October, 2007

I was asked the other day whether I though global development projects (by which I mean projects whose creation and maintenance span multiple points on the globe) could work.

This is probably a good time to point out these are my opinions and mine alone, in case you had any doubts about the issue!

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, so here is one. :-)

Every day when I scoot over to my office, I pass the clocks.

Here is a picture of them:

You'll see the problem right away if you spend much time around analog clocks. :-)

It's funny, but sometimes it seems like the reputation of Windows and its wandering clocks is embedded in the culture -- it is no accident that products will have configuration checkboxes like this one:

So having three clocks in the Windows International building for three of the major development areas of the group that are all a little out of sync with each other. Hmmmm.

Kind of raises the symbolic question of development projects whose work spans the globe to a new low, doesn't it? :-)

I haven't done a whole lot of work with the folks in Japan in recent years, though I do know that the IME development effort was made easier by having one of its members in Redmond (and then just rotating who that person was every few months).

This has nothing to do with either side of the communication was at fault, but just that across the Pacific, between different time zones and development styles and bug counts and thoughts on customer requirements, too much seemed to be falling into the ocean, if you know what I mean.

Maybe that is cultural issues, or just communication via phone and email, but somehow things seemed much better with a local agent in Redmond who could be there for questions, setup changes, build breaks, and the myriad of issues that a huge product can bring to the table.

Not that we fared much better across the Atlantic. I have often praised the team in Ireland in this blog, but I tend to think of their successes (e.g. Locale Builder, Keyboard Convert Service, the updates to Clock and Calendar, the Program Management side of MSKLC 1.4, and more), as due to their own initiative rather than the work on the Redmond side to support their efforts the way I think we should.

It was my principal negative feedback contribution in the Vista post-mortem, because I think we failed them as a team in some important ways, and the fact that Dublin succeeded is nothing short of proof that they can do excellent work, and can pick up the slack when we are slackers who do not communicate well....

My principal positive item was the amazing work they did in Dublin, but that's another story.

At the same time, it is hard to forget the number of times they'd spend a week tracking down a behavior bug which they'd narrow down the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class, only to have someone in Redmond admit it was a by design change in the class. One that nobody though to mention, even though people in Redmond were playing with the Locale Builder beta.

As the nominal liaison to the LB team I'll even take responsibility for the problem here, though the fact that no one was communicating the changes to me either would (if I were still on the team) cause me to try and fix up the communication problem with the people who were changing the platform upon which the tool was being built rather than dwelling on this as a personal failure. As it is, I just have to make sure I communicate that this has been a problem and somebody has to work to make sure it is not still one.

So, after having seen some global development projects, I'd have to say that they can work. But there are only two factors that can lead to success:

• Excellent communication between the development centers
• Phenomenal engineering where the work takes place

If one falls short, the other can pick up the slack, and has. But it shouldn't have to, and if everybody does their part, then everybody can do their work more effectively.

This post brought to you by ㊣ (U+32a3, a.k.a. CIRCLED IDEOGRAPH CORRECT)

This is one of those multiple sclerosis posts that you probably should just skip. Seriously, I mean it -- I'd skip it if I didn't have to stay and write it!

Someone I know had gotten a link in the mail about multiple sclerosis and they sent it to me asking how I felt about it. This happens way too often, believe me.

The link is Who will I be? and the picture is this one:

It's interesting, the post had been up for months with just three comments, then yesterday dozens of comments were added (I guess a lot of people are on the same mailing list as my friend?).

The picture seems a bit depressing to me, and definitely not how I think about MS.

About the whole multiple sclerosis thing....

I act like it doesn't bother me. But mostly it is only true since I don't think about it much. Even when I get mail with links like that.

When I do think about it, then I have to admit it bothers me some.

I'll show you what I mean....

That picture? It kind of pales compared to the comments -- there are some real hard stories there, and although I feel like I have been through a lot this kind of thing makes me realize I have somehow manged to avoid the worst of it.

Frankly, it's the reason I stopped going to MS Society meetings.

Because I hated feeling bad since I didn't feel worse, you know?

And I didn't feel like my bad stories were quite bad enough, and I certainly wasn't going to make stories up.

