I wanted to highlight a few good Web resources that I've been reading lately:

Asia Business Intelligence

This is a weblog maintained by Rich Kuslan. Rich has worked and traveled throughout Asia over the years. This is important reading for anyone interesting in this complex, emerging region.

Macchiato

I'm not sure what to call this site exactly. It's the home page of Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium and a leader of the Unicode movement. He has created a number of excellent resources for anyone interested the subject. For example, if you want to know what a certain code point translates to in Unicode, you can input the number and up pops the character. For example, someone recently emailed me a newsletter with several ’; scattered among the text, such as this example: I’ll take you . The reason the character wasn't displaying correctly had to do with my email client not understanding that this was a Unicode encoding. (Ironically, to make the & and the # display in this Blog, I had to use the ASCII named and numberic entities.)

Now, it was obvious what character was intended, but just for fun I went to Mark Davis' Unicode Charts, punched in the number and sure enough, it was an apostophe. This is how I spend my Saturday afternoons. A little frightening, I know.

Why can't they just speak English?

Lastly, this eclectic site from Michael Kaplan offers a range of resources related to localization and translation. I like the page above a lot because you can test the ability of your browser to display a number of languages at once. It's one of those rare pages on the Internet that tests the very limits of Unicode.