B10[mg]

Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia has seen some name changes over the years. I trust Wikipedia on the dates here, but in history, the names have been Sunda Kalapa (397-1527), Jayakarta (1527-1619), Batavia (1619-1942), Djakarta (1942-1972), and now Jakarta.

Dropping the 'd' in front of the name has to do with the new spelling of the Indonesian language (Bahasa Indonesia). Again, I trust Wikipedia on the dates and history, but since 1972, the "new spelling" mandated that the 'd' was dropped.

So far so good, but recently I noticed that Google has trouble keeping up with this new spelling. On maps.google.com, they tell me the city is called "Djakarta", as you can see here:

Oddly enough, they do write Jayapura correctly. Also Bandung, instead of Bandoeng (which changed in 1947) is written correctly. Other mapping websites all seem to handle the 36 year old name change correctly.

Expedia.com:

Maps.live.com:

Mapquest.com:

NationalGeographic.com:

UN.org:

Maps.yahoo.com:

Since I find this a strange error, I decided to write an email to Google asking them for the reason for this and whether there are plans to update this. I'll keep you posted on the results of that mail (if ever get a reply).

google, maps, indonesia, jakarta, djakarta

Since I now own a fancy Nokia N95 (8GB), I also have the barcode/qrcode reader which is quite handy. When you see an image like the one below, the scanner will extract the URL and allows you to open it (beats a lot of typing).

A QRCode image looks like this:

This little bookmarklet can help you surfing the web. Drag it to your bookmark toolbar and hit it whenever you want to view that page on your phone too. It'll create a QRCode image with the URL of the page you're viewing.

qrcode, barcode, bookmarklet, nokia