On the other hand, I have essentially changed careers six or seven times before settling where I ended up and most of those changes were avoiding MS symptoms that made it look like I'd end up on SSDI if I didn't change careers under the argument that I couldn't be gainfully employed....

Lots of people who have a harder time here, are people who couldn't find something else to do, or who never had the chance to do so?

They aren't that far away from me, I guess. There but for the grace of, yada yada yada.

I might just be in denial.

If I don't think I am in denial, have I proved my point that I and in denial by denying it?

If I had a dime for everyone I wanted to throw something heavy at after they watched the West Wing episodes where they talked about having to play chess with Jed Bartlett given the cognitive MS symptoms....

Made me want to rethink the wisdom of such a visible MS presence on television, when I was having to reassure people that they didn't have to start playing chess with me!

By the way, did you notice how many of the comments in that post with the picture talked about how God/god fit in here?

Well, I kind of covered how I feel about that in Quando Dio vuole castigarci ci manda quello che desideriamo. I don't think that a divine presence has time for Holland's parking spaces or for my medical condition. This is all just life and what it brings to the mix.

Mildly on-topic, there was a Giving Campaign event in our building today -- a miniature golf tournament, spread throughout the building.

Really spread in all the hallways -- I barely made it my office and I wouldn't have made it if I had the big scooter today.

I left after the first time I had to go the bathroom -- being that boxed in is just very un-fun, and it's unfair to tell people they can't have a nice event that they are enjoying....

I'd worry about the fire hazard and trying to get out of the building, but in truth I'd be semi-screwed if I were on my own then anyway since I can't take the scooter down the elevator in an emergency and it's not like I can take on the stairs. This is why I stay home on fire drill days....

Anyway, you see what happens when I start thinking about it.

You just witnessed a whole little thing that happened to me, right on the spot as I was writing the above.

And my outlook is much more hopeful than all that, really.

If you did read this post then I'm really sorry, it is kind of a waste, and just ends without any

This post brought to you by 𝌽 (U+1d33d, a.k.a. TETRAGRAM FOR CLOSED MOUTH)

So Stacy (who I just met at IUC31, if you were there you may have met her too?) calls me up on the phone last night.

I ask her how she is doing.

A bit taken aback, she asks me "Don't you know what's going on here?"

I need to pay more attention to the news, truly. :-(

She quickly filled me in as she travelled to Target for supplies for herself the refugees staying at her place....

Basically, San Diego is burning right now. And this is not a mock weblog incendre kind of thing, this is real fires. The sky is red, the sun is almost muted in response. At last report over 250,000 have fleed, and there is something like zero containment right now.

There are seven fires in San Diego and an eighth in Malibu, and with huge winds that can blow the fires anywhere, they are not really getting much of a handle on any of it yet.

Gov. Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency, and some of the evacuees staying at Stacy's place had the dubious privilege of watching their own homes burning on TV.

I'm watching the San Diego County Wildfires 2007 blog as the news go by (you can see what I am seeing here) and that site should have more info on donations needed for those who would like to help.

And if you are a Microsoft employee than anything you give to the various non-profits that are helping out here can be matched by Microsoft....

But either way if you can help then please do. If you want to include useful links to places to donate things to, then have at it!

I am just idealistic enough to be horrified at the sponsored ads showing up on sites like the San Diego Channel 10 news Animal evacuation Info site (ref: here). I just thought of two new criteria maybe even more critical than relevance -- sensitivity and savoir-faire? EXAMPLE -- moving the "Think you pay too much for your mortgage?" ads on a page designed for pedople who sre being displaced from their homes and need to board their animals?

This post brought to you by ☲, ⺣, ⽕, ㈫, ㊋, 火, 炎, and ䷝ (U+2632, U+2ea3, U+2f55, U+322b, U+328b, U+706b, U+708e and U+4ddd, a.k.a. TRIGRAM FOR FIRE, CJK RADICAL FIRE, KANGXI RADICAL FIRE, PARENTHESIZED IDEOGRAPH FIRE, CIRCLED IDEOGRAPH FIRE, the CJK Ideograph for fire, the CJK ideograph for flames, and HEXAGRAM FOR THE CLINGING FIRE)

David asked me via the Contact link:

Is there a way that users can submit keyboard layouts for inclusion in future versions of Windows? I have developed keyboard layouts for the Tajik language, one similar to the one included in Vista, and one for those familiar with QWERTY, but unfamiliar with the Russian keyboard. Both are very popular, and it would be nice to see the latter one included in Windows.

