Toru Maesaka's weblog

Last week I spoke at the MySQL seminar in Tokyo as a guest speaker with Brian Aker on "Memcached and MySQL". The seminar turned out to be very fun with just over one hundred attendees. You can checkout the photos from here.

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At the end of the seminar, I showed a brief demo of the custom storage engine project that Trond Norbye and I have been working on for the last few weeks. If you're interested, you can read more about it on his blog, or come on over to the memcached channel on freenode :)

http://blogs.sun.com/trond/entry/memcached_and_customized_storage_engines

Even though I don't consider myself a Perl hacker, the two days at YAPC::Asia were surreal. It was great fun and it was nice to hear the current trend in Perl. Specifically, I found the "~~" operator in 5.10 to be quite nifty (must test to see if there is any overhead involved in using this VS doing your own check). Thumbs up to everyone that made this fantastic event come true :D

Larry

I was fortunate enough to meet Larry Wall at the dinner party too :D

Recently I transferred my domain (http://torum.net) to a Japanese  domain management company since my old one had no attractive features to offer me. I also figured that it was a good occasion to start using the features that I haven't bothered using on Google Apps that heaps of people seem to rave about (I've only been using their mail feature).

Long story short, Google Apps is __NOT__ overrated at all. I've become used to their mail service so that was nothing new but their Page Creator feature really kicks ass. Thanks to the feature I prepared what you see on http://torum.net in like 10 minutes or so :D

A new symbolic tower is currently being built in Tokyo and is expected to be completed in 2011. The developers are now calling for votes to decide the name of the tower. This is a good thing but whats interesting are the candidates:

• Tokyo Edo Tower
• Tokyo Sky Tree
• Mirai Tower
• Yumemiyagura
• Rising East Tower
• Rising Tower

Interesting... wonder how these names survived the selection process.

Although its been a week or two since my multi-storage modification was announced in the memcached mailing list (thanks Brian), figured I should write my thoughts and not just code on this matter.

The aim simply is to achieve a network platform that can be widely used in the web industry. By meaning "network platform", I am trying to emphasize that what can be plugged to memcached doesn't necessarily need to be a storage engine.

For example, you could plug a task-queue engine that will periodically perform the tasks in the queue. Representing a task with a <key, value> pair is fairly straight forward since we can use something along the line of <task_type, related_data>. Since we are not using a hash structure but a queue for this example, you don't have to worry about overwriting the previous task(s) that you registered with what used to be the "key" ("task_type" in this example). Hmm.. come to think about it, you can probably use append to do this too.

This is the beauty of making memcached modular. The module writer has control over what to do with data that memcached receives from the client.

What I've mentioned so far are just bonuses from achieving modularity. For my personal use/hobby, I want to link memcached to a fast hash storage engine (Tokyo Cabinet is my favorite at the moment) and use it for fast persistent storage.

So yeah, though the patch that is floating around atm is only my initial attempt, I've managed to get the idea in shape since discussing this idea with Brian Aker last year in Tokyo. l seem to have several people in the community interested and like Dormando has stated, hopefully we'll have something exciting for version 1.4 :-)

As I stated on Twitter last night, I figured I should do something productive on a national holiday for once so I visted the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library. The visit was pretty good in a way that the environment had put me back in the mindset of my college days (though I was never the "study at the library" type). Looking back, I either spent most of my day in the computer lab, be at the gym, or be boozed and whatnot with my flatmates. Great times really :)

Anyway going back on topic, the library is located in Hiroo (technically South Azabu) which you can get to by taking the Hibiya Line. I decided to walk to the Nakameguro Station from Sangenjaya (about 30 minutes walk) and take the Hibiya Line there. Thats the easy part, the difficult part is actually getting to the library from the Hiroo station (you have to hike a little bit).

Once you get out of the station look around for a intersection. There should be a bank (think it was MFJ) on the corner. Theres a road sign on that corner that says "Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library" in both Japanese and English so walk towards the direction that the arrow points.

After a while you should see a park and several tempting intersections but stay on the same road (You might begin to wonder if you're off-route since you've been walking for a while but don't give up and keep walking on the same road  (FYI, I gave up and took a turn and ended up getting lost). After 10 minutes or so you should see this sign:

Once you get to this sign, you're almost there. All you need to do now is turn right and keep walking. This is what the entrance looks like:

After settling in, I wasn't really expecting a programmer to be there but the guy sitting diagonally in front of me was writing Java on some sort of IDE. It was kinda cool to have a programmer near by since I was writing some code as well for my mini project that I'm planning on releasing in the next coupe of months (OSS of course).

I think I've found a nifty programming hideout that I'll try and visit once every so often :)