I’ve learnt some new things about Hong Kong on my recent trip. I have been quite busy working (partying) and didn’t get much time blogging. I’ll have an attempt to sum up the interesting things I’ve discovered during my stay.

y5zone – $79HKD (~14AUD) / month unlimited wifi hotspot access. This is quite a convenient for geeks like me and lets me get online in most shopping centres and food joints (KFC, Pacific Coffee, Starbucks). Other wifi access goodies are 3G, vodafone broadband to go, and fon. I also bought myself a fon router for $44HKD (~ $7.50AUD). Most landline broadband access are unlimited plans. Overall, getting online in HK is quite easy and cheap.

Carpooling Taxi – I lived in an area called Tseung Kwan O and would cost me $110 hkd to go home by taxi at night. Fortunately for the time that I party too hard, I found out there’s carpooling taxis from MongKok which only operate from midnight, and costs $25. Though you take this at your own risk as they speed very fast at tops of 110km/hr.

Fastfoods in HK are quite established. I enjoy my daily breakfast at Cafe de coral for $12hkd including a hot drink!

The MTR (subway) in HK is quite a reliable service. The unbelievable thing is that the train maintenance company is actually the same one as Sydney’s CityRail… Why does the two differ so much in terms of meeting the time table! For more info on wikipedia – United Goninan.

I had the chance to visit ITU (telecom conference) with free tickets from our friends, netbugs and Theo, (scicube) that we share office with. It was interesting to see one of the ‘biggest’ IT conference on the planet. I’ve put some photos on my flickr account.

Hong Kong is also great for hiking. I went with my friend’s friends and ran into my primary school friend there, such a small world. I haven’t seen him since year 5 but can still roughly recognise him 🙂 . more photos here…

Lastly I got to meet up with a few web enthusiasts and some other famous people including Lee Ka Shing… 😛

They announced a “scheduled” downtime with 1 day notice “due to a system-wide upgrade and rollout of a new version of our storage cluster.” Co-incidentally there’s a post on the Hadoop mailing list by their developer…

I am running Hadoop 0.7.2 in a production environment and it has stored
~170GB of data.
I am using 4 nodes with 1.3TB storage each and the master node is not being
used for storage.

Couple of days back, I noticed an error where Hadoop was not accepting new
files, I mean the upload always failed, but download was still working
great.

I read in the mailing list that this issues is resolved in 0.9.0, but I am a
bit skeptical about moving to 0.9.0 as I don’t know whether I will end up
loosing the files that are already stored. Kindly confirm this and I wil
move to 0.9.0 and also please tell me the steps or pre-cautions I should
take before moving to 0.9.0.

Seems like a lot of users are having problems uploading files on their support forum.

Hey and 4 months ago there’s apparently 30 nodes… Glad I’m out of the company.