I assume that you work primarily through governments on this issue. But a couple of years ago, when I was aware that a Tajik government committee was discussing what to have included in Vista, I was told that it was so political that I would be wasting my time trying to make suggestions to them.

Here I'm arguing for some de-centralisation - that it should not all be left in the hands of the government. I could also argue for more centralisation: cooperation between OS writers so that we don't end up with widely differing keyboard layouts in Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc.

Some of my older work is at web.onetel.com/~wdhj , though I have done a lot of work since then, mostly using MSKLC, and the site needs to be updated accordingly ... just one of those things I haven't got around to doing ...

Regards, David

My first thought was for the post from way back in January 2005 entitled Does MS pull new keyboard layouts out of their @!#$%? which really talks a lot about how Microsoft adds keyboards, which largely still covers the issues here.

There are some really significant challenges involved with any sort of decentralization of selection of the keyboard layouts that would be included in the Windows box in some future version, including but not limited to relevance, popularity, overall usefulness in different customer segments, and scalability.

It is not by any means only limited to governments, though. In fact, the subsidiary contacts providing locale data often through their own research find layouts that are more popular or commonly used than the ones described in government standards and they end up providing two layouts -- one to follow the rules and one to actually be useful!

Given that the NLS team has to support the layout forever once it is added, there is an additional review to make sure that the layout will be of general use for native language speakers in market (and to fix bugs!) above and beyond what the subsidiary provides....

The idea of cooperation between platforms is interesting, though there are many additional factors that would complicate that kind of effort which readers may be able to imagine if they spend any time between two or more of these different platforms.

But I will pass the idea along to see if anyone has additional thoughts on the issue, in theory it is a very sensible one.

This post brought to you by U+20e3, a.k.a.COMBINING ENCLOSING KEYCAP

Stephen asks via the Contact link:

I'm making a program doing a Traditional/Simplified Chinese conversion in Delphi. However, all the web pages shown in Google search results are LCMapString. I did try using this LCMapString. LCMapString can do a mapping of 26xx characters. However, I find that it can't do a correct conversion mapping from Traditional to Simplified one.

I wrote a simple routine to convert a list of the 26xx Traditional Chinese Characters. Then compare the result to a list of the characters in Simplified Chinese. The LCMapString can only convert 22xx characters. Is there any document in the MSDN mentioned this bug?

Stephen
from Hong Kong

This is not a bug.

Those two mappings that LCMapString provides via the LCMAP_SIMPLIFIED_CHINESE and LCMAP_TRADITIONAL_CHINESE that I discussed in LCMapString's *other* job:

LCMAP_SIMPLIFIED_CHINESE -- Maps traditional Chinese characters to simplified Chinese, passing through other characters unchanged. Thus 樂 (U+6a02) becomes 乐 (U+4e50). The dictionary used for this mapping is small (only 2,620 ideographs) and has not been updated since the feature was added in NT 4.0 (it was originally added at the request of people in Office, who actually ended up going with their own more sophisticated dictionary solution in Word that does a better job with the sometimes complicated mapping. Now although casing, width, and Kana mappings can all be done in place, this is not allowed for traditional->simplified Chinese mappings, even though the same restrictions (always the same length, etc.) apply here -- if any NLS testers who are reading this want to put in a bug, someone could see about fixing that!

LCMAP_TRADITIONAL_CHINESE -- Maps simplified Chinese characters to traditional Chinese, passing through other characters unchanged. Thus 儈 (U+5108) becomes 侩 (U+4fa9). The dictionary used for this mapping is even smaller (only 2,191 ideographs) since there are many times that several traditional Chinese ideographs will map to one simplified ideograph (thus these two flags are not 100% reversible versions of each other). The table has not been updated since the LCMAP_SIMPLIFIED_CHINESE one was. Same problems with in-place update apply here -- if any NLS testers who are reading this want to put in a bug, it will be resolved as a duplicate of the other bug I was suggesting, above!

