August, 2006

Earlier this year, I talked about the stability of the Unicode Character Database. And about how there are really not all that many changes that happen to items like the general category that the CharUnicodeInfo class depends on. And the same is true of other property values.

But in that battle of consistency vs. correctness, sometimes it is correctness that will win.

Yesterday at the Unicode Technical Committee meeting (being held at Adobe in Seattle), one of those occasional changes that from time to time will happen, happened.

It started because of something that Mark Davis (well, one of his colleagues) noticed:

We have a bug in 5.0 in that a case pair is split across two different script values. We should fix this in U5+, and add an invariant test to ensure that this doesn't recur. 

2183;ROMAN NUMERAL REVERSED ONE HUNDRED;Lu;0;L;;;;;N;;;;2184;
2183          ; Common # L&       ROMAN NUMERAL REVERSED ONE HUNDRED

2184;LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED C;Ll;0;L;;;;;N;;;2183;;2183
2184          ; Latin # L&       LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED C

Roman Numerals are something I have talked about before (like in this post).

Now the truth is that almost all of the Roman Numerals in Unicode have two things in common:

1. They all have a general category of Nl (Number Letter);
2. They all have a script membership of Common.

In fact, the first point is true of all but the two characters above, and the second point is true of all but one of them.

But the honest truth is that is that putting them in the script value of Common never really made very much sense, because even if they are used within other scripts, they never really stop being Latin letters. And having these two charcters as a case pair and with Lu/Ll general categories but different scripts is really weird.

And having these two different from all of the rest since they all have the same issue is also bad.

So the plan? To update the script membership of the roman numerals (all of them) from Common to Latin, which is what they are. But since those two characters happen to have a case relationship, to leave be the difference in general category of the two characters mentioned above.

This is a change that will happen in a future version of the standard. And does allow for a slightly more correct result, albeit one that might cause some people to be concerned.

In fact, I anticipate at least one bug being reported based on someone noticing the change, and my predition will be that they are not really even using the characters in question! I will keep you posted on this, in any case. :-)

I'll talk more about other such changes in another post....

This post brought to you by ↄ (U+2184, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED C)

It only comes once a year, the day that is erroneously reported as the birthday of singer/songwriter Aimee Mann. Mann fan and owner of the MannList Jill Weisenfeld muses on the reasons for this anuual mistake:

Yes, Aimee's birthday is September 8th.  I believe the original confusion
arose because of an American new source reading the date in a European
publication.

I don't usually like to pile on and complain about the media's inaccurate coverage of events that fill random column inches which undergo the heavy research involved in, say, a Google search. Newspapers struggle enough with the fact that they are losing their subscription base to the web without having pundits point out the irony of the fact they might be using it for their research so extensively.

But when people mess with locale-specific date formats, they cross a line.

A line that this blog has drawn in the sand (an expression that is not really a proper snowclone in this formation, though perhaps a pragmatic one if you include the context of previous sentences!).

Offenders include: The Seattle PI, The Los Angeles Times,  and The Chicago Tribune. And all due to the extensive research that fine papers such as these do in their own archives or on mega-accurate sites like FamousBirthdays.Net and Rock on the Net's August Birthdays.

Way to go, papers of record in large cities. Try to do better next year, please.

And happy NOT Aimee Mann's Birthday, everyone!

This post brought to you by A (U+0041, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A)

Maybe I am just watching too much TV.

But another commercial struck me funny. There is a clip of it right here:

The transcript:

Mother:I have not had it up to here with you, young lady!
Daughter:Why do you insist on treating me like an adult?
Mother: Because you insist on acting like one! Now you're getting this new phone.
Daughter:But it's so small! I really like it! Why is it always what I want?
Mother: Well, do you have any idea how much money this is not going to cost me?
Daughter:I love you!
Mother: I know you really mean that.
Daughter: You never hated me and you never will!
Mother: You are the most grateful little....
Announcer: Cingular is changing the conversation about cellphones....

Now this is a bit like that piece I quoted from The New Yorker in this post -- in both cases, effort is made to give the opposite meaning to the words. There are some important differences, though:

• The older piece used back-formations in a deliberate and consistent way, while the former simply sought to invert the meaning of every line;
• The commercial kept the tone of an argumemt between a parent and child that most viewers can immediately identify with, while the older piece was obviously a monologue;
• The commercial actively showed product features (small, economical, etc.) in its inversions and giving them a positive context, by associating them along with positive traits (not hating, nevet hating, being grateful, etc.) while the older piece caused an almost 'garden path' kind of moving through meanings where one had to deconstruct the term, reconstruct the original, and then invert the meaning.

