi, used to sleep on park benches, but he doesn’t have to anymore:

This simple service is vital for the 50 semi-permanent residents of the cafe, many of whom have taken refuge here after being laid off abruptly during the current recession.

Takemitsu Karitachi, a contract worker at a nearby factory, is one of the many people who have been sleeping at the cafe every night for the past two months since he lost his office job and his apartment.

Karitachi, who used to roam the streets and hopped between various Internet cafes for months, says he is now relieved to have found a more permanent home — even if it’s a cubicle just slightly bigger than the back seat of a car.

BMW India sales records
It stunned me when I found out that in 2007, BMW only sold 1,338 cars, and in 2008, plans to sell 2,800 units. The sales ratio between the BMW 5 and 3 series is 55:45 (so the one’s buying a BMW, actually have a lot more disposable income than one would think).

I don’t know the cost of a BMW in India, but if its prohibitively expensive as it is in Malaysia (what is it, up to 300% excise duty?), I’m surprised the numbers are a lot lower. Seeing a BMW (or a Mercedes) on the road in Malaysia is very common – yuppies are driving 3-series cars (BMW 320), straight into their first management job, willing to fork out RM220,000+, and paying it off over seven or nine years.

Lucky for me, I don’t think of a car as a status symbol (and think that people that do, are rather daft).

After Credentials
Read Paul Graham’s After Credentials. It is probably his best essay in recent time, and its very pertinent to those living in Asia.

Not only in South Korea, but in most parts of Asia, education is touted as being very important. Quotes like “In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person’s future,” don’t surprise me. Paul thinks its old fashioned – I tend to agree. Today’s universities are not more than cram universities.

The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children’s qualities.

Let’s think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn’t need them.

This doesn’t work in small companies. Even if your colleagues were impressed by your credentials, they’d soon be parted from you if your performance didn’t match, because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed.

In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about. People hiring for a startup don’t care whether you’ve even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization.

The whole article is interesting. There is a good analysis of the big company versus small company paradigm, as well as the fact that people want instant (and not deferred) rewards.

I predict that within Asia, in the next two decades, hiring based on your after credentials (first bachelors, then masters, possibly doctorate eventually), are going to be a thing of the past.

Lawyers use Facebook to serve notices
Via The Age:

Canberra lawyers have won the right to serve legally binding court documents by posting them on defendants’ Facebook sites.

In a ruling that could make legal and internet history, a Supreme Court judge ruled last week lawyers could use the social networking site to serve court notices.

Email and even mobile phone text messages have been used before to serve court notices, but the Canberra lawyers who secured the ruling are claiming service by Facebook as a world first.

“The Facebook profiles showed the defendants’ dates of birth, email addresses and friend lists and the co-defendants were friends with one another,” a spokesman for the firm said.

On perfumes, and smell
This is interesting, The scent of a man. Very captivating, here are a few select quotes:

They already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odour it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.

They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrance showed an increase in self-confidence. … What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men’s movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was making the difference.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway was: “The sexes themselves smell different, too, and women can glean information about a man’s social status from his smell alone.””

Women can smell success?


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