Notice those counts in there -- that is all that exists in the tables provided by Win32.

As of Unicode 4.01 (the last time I looked in to the matter) the Unihan.txt data file provided in the Unicode Character Database does not provide all that larger of a list (2629 simplified mappings including some from Extension B that Windows doesn't have and 2554 traditional mappings with analogous additional entries.

Though clearly Microsoft has better mappings, like the ones in Microsoft Office I mentioned:

but I don't know of any source available to programmers from Microsoft. Though people like Raymond Chen have mentioned other, external sources for doing the conversion in the past.

And if you look around on the web you can find lots of implementations in Perl and other languages, and some additional data tables to support the work.

When you consider the problems that face people in relation to IDN and traditional/simplified mappings, it really seems like this problem should be something that Windows does better.

A bit of trivia:

• most of the simplified Han used by these two mappings are not in Windows code page 950;
• all of the simplified Han used by these two mappings are in Windows code page 936;
most of the traditional Han used by these two mappings are not in Windows code page 936;
all of the traditional Han used by these two mappings are in Windows code page 950;
LCMapStringA converts to and from Unicode using the ACP of the locale you pass in, which can only amount to 936 or 950 and not both.

This makes LCMapStringA (rather than LCMapStringW) almost entirely useless for these two mappings, even though minimal effort to simply assume the code pages to use (936 or 950) based on the mapping direction would fix that. This problem has existed for every version of Windows since these flags have been supported, so I guess people aren't eager to make changes in this space....

This post brought to you by 傧 and 儐 (U+50a7 and U+5110, two Han ideographs with a relationship you can probably discern from context)

Warning: In this blog post I will be tooting my own horn. If that kind of thing disgusts you (as it usually does I!) as self-important and self-congratulatory ego-driven rubbish then you may want to skip on to the next post due out in a few minutes!

There was this program going on about Vista Heroes¹, before Vista shipped. It was all peer nominated and there was like a hero a week².

When the weekly mail came out describing who the newest hero was, it even jokingly mentioned how the person was nominated by their peers or maybe even themselves. :-)

I even nominated a few people myself from my own team. I noticed their names in the "Hall of Heroes" so maybe that was me who got them there.

At the end everyone got to vote on the biggest heroes from this pantheon.

With all that said....

I am not a Vista hero.

I know this because

• no one ever told me I was (I assume there was a T-shirt or a dove bar for the weekly winners?);
• a regular reader here was looking at the Hall of Heroes and noticed my name was not there, so they asked me about it.

Truth be told I hadn't noticed until then.

On the other hand (and this I found out when I looked at the list), neither is Raymond Chen nor Larry Osterman nor Mike Sheldon nor Michael Grier nor Jay Krell nor Rob Earhart.

For that matter, neither is Bryan Tuttle (and anyone who ever paid attention to daily build mails knows that Vista probably never would have made it into the hands and testers for half the cycle if not for the several man-months of work that Bryan put into the Vista build system each month!).

And there are others who fell in that same category of "no one filled out the nomination form for them" who (if I were asked to submit my own list of heroes during the project) I would have included.

At the same time, there are other people who I would consider crucial based on my own personal knowledge who did make the list. So the list is not useless, it just isn't complete.

There are perhaps even a couple on the list who I would really have recommended against had anyone asked, but that number is mercifully small and I am not going to be putting that list up for obvious reasons!

But I'll add three names of my own, when it is too late to go in the Hall of Heroes are too late to be recognized anywhere but here in SiaO.

For a specific reason -- between the highly individual efforts above and beyond the call of duty and solely because we saw important work that was not happening, each of us were able to work to keep two locales from being removed from the Vista "supported locales" list.

I'll explain why....

To be on that list means there has to be full support in fonts and rendering and locale data and input so that anyone who would call the language theirs can use the product.

The actual list of languages we partially support is obviously MUCH bigger; only a few make it to this smaller list.

If one of these core "support items" is missing, the product can't claim to support the locale, pure and simple.

But Yi and Amharic (which had almost all the required support scheduled and happening) were both missing input methods, each for very different reasons, and both could eaqsily have ended up on the chopping block³.

