I did indeed find some katsu curry, even though it was slightly challenging. Here's some of my highlights of YAPC::Asia.
The first day continued with matz's Ruby on Perls which went into great detail about handling character sets and how the way Ruby does it is different from Perl's (and Parrot's). Then there was an interesting talk on how mixi.jp has scaled their service (this went well with a talk later on on scaling Hatena::Bookmark). Both were interesting and practical, but running mysql slaves on tmpfs does seem a little silly, though.
Jesse did a great talk on Jifty - no hype, just the cool features and nice syntax. A framework to follow, I think. Many slides in the conference used the Takahashi method and presentation I most enjoyed was by Takahashi himself: Babel 17 computer language in which he explains that Ruby is a dangerous language because its syntax is a weapon that changes your brain. Makes sense to me!
Day 2 was also excellent, and harder to summarise. I particularly enjoyed miyagawa fighting with blog spam and Kenichi's history of Debug Screens. And the lightning talks! All were excellent.
Many thanks to the organisers for an excellent conference. Slides, audio and photos are available.