Now none of this approaches a rigorous exaplanation of what is going on from a linguistic standpoint. But then again I am not really a linguist.... :-)

Enjoy the commercial in any case. I like what it is doing here -- by putting things in the context of the cellphone 'changing the conversation,' it is keeping it in the form of argument, one that anyone could write the script for:

Mother:I have had it up to here with you, young lady!
Daughter:Why do you insist on treating me like a child?
Mother: Because you insist on acting like one! Now you're not getting this new phone.
Daughter:But it's so big! I really hate it! Why is it always what you want?
Mother: Well, do you have any idea how much money this is going to cost me?
Daughter:I hate you!
Mother: I know you don't really mean that.
Daughter: You never loved me and you never will!
Mother: You are the most ungrateful little....

And even as we recognize this, and even though we know that the framework of the parent and child arguing would never really hold up here (they would still argue, to be sure; they would just find other things to argue about!), we are left with a positive impression of the product.

Quite clever, really. :-)

This post brought to you by ዄ (U+12c4, a.k.a. ETHIOPIC SYLLABLE KXWEE)

The other day when I was talking about You say ĭtalics, I say ītalics. It is much more complicated in Cyrillic, the difference between the way italic/oblique font styles are thought of in different languages/locales was one of the interesting issues, something that Ssimon Daniels mentioned in response to RubenP's point about "And ditto on the synthetic obliques. I mean, why does Verdana have a real oblique, but Tahoma doesn't. It's the same bloody typeface!":

Tahoma was created for UI, and our traditionally our UI doesn't use italics (some languages we localize into don’t really have an Italic concept). However, the point is well taken, as we can't control where a font gets used we decided to include Italics (true ones) in Segoe UI, based on the amount of fake Tahoma Italic we’ve seen over the years on the web and elsewhere.

As for Frutiger Next Italics. Linotype obviously lifted that idea straight from Myriad as a way of getting back at Adobe. ;-)

Michael, if you’re interested in Italics a post on Meiryo Italics would be a good one.

I actually use fake Tahomia Italic in this blog, so obviously I agree with Simon's point about lack of control over the font usage....

But the point he raised about Meiryo (tha new Japanese font in Vista) is quite interesting (even if it was not as funny as the Linotype one!). It gets down to the core issue of who is in control when it comes to typography decisions -- the user or the font.

You see, in Meiryo only the Latins have a slanted form in the Italic font, not all glyphs. So if I take a string like:

Very interesting.   非常に興味深い。

It will slant the Japanese text, which really violates Japanese traditions.

But in Meiryo, it is a little different. Like in this screenshot in vist'a Wordpad:

The fact that the text is marked Italic is really not terribly relevant to Meiryo, it would seem!

Now while this really is in keeping with Japanese typographic traditions, it has been reported as a bug by several different people since Meiryo was first added to Vista, primarily from users who are used to slanted characters.

But it does kind of underscore that font settings, whether they are size, weight, or obliqueness, are actually a preference, one that the font itself might be designed to ignore.

This is not something that everyone is comfortable with (just as people may not like that the letters are such different sizes in different fonts), but it is actually how they are designed....

This post brought to you by い (U+3044, a.k.a. HIRAGANA LETTER I)

Richard asked in the Suggestion Box, and I decided to dispatch quickly:

Why is it that English (en-US, because there is no en-GB) Windows and .NET don't know how to upper case a Latin Small Latter Sharp S even with the de-DE locale specified:

"\u00DF".ToUpper(CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("de-DE"))

does not return "SS", but "ß"?

The Unicode casing file CaseFolding.txt has

00DF; F; 0073 0073; # LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S

Is this a Window's limitation? (Which would not help, given I'm trying to put together a demo of doing the right thing to build I18n into an application update.)

This is a question I have talked about many times in the past, as a simple search for U+00df indicates. And most importantly, since Casing and IgnoreCase are still not the same thing and Collation != Case (a.k.a. Collation <> Case), for now this is how casing will work on Microsoft platforms -- what Unicode refers to as simple casing....

This post sponsored by "ß" (U+00df, LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S)

It is not just celebrities who look alike -- it happens to regular people too.

Now perhaps they were separated at birth.

Or maybe it's just me.

But doesn't developer and blogger Marco De Sanctis look more than a little bit like Mr. Gretchen Ledgard? :-)

(Marco had linked to me recently about something else and the picture just jumped out at me!)

