Restaurant: Denny's

Time for another restaurant review. As you might have guessed, Denny's is yet another franchise of family restaurants. This one is a bit further from the station. I've actually discovered and ate here yesterday during my Ingress tour, but since it didn't fit the theme of the post yesterday, I saved it for today. So without further ado, let's begin.

As this shop is full of people and I've heard that some Japanese don't like being photographed, I couldn't get a full view of the shop. But anyway, here's the empty seat next to mine.

For the food, I've ordered omelet, but it's not just any omelet, but omelet over fried rice with cheese!

And that's it for today's post. Actually, I went to Tokyo again today, but there's not really anything worth making a post about.

Ingress in Tsukuba

After having gone to the Tokyo Ingress Meetup last week, I'm fired up again! Today, I did my duty as a Resistance and went to capture all the uncaptured (unfortunately, there's not a lot of players around) portal around Tsukuba.

For planning, the Ingress Intel map is essential. However, the Intel map would only show low level portals when zoomed in, so it's not very useful for finding the many uncaptured portals around Tsukuba. Fortunately, there's a workaround. By using the 'zoom out' function of your web browser while zoomed in on the map, you can get an overview of all the uncaptured portals in a large area.

After locating each portal (or group of portals), I then plot it on Google Maps for easy access on the go.

So let me introduce the various portals in Tsukuba. A very convenient cluster of portals is located at Chuo Park. Twelve easily accessible portals are located in this very tight space (such that if you use a bicycle, you can make around and still have to wait for the 5 minutes cool down period). The one uncaptured portal is located in the Tsukuba Expo Center which is very difficult to access.

The Tsukuba University, like any other large universities, also has a lot of portals. However, it is more spread out that the portals at the Chuo Park.

Other portals around the area are often located around religious places such as shrines or graveyards.

One other interesting portal is a nice painting inside a tunnel near Tsukuba University. If it weren't for Ingress, I wouldn't have found it!

I've also found an alumni of Tsukuba University in the COMM (in-game chat), unfortunately, we missed each other in the real world. I've also managed to level up to level 6, only 2 more levels to go! Below is the Intel map of Tsukuba after all portals are captured. (The green one below is inside JAXA which was closed by the time I got back, so, unfortunately, I couldn't attack it.)

Restaurant: Gusto

I guess I'm running out of things to write home about, so I'm going to write another restaurant review! Today, I went to "Gusto", another family restaurant near the Tsukuba station.

I went in and the cashier asked me if I wanted the smoking or non-smoking section in Japanese, which I couldn't understand. So I've asked him if he could speak English or not and... surprise! He could speak English quite fluently!

Unfortunately, I couldn't say the same for the waiter who took my order. So instead, I've asked him to speak simple Japanese slowly and managed to get by. My order today was "Texas BBQ Pork".

One interesting thing unrelated to the restaurant is that in Thailand, pork and chicken are basic food while fish are more expensive. I've heard that people eat a lot of fish here, but so far, apart from sushi, I could only find fish in basic menus while more advanced menus often consists of pork and chicken.

Anyway, before I left the restaurant, the English-speaking cashier remembered me and gave me the price and saying something along the line of "thank you for coming" in English.

Submitting Patches to CloudStack

(Warning: Another technical post. Blame the rain.)

Today, the patch I've been working on is finally out there in the public. The patch is to add PCI-Passthrough support to CloudStack so that various PCI devices can be directly assigned to guests. Network cards can be assigned to guests for performance reason or other devices which has no emulation support, such as SSL accelerator cards, can be added so that guests can use them. Thanks to my mentor and the CloudStack community, the patch has gone through several iterations, improving each time.

After cleaning up the patch and rebasing it onto the latest 'master' development branch. The patch has been submitted to Apache's Review Board. After the patch is submitted on the website, it is emailed out to the mailing list for other developers to review. Even though I have code review experience with Gerrit from CyanogenMod before, it'd be interesting to see how things would turn out for a larger project maintained by a well-known community such as Apache. From Apache's and Linux's mailing lists, I can already see that the internal operations are quite different.

For those interested, you can see the patch submitted for review here: https://reviews.apache.org/r/12098/

The FDB Table

(Warning: highly technical post!)

