Traditionally, New Year’s in Bali is celebrated with a fireworks display near Kuta Beach. And lots of beer.

Bintang Beer comes in 2 bottle sizes, the 330 mL “Pint” shown above, and the 620 mL “Bremer” typically carried in each hand by Australian tourists – “Just in case, mate.” The brewer is advised by Heineken.

Bintang means “star” in Bahasa Indonesia.

Angry Birds is a cultural phenomenon in Southeast Asia, with t-shirts, backpacks and plush toys featured at many stores.

wikipedia: Pint

slashdot.org: Comment on Chinese Internet Routing

“At 9:46 PM Pacific Standard Time on March 10, an earthquake with preliminary magnitude 8.9 occurred near the east coast of Honshu, Japan . (Refer to the United States Geological Survey for official earthquake parameters.)”

“This earthquake has generated a tsunami which could cause damage to coastal regions in a warning or advisory. The waves are expected to first reach Shemya, Alaska at 12:13 AM AKST on March 11.”

Measurements or reports of tsunami activity:

 Location                   Lat.   Lon.    Time        Amplitude
 ------------------------  -----  ------  -------     -----------
 Ofunato  Japan            39.0N  141.8E  0605UTC   10.8FT/03.29M
 Hanasaki  Japan           43.3N  145.6E  0643UTC   09.3FT/02.82M

Note that there have been over 30 5.0 to 7.1 aftershocks, as well as a 6.5 near Bali the night before.

Crescent City, California, was hammered by at least three tsunami waves, including one reaching a record 8.1 feet.

“Each was a little higher than the last,” said spokesman Joey Young of Del Norte County’s emergency operations center.

The tsunami brought waves of about 6 feet to a harbor in Maui, authorities said, but other areas reported lower levels, including Honolulu at 2.2 feet and Hilo at 4.3.

wsj.com: Waves Hit Hawaii, California; One Man Swept to Sea

We don’t hear much about Indonesia in the USA aside from natural disasters, but Bali (and nearby Solo) have a centuries-old Zen-like tradition of master craftsmanship in batik, sculpture, gamelan, dance and textiles.

If you’ve been to Bali before, you may not realize that the 6′ wood Saraswati sculptures take 6 months to carve, and the larger ones about 12 months.

Hours

Closed Mondays
Tuesday through Sunday: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm.
Thursdays: 10:00 am – 9:00 pm

And afterward, head over to the Borubudur Restaurant on Post Street.

The left inboard engine exploded and rained debris over Batam, Indonesia at 7,000′, including the suspect turbine disc, which still hasn’t been found. There were 466 passengers and crew on board.

Looks like a combination gearbox design/maintenance lubrication/inspection issue known since 2007 … but not relayed by Rolls Royce to Qantas.

Initially a Qantas pilot sitting in the back of the plane reported seeing streaming fluids outside the plane, visible in the entertainment camera view. It took 5 pilots to troubleshoot and land the plane.

Although the seriousness of the incident was initially downplayed, not only was the engine shroud shredded, substantial damage occurred to the left wing, including “shrapnel puncture to the wing, loss of hydraulic functions to the control surfaces and landing-gear, and loss of fuel or other fluid from the aircraft while airborne.” Additionally, a wing spar was blown apart, engine control wires cut, droop nose motor damaged, and the “green” hydraulic system disabled.

Because the left outboard engine could not be shutdown after landing, the cockpit voice recorder continued and erased over the time of the incident. Eventually the engine was smothered with foam and it stopped.

We’ll see if the plane is reparable or not. The left wing and engines would need to be replaced, and the airplane retested and certified again.