Back when I posed the question the other day about 32 bit vs. 64 bit HKLs?, SDiZ properly identified the issue as sign extension, and Igor Tandetnik even pointed out the MSDN article that explains it (search for the "USER and GDI handles are sign extended 32b values" section of the article, which I then quoted in a later comment.

Regular reader Mihai then made an excellent point about the docs  related to the HKL that seem to point in the wrong direction and perhaps lead to confusion here:

Ok, is clear this is cause by signed extension.
But I think is a bug, because the doc says:
"The low word contains a Language Identifier for the input language and the high word contains a device handle to the physical layout of the keyboard"

And this is a bug. Mihai is right. But it is a doc. bug -- a doc. point firmly embedded in the 32-bit world. Though since these handle 'void *' values are signed both managed and unmanaged code will handle them properly, like if you use the following code (which also gives the answer to the other question I asked -- about what the KLID value of an MSKLC-generated keyboard such as "A0000409" might lead to:

System.Int32 i32;
System.Int64 i64;

i32 = -268368865;
i64 = i32;

System.Console.WriteLine(i32.ToString("x") + "\t\t" + i32);
System.Console.WriteLine(i64.ToString("x") + "\t" + i64);

i32 = -1610611703;
i64 = i32;

System.Console.WriteLine(i32.ToString("x") + "\t\t" + i32);
System.Console.WriteLine(i64.ToString("x") + "\t" + i64);

i32 = -536869884;
i64 = i32;

System.Console.WriteLine(i32.ToString("x") + "\t\t" + i32);
System.Console.WriteLine(i64.ToString("x") + "\t" + i64);

This little bit of managed code will output the following:

f001041f                -268368865
fffffffff001041f        -268368865
a0000409                -1610611703
ffffffffa0000409        -1610611703
e0000404                -536869884
ffffffffe0000404        -536869884

As to why I used the decimal version of the numbers rather than the hexidecimal one, it is because managed code is rather unwilling to consider the hex value to be a valid 32-bit signed value, even though once it is assigned it will readily display that value as the hex version. It actually makes dealing with things like the InputLanguage's InputLanguage.Handle property harder to deal with. Best to keep that value opaque and use InputLanguage.Culture.LCID to get that Locale ID if you need it. :-)

But then I started thinking about what one sentence could be used to replace:

"The low word contains a Language Identifier for the input language and the high word contains a device handle to the physical layout of the keyboard"

to handle the reality where we are talking about a bit more than just the high word. Identifying the doc bug is easy, but fixing it is a bit harder in topics like GetKeyboardLayout that contain this bit of boilerplate text.

What would you try and put in there?

This post brought to you by Ḁ (U+1e00, a.k.a. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING BELOW)

Okay, I admit it. When I pronounce the word italics, I say EYE-talics, not IH-talics. But I do say IH-talian, not EYE-talian when I see the word Italian.

I point this out because although she had never corrected me on this particular point even once before, or even ever hinted that the pronunciation was wrong, soon after she had some typography program managers reporting to her, Cathy pointed this out to me one day.

But in the end I think she was just enjoying correcting me; after all, both forms are acceptable in dictionaries for italics but not for Italian! I mean, the point of language is communication, and as long as people get the message neither pronunciation is really going to confuse anyone....

This post has little or nothing to do with that, but it is about italics. :-)

Well, actually it is about U+0453, a.k.a. CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER GJE.

It seems that depending on the font you choose, the italicizes differently. For example, in Tahoma it looks like this:

and with the new Segoe UI font it looks like this:

Boy, that Segoe UI one looks like it has a bug, doesn't it? I mean who on earth would expext a character that looks more like:

(a lowercase r or small gamma than anything else) in any font, including Segoe UI, look more like a reversed s just because it was italicized?

Turns out it is not a bug!

Simon Daniels talked with Steve Matteson of Ascender who had this to say:

the 'backwards s' is the preferred italic form for Russian lowercase Ghe but for Macedonian lowercase Gje it needs to stay the 'small gamma' shape. Sorry I don't know the specifics on why.

Looking up in Wikipedia's article about the Cyrillic script, it does say a bit about this:

In the absence of Roman and Italic traditions, Cyrillic type fonts are properly classified as upright (Russian: pryamoi shrift) and cursive (kursivnyi). Cursive or hand-written shapes of many letters, especially the lowercase letters, are entirely different from the upright shapes. As in Latin typography, a sans-serif face may have a mechanically-sloped oblique font (naklonnyi).

In Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian, some cursive letters are different from those used in other languages. These cursive letter shapes are often used in upright fonts as well, especially for road signs, inscriptions, posters and the like, less so in newspapers or books.

The article also links to another page that has a much fuller explanation, entitled Serbian Cyrillic Letters BE, GHE, DE, PE, TE. The page also talks a bit about the tradition of italics in typography, and the expectations here. A worthwhile read if you are interested in solutions here.

Now I will not go so far as to say that Tahoma and fonts that don't use this form are tailored for Bulgarian, Macedonian, or Serbian; in fact, I'll note that although Microsoft ships a 'Tahoma' and a 'Tahoma Bold' that we don't ship a 'Tahoma Italics'. Which kind of removes the easiest way to have an alternate form for the small Ghe, doesn't it? :-)

Between that and the fact that there is currently a Russian localization of Windows but not a Macedonian one, it sort of makes sense that the default form in the UI font of much of Vista and Office 2007 would follow the Russian glyph preference....

It does mean that the issue Chris Pirillo has pointed out here about the inconsistency of application of the new UI font (discussed previously here) might be a bit more worrying for Vista and Office 2007, since between MS Sans Serif, Tahoma, Segoe UI, and Microsoft Sans Serif, only Segoe UI is getting it right. This might make the Russian localization of Windows a bit more challenging with this inconistency of font being used, huh?

Luckily the uppercase form (U+0403) does not have this difference, so at worst it will just like we capitalize like morons in Russian in those places where the UI font is inconsistent? :-)

This post brought to you by ѓ (U+0453, a.k.a. Italicized CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER GJE)

(Nothing technical in this post, sorry!)

I swear that none of what I am about to talk about has been intentional. I am merely a victim of circumstance.

I have been taking Lipitor for a borderline cholesterol level which, when combined with my lack of discipline about diet, made folks in the medical establishment feel like I should perhaps try and be safe rather than sorry.

And I have been taking Copaxone daily for my MS for the last few years, mainly because although I preferred the once-a-week Avonex, I was one of the small number of people who suffered flu-like symptoms, and I was tired of being sick once a week. I used to hate the notion of 'shooting up' daily, but I decided to get over it and just pretend it was like I was actually shooting up something ilicit -- so I could have all the fun of being a drugie without any of the downsides of a life of crime and poverty....

And since August 23rd I have been taking Novantrone, as I have mentioned in this blog before. And so far the Echocardiograsm is still looking good. So, Bob willing I'll be on it for a couple more years.

Now I did not stop taking Copaxone during the time I have been taking Novantrone. I talked about it with my neurologist and at first she pointed out that if I was not tolerating the Novantrone that I'd just be back on the Copaxone anyway. And later I just never got around to stopping it, so I didn't.

I also have lots of friends who send me new articles every time they see something on the web about Multiple Sclerosis. It is almost always sensationalistic, mainly because of the combination of the facts that people reporting on these things don't understand them, and even if they did the truth is never as sexy as they need to get people interested. So I usually take what the send with a grain of salt.

But two news items in particular were interesting to me:

Lipitor-Copaxone Combo May Fight MS -- despite its upbeat nature and the fact that the positive results are with the animal model for MS, Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis (EAE) -- since MS cannot itself occur in mice -- and many EAE cures do not actually help with MS, it may well be good news.

Drug combo fuels hope for multiple sclerosis -- the positive results in this three-year open label Copaxone/Novantrone combination therapy are fairly exciting (and I look forward to the article that should be in the upcoming issue of Neurology), though once again one has to be careful to look too positively at popular news reports.

It seems that I have unintentionally been involved with two interesting combination therapies? :-)

I'll probably talk more about the second one after I read the article in Neurology. It will be years before anybody comes up with anything on the first one, but I'll just suggest no changes in my drug regimen for now....

No, this post is not making the point that Chris Wetherell did and folks picked up on a couple of years ago, like here. Let me exaplain....

So I found myself IM'ing with Melanie Spiller as I have been doing intermittently since that dinner last month, and thinking about how refreshing (and entertaining!) it is every once in a while to have a whole new source of information. Like she pointed out a bumper sticker she had seen that she thought I might enjoy:

What if the hokey pokey is what it's really all about?