Working on my project at AIST, I've encountered many problems related to networking and the kernel. One of them is that, when SR-IOV is enabled, bridged networking no longer works. Per my mentor's suggestion, I've posted a bug report onto the Linux kernel's netdev mailing list and I've got many useful replies.

One of them suggested that I add the guest's MAC address to the device's FDB table.

As Greg indicdated, this (== stetting a bridge over a PF or VF in
SRIOV moded) can actually work, if you make sure to use FDB operations
to add the VM unicast MAC to the uplink (the mellanox device) tables,
this is trivial (google for ndo_fdb_add ...) and should work, let us
know if it doesn't.

I had no idea what the FDB table was, but a bit of Googling showed me that the "bridge" utility from the "iproute2" set supports modification of the FDB table. So I've tried sudo bridge fdb add [target mac address] dev [device] on the host and sure enough, it worked!

But what exactly is the FDB table and what is it used for? The only meaningful resource I could find was on the blog "Michael McNamara". According to that post, the FDB table is the Layer 2 version of the ARP table, allowing a switch to know which port to forward a packet to. My guess would be that the FDB tables allows the SR-IOV device to know which PF or VF to forward the packet to.

Restaurant: Sawadee

After a busy weekend has passed by, today is another day of work and another post of restaurant review. This evening, I went to a Thai restaurant. "Why?" some of you might ask, "Why are you eating somethingw you can eat for much cheaper in your own country?". The answer is simple: I want to see what Thai food in another country is like.

I enter the shop and the staff started greeting "Irasshaimase" until she saw me did a Wai (Thai greeting). Great! This shop is ran by a Thai so it should have pretty good Thai food. (Which is also disappointing since I won't have any strange experience to tell.) I was then served water in a... very Thai way. The container is called a "khan" which is the traditional Thai container for water, but no one uses it for drinking nowadays.

The shop attendant said that there used to be a lot of Thai kids studying at Tsukuba University, but not so many now. Apart from selling Thai food, this shop also sell Thai spices and Thai sauces from Thailand.

After looking at the menu, I've settled for the staple Thai food — Kao Pad Kaprao with Fried Egg (ข้าวผัดกะเพราไข่ดาว). I was also told that I can order any Thai food (อาหารตามสั่ง) and they'll make it if they have the ingredients.

It tastes pretty good and is authentic Thai food. However, the fried egg tasted a little bit strange, maybe due to Japanese eggs. Interestingly, Japanese chicken egg is white instead of light brown.

So now I know that if I miss Thai food, I have somewhere to go. The price is a little bit hefty though at ¥1,100 for this dish. Next time, let's continue exploring Japanese cuisines!

Tokyo Ingress Cross-Faction Meetup

As I've mentioned earlier, the other thing I did today was attending Tokyo's first Ingress Cross-Faction Meetup. For those who do not know, Ingress is an online augmented reality game by Google where you have to go to different places to capture portals and defend them. (You have to physically be where the portal is.) The whole world is divided into 2 teams — resistance (blue) and enlightened (green) to compete with each other. I am a resistance.

The meeting place for the meetup is the NS Building in Shinjuku. To get to Shinjuku from Asakusa, I have to take the underground Toei subway, and this is where my bad luck (or my ignorance) came in. Transferring between the Asakusa line and the Shinjuku line (both operated by Toei) requires walking between 2 stations, so I assumed that I needed to buy 2 tickets to get there. But later, I found out that I can buy a ticket which will be valid until I get to Shinjuku from the originating station, which is also a lot cheaper from buying 2 separate tickets! On a different note, I've also missed the rapid train because I was too busy checking if the train was going in the right direction or not causing me to have to take the local train instead.

So after a lot of hurdle with the trains, I've finally arrived at the meeting place. Quite a lot of Ingress players were there (around half of them were at the maximum level!). One thing most people have in common is a battery pack to connect their phone with!

This is the NS building. The group in the middle is the early arrivers.

I was also given some stickers!

The plan is to have a battle between blue and green. To make this fair, level 8 (maximum) Ingress agents have worked together to reset all the portal in the area to neutral.

After the fight has started, people separated into small groups to capture, defend and attack as many portals as possible. Talking with other players in the group sharing experiences was very fun as well. In the end, the enlightened (green) has created a huge field a few minutes before the battle ended and won the battle.