As alarming as the engine failure was, of as much concern were the 2 delays in releasing the passengers:

1. the Qantas pilots circled over Batam for 2 hours to burn off fuel and evaluate the airplane. A fire in the air will cause loss of control in under 5 minutes, so a more expeditious descent should have been taken. “It took two hours for the pilots to circle and burn fuel, but also to handle the error messages the computer says you need to sort out before landing.”
2. because fuel was leaking and the outboard engine could not be shutdown, the passengers were kept on the plane for an hour after landing. There’s no excuse for that, since an evacuation would take several minutes, but a fire would destroy the aircraft in less than a minute on the ground, so passengers should have started disembarking immediately.

finance.yahoo.com: Qantas keeps superjumbos grounded after accident
flightglobal.com: Cockpit recorder overwritten in Qantas A380 engine incident
avweb.com: Qantas A380s Still Grounded
wsj.com: Rolls-Royce Turns to Airbus to Replace Engines
forbesadvocate.com.au: Qantas keeps its head above water despite Titanic near-miss
The Anatomy of the Airbus A380 QF32 near disaster
wsj.com: Report Details Qantas Pilots’ Response
Qantas overloaded aircraft
Repairs to damaged Qantas A380 set to begin in Singapore – $150 million
New Cracks Found in Airbus Wings

The owner is from Jakarta and features Betawi-style cooking.

I ordered the gulai kambing (curried goat) with white rice. It was hot and delicious, with the bill coming to $9 for 1 person.

The decor includes wayang kulit (traditional shadow puppets), Indonesian pictures, with gamelan background music or Indonesian-language singers.

The staff speak Bahasa Indonesia to each other, but you can order in English.

I chatted with 4 Indonesian students (studying business, hospitality and architecture nearby) who said that there were about 4 Indonesian restaurants in the Bay Area, including 2 on Post Street in SF, but Jayakarta was their favorite.

A party of 10 Indonesian people arrived as I left, so the food must be authentic.

There is a selection of local Indonesian monthly papers at the door, including Kabari and Indonesian Media, and they sell $5 international phone cards for calls to Jakarta.

Jayakarta Indonesian and Singaporean Restaurant
2026 University Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704-1006
(510) 841-0884

Open 11 am to 10 pm every day.

Extensive yelp discussions about Jayakarta Restaurant

Anthony has extensive experience in game localization, going back to Sierra On-Line’s Leisure Suit Larry franchise (challenging to localize because the user input was freeform text) and Valve Corporation’s Half-Life (requiring about 6 months to localize.)

Also many members of the game development community were there, including an Ubisoft localization project manager and SO-L’s fourth staff programmer.

Localization staff typically have to play the game for a week to understand how it works and what work needs to be done.

There are various localization levels for games:

1. Just localize the box art
2. Add subtitles
3. Localize everything

For networked games, some additional issues are:

• localize just the client (user) program, or also the server too?
• what if player messages to each other are in different languages?

Cheats are very helpful to expedite testing when testing levels, features, etc.
Testing on the lowest supported resolution is the fastest way to find font and string problems.

When testing PC games, particular graphics cards may be needed. Localizing console games is more involved though, requiring a developer console and software development licenses, possibly costing thousands of dollars per console.

Besides the usual challenges in localizing products, games have 2 additional steps:

1. for console games, manufacturer (Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft) acceptance testing is required. 10 to 15 days need to be scheduled for the initial test run, followed by 5-10 days per round of additional testing for rejected games. Additional test runs are billed by the mfg.
2. government ratings boards, like ESRB in USA.

Also, holiday deadlines for games are literally that: missing a holiday means that your audience has already spent their discretionary budget, so the release is fruitless.

Thanks to Google for hosting the meeting.

He was on the Summize team that Twitter bought, so originally worked on search, then ended up being the i18n guy.

Twitter had a lot of things stacked against it i18n-wise:

- unilingual source tree
- no budget to do any real engineering initially
- Japanese tree translated by outside volunteer partner, Digital Garage
- primitive Unicode support in MySQL and Ruby
- now a legacy system full of data, hard to add metadata like lang/locale at this point.

Japanese cell phone support was challenging because:

- Shift_JIS, not Unicode
- each of 3 carriers uses a different image format and different emoji codepoints, some overlapping
- lack of l10n resources in house for Japanese-flavor design, including being cute, dense and also having an ad to demonstrate business seriousness
- Japan uses cellular emails, not SMS like other places
- mobile browsers don’t support cookies, so URL sessions needed unlike the regular Ruby web app
- hard to tokenize short messages in Japanese.
- need QR (Quick Response) code support (2D barcode)

QR Code

Crowdsourced translations using Google Groups, interns and app integrated with Twitter site. Now up to 3,700 strings and 2,600 translators. Hard to translate informal terms like tweet and follower though.

There was very good turnout, with 60 attendees live and 6 online.