That is freaking hilarious, in my opinion. Perhaps you don't agree, and I won't argue with you since I have no sense of humor, really. But if I was ever going to put a bumper sticker on my car, that would be it. I even wrote it on my white board and Kieran, who happened to be passing by, agreed that it was pretty awesome.  

So what does this have to do with Google not getting blogs? :-)

Well, I did that ubiquitous thing that is going to make Google lose their trademark someday just like Xerox might -- I google'd this phrase. And the results were surprising to me:

1 - 12 of about 173? WTF?

Clearly Google is smart enough to recognize that there is a pattern but not smart enough to identify that it might be due to the modern equivalent of pages with frames that happen to share the same frame text -- not smart enough to point out which links have the repeats. The subsidary info that every blog page might have? It can't call out why they might be the same, why it might have lumped them all together?

This is not proof that it Google doen't get blogs by the way. If anything it is proof that thay do get blogs, at least in the sense that they can see patterns and such. So what am I rambling on about?

Well, I took another phrase, one that appears in the disclaimer text of my own blog:

not for use on unexplained calf pain.

and I google'd it, with the following results:

1 - 1 of about 24,100? Serious WTF?

How did it pick out over 24,000 pages in a blog that has only a bit over 1,200 posts? And how did it decide that the Cantonese IME post is the "most relevant" of the about 24,100 that it had?

Simple. You can see it yourself if you click on the link to repeat the search with the omitted results included and scan around the results a bit. Though of course this post may throw the balance off a bit!

It is counting every page. And every month link in the archives on every page. And every category link on every page. And so on.

If you scroll to the end of the results, it is eventually smart enough to see something is going on and avoids the recursive freaking hole it has dug for itself and actually stops at around 1,000. Which would still be about 995 after even some of the dimmest children will realize what is going on and be a bit smarter about how it describes things.

And if you search on actual content like the title of a post or text inside of a post, you see a different problem -- it is actually looking at every RSS link off of every page, too. And indexing all of those as well. Fools like me who actually aggregate full posts are punished the most here, and Google will provide links to each of those pages, too.

We are impressed with Rainman in particular and with some of the capabilities of the more talented Idiot Savants in general. But we eventually get over that and realize that the first word in that title is Idiot and that what is widely believed to be the most talented searching algorithm could perhaps become a bit smarter. I'd find it much more impressive than throwing half a million servers at the problem, were someone to ask me....

Not to further cast asparagus, but search.msn.com, for example, stops after only ten results across five different domains. Not such an idiot, msn is, huh? :-)

This post brought to you by ෝ (U+0ddd, a.k.a. SINHALA VOWEL SIGN KOMBUVA HAA DIGA AELA-PILLA)

I was over on Language Log the other day and I read Eric Baković's Between Good and Evil. Somewhere between the points in the post and the reference to Carl Sagan's thought experiment about the dragon I was reminded about a bit in Sagan's Contact (not the movie but the book, which was free of both Hollywood simplifications and the type of things one imagines Jodie Foster wants out of parts she takes).

I think it puts the question of atheism vs. agnosticism in a slightly more reasonable light than a purely scientific, a purely linguistic, or even a purely religious standpoint might:

   "You don't want to believe in God." Joss said it as a simple statement. "You figure you can be a Christian and not believe in God. Let me ask you straight out: Do you believe in God?

   "The question has a peculiar structure. If I say no, do I mean I am convinced God doesn't exist, or do I mean I'm not convinced that he does exist? Those are two very different statements."

   "Let's see if they are so very different, Dr. Arroway. May I call you 'Doctor'? You believe in Occam's Razor, isn't that right? If you have two different, equally good explanations of the same experience, you pick the simplest. The whole history of science supports it, you say. Now, if you have serious doubts about whether there is a a God -- enough doubts so you're unwilling to commit yourself to the faith -- then you must be able to imagine a world without God: a world that comes into being without God, a world that goes about its everyday life without God, a world where people die without God. No punishment. No reward. All the saints and prophets, all the faithful who have ever lived -- why, you'd have to believe they were foolish. Deceived themselves, you'd probably say. That would be a world in which we weren't here on Earth for any good reason -- I mean for any purpose. It would all just be complicated collisions of atoms -- is that right? Including the atoms that are inside of human beings.

   "To me, that would be a hateful and inhuman world. I wouldn't want to live in it. But if you can imagine that world, why straddle? Why occupy some middle ground? If you believe all that already, isn't it much simpler to say there's no God? You're not being true to Occam's Razor. I think you're waffling. How can a thoroughgoing conscientious scientist be an agnostic if you can even imagine a world without God? Wouldn't you just have to be an atheist?

