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South Africa is experiencing serious power outages, some questions in my mind remain unanswered on the issue:

• If our growth plans for the country called for 8% growth, which we haven't met but we've been doing pretty well. If that is so, how did Eskom (the state electicity provider) fail to examine their generating capacity? Currently we're turning away large capital projects that use lots of electricity.
• I meet many many robots (traffic lights) out of order when travelling to meetings. A simple question from me is this, isn't this critical to the disaster plans for the various city councils. Its just too easy to blame Eskom on this one. But if it wasn't load shedding but a real natural disaster who would the council blame? God. Surely keeping robots working is a critical part of a disaster plan. Considering that we have LED based lights and batteries are cheap surely its not that hard to place robots on batteries? Even if only on critical intersections.
• Technology to shed non-essential loads such as geysers have been available since at least the 50s. Yet newspaper articles talk of revolutionary technology. Yeah right, why exactly hasn't this been done years ago? Its another disaster management issue really or maybe even concern for the environment. But the fact that we are doing random load shedding is simply because the council can't shed these geyser (and maybe we should include air conditioners in that list).

I firmly believe that we wouldn't be seeing much of the disruption if the various city councils had taken disaster management and conservation more seriously. Blaming Eskom, who have their own to anwers, is just too easy.

So you've spent good money, buying a companies products. In the real world that makes you a good customer, one that that company would like to retain and build a relationship with.

In the Hollywood world such good customers are treated like criminals.

Poor Davis Freeberg, he paid good money for lots of movies, i.e. good customer. Now they're telling him to shove it because he upgraded his computer to allow him to watch HDTV (you know the kind of person who will buy the same movies again at a higher resolution).

Perhaps the positive side of this is that more users will learn that DRM is evil from the word go. The only thing it highlights is that Hollywood is so out of touch with the real world and its real customers.

Mozilla Addons is revamping their Developer Control Panel to add some really useful statistics (mockups, bug).

I'd say its impossible to localise without good statistics. We've struggled for a while now to work out how many people use our translations and dictionaries. This will help us now who is actively using it, how many downlaods there are, etc. Great stuff.

Since I've made many friends in the localisation and OSS space I'm sure many of you will appreciate being in the loop on this Bailey family development.

My youngest daughter, Phillipa, has developed Kawasaki Disease. Or as Wikipedia puts it:

Kawasaki disease, also known as lymph node syndrome, mucocutaneous node disease, infantile polyarteritis and Kawasaki syndrome, is a poorly understood self-limited vasculitis that affects many organs, including the skin and mucous membranes, lymph nodes, blood vessel walls, and the heart. It does not seem to be contagious. It was first described in 1967 by Dr. Tomisaku Kawasaki in Japan.

If you actually understood any then your a medial doctor and a localiser.

But the good news is that she's fine.

The most worrying part of the disease is that it can affect the heart and in a very few cases lead to cardiac problems. The X-Rays and heart sonars indicate no heart damage. She went straight onto treatment which involved hospitalisation and massive doses of intravenous immunoglobulin. This of course happened just as I flew into from Croatia.

Mom and Dad are still working out what the long term implications of this are. But its wonderful to see our girl back to her usual bubbly self, its only then that you realise how the disease knocked her.

For those wanting more information on the disease check out these links:

• Wikipedia article
• KD Foundation

What happens when you translate directly from Afrikaans to English? You get this of course.

I'm sure it will make you laugh no matter what language you speak. But it certainly is more entertaining if you can understand the nice rambling story in Afrikaans.

I'm at the Open Translation Tools workshop in Zagreb, Croatia. Meeting some amzing people and tools creators. But the most important is the number of users, or content creators, who are really wanting to get their stuff translated. So use cases are coming out of this which is wonderful.

Aha momments:

• Using RSS as a transmit mechanism between CMS/blog/etc to a Translation Workflow System
• Lets license text in applications with a much more permisive license, or even Public Domain. This was discussed by a license group and will be persued as it allows Translation Memory systems to use text from any source.

Today saw the release of Firefox 3.0 beta 1 in 20 languages. No South African languages... yet :)

Meeting some wonderful people here at the PanAfrican Localisation Workshop, some old friend and many new ones. Wolof localisers, Kiswahili bloggers, lexicon experts, Kinyarwandan localisers, etc.

Sadly discovered that not much seems to change, localisation still happens in silo's as Stephen Holt described their language focused localisation into Kinyarwandan. Maybe one day programmers will listen to localisers. Till then we'll just take deap breaths before we dive in.

Now about the Swahili blogger - Ndesanjo Maka to be more precise. Seems we have a common friend in Ethan Zuckerman. I got reved about blogging again, and decided I'd blog this to see if Ndesanjo really is reading this ;) and of course I linked to him to ensure he becomes even more famous.

Download the new PO syntax highter for vim, especially if you can't spell. This version adds spell checking in the msgstr. The changes where contributed by Leonardo Fontenelle.

There are now only minor things missing from the syntax highlighter:

• domain
• #| for previous translations - I'm not sure how we should highlight these

Today SAFM had a debate around the evolution of language. I didn't get a chance to listen to most of it but did get to phone in. While on the line I had to listen to the traditional complaint that "insert radio station name" isn't speaking proper English, blah blah blah.

The question I asked - well I hope I asked - was I don't believe in stoping evolution but should we allow technology to speed up that demise? Since what we do is bring technology into the multilingual 21st century I'm always wondering is our intervention in the interest of the languages? But also without our intervention what would happen to these languages?