Thanks to Adobe for hosting the venue. (Though I don’t understand why there is a 3-year NDA for attending a public meeting.)

techcrunch.com: Twitter Has Basically Doubled In Staff In The Past 6 Months (June, 2010)
Official Twitter Blog

In the past, Bali was regarded as an inexpensive place for young Australians and others to vacation.

For the first time however, I would have to say that is becoming a memory of the past.

There are the occasional local hotels still available for under $25/nite, but none of the newer hotels, which are aiming for $100 to $200/nite.

If you can afford it, the new Holiday Inn Baruna Bali in Tuban at $120 to $200/nite is awesome – opening right onto Tuban/Wanasegara Beach. The style is more modern than Balinese, but you can visit the Risata Hotel Bali down the street and see lush Balinese gardens and stonework.

Taxis have greatly increased in price recently. The fare used to be an afterthought, typically less than $1 within a city.

There are 2 classes of taxis now:

1. Bluebird – great service and fair prices – old (cheaper) argo meter settings, worth calling in
2. other companies – average service and high prices – new (higher) argo setttings, or even 40 ribu minimum pickup fare from Galeria Mall. Indonesian visitors are scared of these prices.

To save money, use an ojek (motorcycle taxi), or try carpooling and scheduling multiple stops on the same trip.

Or pick a hotel within easy walking distance of sites that’s also near a major travel artery. In Kuta, that would be at the exit of Jl. Legian near Jl. Pantai Kuta (easy walk to the Legian nightclub scene, memorial and Kuta Beach as well as near taxis to Tuban or Denpasar.) In Tuban, that would be on Jl. Wana segara or Jl. Kartika Pl. (easy walk to Tuban Beach or Discovery Mall/Mal Centro.)

I talked to some merchants in Tuban, and asking rents for storefronts have doubled in the past 12 months.

All of the computer stores selling PCs in Kuta, Tuban and Sanur have closed, likely due to high rents, low margins and lack of capital. There are a few Mac stores, such as PC Max and one in Carrefour. Otherwise, you must go to the large Rimo Computer Mall in Denpasar. Rimo is pretty good for basic parts, with new releases lagging Jakarta by 2 to 3 weeks.

The most comprehensive selection of DSLR batteries and accessories in Kuta-Tuban is in the Zoom Digital Kiosk in Discovery Mall, Tuban.

If you’re a computer or business person and need to stay in touch online, visit Internet Sartika at Jalan Wana segara No. 29, Tuban. It has dual broadband connections (1 Mbps DSL and 1 Mbps fiber optic) and new 3 Ghz Intel Duo Core 2 computers, for the quickest Internet connections.

Several tourists asked me what’s worthwhile to see in Bali.

One of my favorite places is still GWK Cultural Park, which has massive stone monuments, great views overlooking Kuta and local dances starting at twilite. It’s a photographer’s paradise. GWK is only 30 minutes from Kuta or Tuban by taxi and can take anywhere from 2 hours to a day to appreciate.

(It was a long trip from San Jose on the Caltrain. I knew that I had arrived in San Francisco when I could smell the stench of urine upon leaving the station.)

Jeff mentioned working on ticketmaster.com before, and used S5 slides to illustrate a variety of localization issues with languages like Chinese, Japanese and Malaysian.

Some of his tips for identifying and preventing translation string corruption were:

• check for double-encoding of UTF-8 strings, perhaps with Test::utf8::is_sane_utf8()
• check complete toolchain for UTF-8 cleanliness
• can use Unicode script and block properties to identify language when possible, as documented in perldoc perlunicode
• use RCS pre-commit hook feature to inspect checkins, though can be slow with large input files.
• important to decide how much cleanup the translator is responsible for vs. internal.
• JavaScript string localization will likely require careful escaping of quotes.

Audience members also suggested:

• enable online web editing of translations as well as batch export
• consider locking columns if translators use excel worksheets.

As always, my comment is that it’s more important to focus on locale definition than charsets in i18n projects.

Several members were looking for perl jobs, so post your offers on the mailing list.

Thanks to Six Apart for hosting the meeting.

Juerd’s Perl Unicode Advice
Unicode.org
wikipedia: UTF-8
Jeff’s CPAN