   "I thought you were going to argue that God is the simpler hypothesis," Ellie said, "but this is a much better point. If it were only a matter of scientific discussion, I'd agree with you Reverend Joss. Science is essentially concerned with examining and correcting hypotheses. If the laws of nature explain all the available facts without supernatural intervention, or even do only as well as the God hypothesis, then for the time being I'd call myself an athesist. Then if a single piece of evidence was discovered that doesn't fit, I'd back off from atheism. We're fully able to detect some breakdown in the laws of nature. The reason I don't call myself an atheist is because this isn't mainly a scientific issue. It's a religious issue and a political one. The tentative nature of scientific hypothesis doesn't extend into those fields. You don't talk about God as a hypothesis. You think you've cornered the truth, so I point out that you may have missed a thing or two. But if you ask, I'm happy to tell you: I can't be sure I'm right."

Anyway, it just occurred to me while I was reading and thought I'd share. :-)

This post brought to you by ܞ (U+071e, a.k.a. SYRIAC LETTER YUDH HE)

It all started on Saturday in the early evening, that show I mentioned in I before E, except after C.... And as is often the case, the meta-show was as interesting as the show itself. :-)

I drove out to pick up Julie, we headed downtown, and found a place to get dinner across the street from the venue. It was a great chance to catch each other up on what was going on at work before the rest of our party that would likely not find this conversation interesting joined us....

Ok, it was getting close to 7:30pm so we crossed the street. It was for a meet and greet with Duncan after the sound check and before the show. We waited outside for Kristin and Tana. In fact we waited until a minute or two after, and then I called. And found myself talking to Kristin's husband -- she had left her mobile at home. Hmmm. So Julie and I decided to go in.

Vienna Teng was setting up to do their sound check, and someone was yelling into their phone pretty loudly. He hung up and then chucked his phone into the wall. Which was amusing since when I asked for Vance (Duncan's manager on the tour), the guy I asked really wanted to make sure that we weren't with the guy who had just chucked his phone across the room into the wall. :-)

So we straightened all that out and Vance came out. I told him why we were here. He had bad news -- Duncan had already left to go to dinner before the show. He had not realized that anyone was coming since he hadn't actually read the email mentioning that "Michael Kaplan + 4" were coming to the show and for a meet & greet. Oops!

No worries, he checked out our bonafides and put our names on the list. And set up the meet & greet for after the show. Which was gonna work better since Kristin and Tana had just arrived and might have missed it had it happened earlier....

Though in the back of my mind I was doing the math -- Doors open at 9pm, Vienna starts 30-60 minutes later with over an hour for her set, half an hour break and then Duncan has a ninety minute set. If all the time is cut short then "after the show" translated to well after midnight.

Suddenly the fact that Cathy couldn't make it was looking okay -- she would have slept through most of it anyway....

So I introduced all the people who did not know each other yet and we listened to Vienna and the sound check for a bit (Kristin's a musician, so for her check what the acoustics might be like is like normal people checking where the restrooms might be). Then with over an hour to kill we decided to head down the street to a bar that was open to get a drink.

The first place we went into, we were making the patrons uncomfortable. I did not notice right away since I did a subconscious cehck to make sure that the women would be sage and then relaxed. Julie didn't notice because she was being Julie. But Kristin and Tana noticed right away that this was actually a gay man's bar, and that the reason the patrons were uncomfortable was because a gimp rolled in with three women and we were all being if not loud than at least not quiet. Obviously the women were safe and I was too, but since we were making people less than comfortable we decided to head down the street to another bar...

So we found a place and Kristin started talking about Red Beer, which I had never heard of but saw the commercials for in the days since then. So we chatted for a bit over the white noise in the bar about all sorts of things from tattoos to the ironic perceived asexuality of gimps to tramp stamps (more on why this is relevant in a bit!) to working at Microsoft to farming to being a musician (Kristin) to almost getting married and reasons for calling it off (Tana and I, though not to each other!) to the fact that Jebin Bruni was playing with Fiona to Red Beer to going to strange cities and seeing musicians while I happened to be there to the fact that I used to work for Julie but then she got promoted until I was working for the person who was working for the person who was working for Julie, and so on. It filled up the time nicely until it was almost 9pm and we decided to head back to Chop Suey.