After the match has ended, level 8 agents have reseted the portals again to prepare for "drawing" an image by using links between the portal.

The plan is to draw an Android

Everyone working together to create the required links

Unfortunately, during the drawing, it has started raining hard and so the drawing was canceled. On the upside, I've found out about a great app that shows nearly real time rain-status in supported areas overlaid on a map.

X-Band Radar (thanks to growegg-san for the screenshot)

It was then time for me to leave (other people are going to a drinking party — I don't drink and I don't want to end up getting back too late). And this is my second bad luck about the trains today. I took the train from Shinjuku station to Akihabara station in order to board the Tsukuba express. Since I came to Tokyo before and know about the Yamanote loop, I got on it. It was only then that I realize that Shinjuku and Akihabara are on the exact opposite side of the loop (meaning that the train has to travel half the circumference to get there) and the Chuo Line which cuts through the loop from Shinjuku to Akihabara is a much better method of getting there.

Shinjuku is a very busy station

It's nearly half past midnight, so I'll stop here for today. Tomorrow is Monday and thus work continues...

Asakusa Tour

As I've mentioned yesterday, today, my mentor will give me, my senior, and 2 Taiwanese researchers (Ricky & Jung) to tour Tokyo. We've started off at Asakusa since it's the on the Tsukuba Express line and thus we can go there without connecting with other trains.

Sensoji Temple at Asakusa

We also have one extra member today! Takano-san had brought his cute son, Kaoru-kun, with him.

This is Kaoru-kun

Before we've reached the temple, there were a lot of shops there selling various goods and souvenirs. One of my friends told me to try out the melon pan here, but I couldn't find the shop. Instead, we've all tried some green tea ice cream here, which is made from tea powder from Hoshino village in Fukuoka.

Green Tea Ice Cream - ¥400

Next, we did what we all love to do at temples... finding out our fortunes (called "mikuji" in Japanese). Ricky and Jung got bad luck. My senior, Best, got worst luck. However, I may have the worst luck of all since I didn't have ¥100 with me then to pay for the fortune. I'll tell you later about my very bad luck.

If you've picked up bad luck, you tie it up here and don't take it with you.

Next, we went up to see the temple while Kaoru-kun shows us his Ultraman cards.

After we've managed to pull Kaoru-kun away from toy stores, we ate lunch at this sushi restaurant...

...or so we had planned. Unfortunately, it was closed so we had sukiyaki instead. This was a treat from Takano-san, ありがとうございます!

The restaurant staff teaching us how to eat Sukiyaki

After that, all the other people went to the Tokyo Skytree, but I wanted to attend Tokyo's first cross-faction Ingress meetup, so I've left the group. I'll write about that in another post soon.

AEON Mall Tsuchiura

Having already explored many parts of Tsukuba, I've decided that today, I will ride the bicycle to the town next to Tsukuba — Tsuchiura. When people ask me if I know how to get to somewhere, I often answer, "I don't, but Google knows". This time, I've asked Google for my directions as well.

My route planned by Google Maps

The distance is approximately 6 kilometers and it's actually quite an enjoyable ride, being able to see the view of Japan's country side. Many of the road consists of uphill and downhill, so after overcoming the uphill part, one can relax while the bicycle goes downhill!

After riding for 30 minutes, I've finally arrived at my destination.

But before I talk about AEON Mall, let's look at this interestingly steep ramp.

This goes all the way to the top floor where there is an additional parking lot. Unlike Thai malls, this mall does not have parking lots on every floor.

The parking lot on the top floor

That's more than enough about parking (especially for a person who doesn't even have a car), so let's move on to the mall itself. AEON Mall Tsuchiura is a relatively large mall and is quite similar to Central Plaza in Thailand. In Tsukuba, malls near the station are quite small with limited space. However, that is compensated with the amount of quality shops available outside of shopping malls.

Inside AEON Mall Tsuchiura

Interestingly, here, the disabled toilet is also labelled as a "family" toilet.

That's enough for today. Tomorrow, Takano-san, my mentor from AIST will take me, my senior and two other researchers from Taiwan to tour Tokyo. In the afternoon, I'll also join Tokyo's first cross-faction Ingress meetup. It'll be a very interesting day!