We got there and were redirected to the will call line, but when we saw it was around the corner I had a chat with the guy outside and they got us in. I think everyone was impressed, kind of like when I got Julie and I up front to see Fiona earlier in the month. It is so seldom that I get to impress women these days, so I decided to enjoy it. We found seats (there were not many there even with the place empty -- an interesting way to force standing room only!) and kept chatting while the venue started to fill slowly.

And then, by 10pm, the show was starting!

Now I'll start by saying that although I owned several of her albums including her most recent one, that I had no idea she was a CS graduate from Stanford who gave it up to pursue her musical passions. It is probably good that I did not know all this simnce my head might have exploded as I sat enchanted by the voice of this amazing singer/songwriter!

From the song she played for the "tech" community in Seattle that was inspired by the movie Office Space (Whatever You Want) to the song about the guy who she had the crush on who turned out to by gay but who (with his boyfriend) picked one of her creations as "their song" (so close!), it is clear that she is just as comfortable chatting between songs as she is playing during them. I swear I didn't notice that she had no guitar player on stage until she was several songs into her set!

Then she talked about how, while writing for the new album, she realized she was basically happy. Which is a terrible way to try to find inspiration for songs. So she imagined herself 10 years later, in the midst of a midlife crisis, and out came "Love Turns 40", which I decided should be dedicated to Julie (whose age everyone in the group knows due to the hard work of Cathy and Martina who are both younger than she is!).

Her voice was incredible, and although the acoustics in the venue were not stellar (something we sort of realized back during the sound check), the performance was. I decided to buy a shirt (so I could symbolically make sure I was giving her something for her efforts!) and to try and get an autograph on her CD. It is hard to explain, it just feels like when someone does an amazing job and I get enjoy it that I should be giving them something for it. :-)

By the way, I noticed that she is going to be back in Seattle on September 29th, opening for Madeline Peyroux at the Moore. Currently it is on both of their websites but not on the Moore's -- I will have to check it out snd see if I can find out what is going on....

In any case, she closed the regular set with a great rendition of her new song "City Hall", complete with her Marika Hughes and Dina Maccabee (her cello and viola players) acting as backup singers with hand gestures to act out the song that just made the whole thing hilarious, and then we settled in to wait for Duncan to start.

Oh, before I forget; her set list:

• Enough to Go By
• Whatever You Want
• Blue Caravan
• Shasta
• Unwritten Letter #1
• Love Turns 40
• 1 BR / 1 BA
• Nothing Without You
• Recessional
• Gravity
• Now Three
• City Hall
• Harbor (this was the encore)

She did make a brief appearance to sign CDs and dstuff but she had a big line so I decided not to stand in line too. I figured some other time. So the four of us were talking, waiting for Duncan to to start.

ASIDE: Starting during Vienna's set we did notice a guy and two girls in front of us, and one of the girls did indeed have a tramp stamp which for some reason we all found hilarious, especially after we had talked about what is supposedly meant earlier (what did Vince Vaughn say in The Wedding Crashers? Might as well be a bullseye?). But although the strange interactions between these three people were interesting, we didn't really want to be distracted too much by it....

And then by 10:30, Duncan Sheik took the stage. And as always he was fantastic. Julie was I think a bit disappointed that he didn't play "Barely Breathing" because she had that song in her head both before and after the show; it is a long I love as well but we got over it.

There were some funny moments, like when Gerry pulled out the white guitar, and then later Duncan pulled out a black one and Gerry remarked that it was like Spy vs. Spy -- I got the feeling that many people did not understand the reference, but I thought it was pretty funny.

The setlist (this is also from memory, if someone who was there sees a mistake the order they should feel free to comment about it!):

• Nothing Fades
• Good Morning!
• For You
• She Runs Away
• Magazines
• White Limousine
• Such Reveries
• Star-field on Red Lines
• Genius
• Wishful Thinking
• Start Again
• Memento
• The Dawn's Request
• Hey Casanova

For the encore, I know he did Mr. Chess, but I am drawing a blank on the other one. Either way, it was a great set, and although the venue was not a good as The Triple Door, I have high hopes for next time!

So the show ended at 1:00am, unfortunately Kristin and Tara had to leave early so they didn't get the chance to meet Duncan. But Julie and I went back and had a chance to talk with him and I swear he has got to be the single nicest person in the industry. And so totally hands on with his myspace site and the support he shows for fan recordings. Simply an amazing person, we'll have to figure out something for next time he is in town for Kristin to meet him and do that weird talking thing that only fellow musicians can do....

I didn't ask him to sign my CD; I guess I could have, maybe I should have. I also forgot to ask him about the 'Mark Liberman' thing. And there are other Mark Libermans if you Google-stalk the name, which I am not going to investigate the way Rory might suggest given his luck with Google here. I'm not looking for a soulmate or anything. :-)

Anyway, on the way out we ran into Vienna and I asked her if she would sign my CD (more on this story here). I was really glad this happened since I had sort of sworn off the earlier opportunity with the line. I don't know if that makes me a snob or something, but the line is awkward with the scooter so I think I am tying to avoid all that.

In any case, an awesome show and lots going on around it (i.e. "the meta show"), and sorry it took me so long to post this!

Made it back to Channel 9 again, in Windows Vista Localization and Globabilization: Meet the team (the previous one from December 2005 mentioned here).

Once again it may help dissuade those under the mistaken impression that I am attractive, intelligent, and/or interesting. :-)

Scoble actually calls me a two-timer here, which is fun. And both Kieran and I focus on our "open" story related to keyboards, locales, and more....

It was all done back in the end of February, if memory serves, and this one has Kieran sitting in as well. We do not appear until 44:27 (I remember Robert pointing out that there was not much time left?), though there are other, more interesting people available than just me throughout....

Enjoy!

It was like deja vu or something.

Cathy and I were talking about MSLU, and the whole issue of the code names came up. As I said back in Why/how MSLU came to be, and more, she had proven her PM skill by coming up with the cool code name (Godot) and the cool DLL names. Though I have to admit that there were some names that were more collaborative in their origin, as far as I can recall they all were imagined in her old office in building 9. Which may be how she ended up with authorship credit, sometimes? :-)

That project name (Godot) came out of one of those late meetings and the Samuel Beckett play really did provide the right emotional context. Soon after I started on the project I don't know which was worse -- that we heard about a Windows 95 Unicode Layer written by Basis Technology called Cheops, or that someone from Microsoft (Chris Pratley? Murray Sargent? One of them...) was going on in public about how if Microsoft hadn't done it by now then we never would. Insert eye roll here, please!

Trivia for you all that needs to be captured somewhere, easier to talk about now (since Win9x is no longer supported and all!). The original name of the DLL came out of a meeting between Cathy, Julie, and I late one day. We came up with the Win9x Supplemental eXtension -- or Win9xSUX.dll. And I think I pointed out that the cool thing about hanging out with them is that it was like getting drunk without the hangovers as we laughed about stuff like that. The project was checked into the Windows source tree for at least 24 hours that way, though as soon as Julie found out the name I realized how much it those meetings were like getting drunk -- she immediately said we had to change the name. Like right now. Another late meeting with the three of us, and came up with the UNICOde Win9x Supplement, or UnicoWS.dll. Eureka! And the DLL name was changed, probably before anyone else ever even built it. Sigh of relief for all. If you know what I mean.

Anyway, the "Cow" theme was huge in the project, as I mentioned previously. I still have several of the stuffed cows I picked up at FAO Schwartz after the unicows meeting happened.

Now a back-formation is defined quite simply:

In etymology, the process of back-formation is the creation of a neologism by reinterpreting an earlier word as a derivation and removing apparent affixes, or more generally, by reconstructing an "original" form from any kind of derived form (including abbreviations or inflected forms). The resulting new word is called a back-formation.

Now isn't it a kind of a back-formation that we went off on this whole bovine tangent? Since obviously the whole project was not based on cows (though the "cuteness" factor in the name obviously involved the play on words involving a cow?). Well, at least some of the conversations about bovine things involved back-formations, I think.

But then if you look at the Wikipedia article about MSLU, it talks about libunicows and Opencow, the open source versions of unicows.lib and unicows.dll. And the name Opencow is definitely a back-formation.

The original public project name MSLU (the Microsoft Layer for Unicode) had its original open source version named MZLU (the Mozilla Layer for Unicode) and that is clearly a back-formation, too. But of an entirely different kind, being both such obvious attempts at acronyms and all....

By the way, I am not a lawyer; but I think a lot of the MZLU/Opencow project seems to be based on some misunderstandings of the licensing restrictions on unicows.lib and unicows.dll, but the cross-platform requirements of libunicows are slightly more convincing of a need so even were I to argue for changes to clarify the license (which I have done on at least two occasions before to make specific customers more comfortable with the project and using it) the projects would still have to exist, so it seems kind of pointless to argue the issue. If you know what I mean.

But how is this post for a horking huge chunk of MSLU back-story with no backwash? :-)

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