In the end:

• If it were not for the efforts of Wei Wu and I to push regularly and consistently hard for a solution to allow easier TSF TIPs to be created (that led directly to text based TIPs solution I have mentioned previously), there would have been no Yi input method done -- the work was done as a normal part of other people's jobs but the effort Wei and I put into the problem were just us caring about the right thing happening in the product, not because it was a part of our jobs at the time;
• If it were not for the efforts of Ning Jin-Grisaffi and I to get the Amharic input method created with the help of Daniel Yacob (all of this reported previously in Hang on just a [Hansel]Minute!) and into the product (and especially through triage with this brand new feature late in the game), there would have been no way to input Amharic -- the person whose job it was to provide a keyboard (and who assured everyone it was coming) left the company and we saw too late that there was no way to build a conventional keyboard for the language -- cutting was the only conventional, viable option.

So there are three additional heroes I would add to that list of Vista Heroes:

• Wei Wu
• Ning Jin-Grisaffi
• Michael Kaplan⁴

More important than other work? I suppose not.

Should I have just gone and filled out the nomination form back at the appropriate time? Probably so. :-)

To my knowledge we received neither any official recognition nor bonuses of any sort.

In my own opinion these two items make up the most significant work I did in Vista, above anything else I did related to [custom ]locales or keyboards or collation or NLS or standards or training or consulting.

We were heroes because from the point of view of those languages, our meager efforts were (in my opinion) quite heroic!

1 - Look here if you are an internal, if you are not then use your imagination, seeing the site is not necessary to the story.
2 - Since there were so many weeks in this cycle you end up with a pretty big list as I am sure you can imagine... :-)
3 - Or at best in the case of Yi been left on the list in violation of our "supported locale" definitions to meet PRC software requirements.
4 - Probably the closest you will ever get to see me tooting my own horn, truly. So enjoy it. :-)

This post brought to you by ꆈ and  አ (U+a188 and U+12a0, a.k.a. YI SYLLABLE NUO - the first letter in ꆈꌠꁱꂷ - and ETHIOPIC SYLLABLE GLOTTAL A - the first letter in አማርኛ)

YES, IT IS THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN.

THE TIME I MISSED LAST YEAR....

REF: We missed International Caps Lock Day! :-(

AS YOU MAY OR MAY NOT KNOW, THIS BLOG HAS A FEW OF THE MOST ADAMANT CAPS-LOCK HATERS AMONG IT'S READERS, SO THIS IS THEIR DAY TO COME OUT OF THE WOODWORK AND TEST MY PATIENCE WITH THEIR VARIOUS CAUSES AND ACCUSATIONS OF DICTATORSHIP WITHIN THE BLOG.

WHICH IT IS (A DICTATORSHIP, I MEAN)

ANYWAY, THE SCHEDULED POSTS TODAY WILL NOT BE IN ALL CAPS, SO I FIGURED THERE SHOULD BE AT LEAST ONE POST WHERE I LEFT THE CAPS LOCK ON.

WARNING: ANY COMMENTS TO THIS POST WITH LOWERCASE LETTERS IN IT WILL EITHER BE (A) DELETED, (B) RIDICULED, OR (C) BOTH, IN KEEPING WITH THE DAY. IF YOU ARE A COLEMAK ZEALOT, THEN HOLD DOWN YOUR SHIFT KEY FOR THE DURATION. :-)

THIS POST BROUGHT TO YOU BY EVERY SINGLE UNICODE CHARACTER WITH THE Lu UNICODE CATEGORY (ALL 1320 OF THEM?)

It is probably important for me to point out that a blog post represents a slice of life -- how I feel when I was writing it.

In fact, given that there are times I change my mind by the time I finish a post, it is possible to consider a blog post to be between 1 and 5 slices of life!

I find it easy to say things now like First the music, then the lyrics -- and make it rhyme! and act frustrated about how the lyrics and indeed the themes of songs are marginalized and at times even supplanted so easily.

But I did not always feel that way.

I used to quite passionately believe in the same thing that Seal expressed in the liner notes of his 1994 eponymous album:

    One of the most popular questions people seem to ask is "Why don't you print your lyrics on the album?". Well, the answer to that is that quite often, my songs mean one thing to me and another to the listener. But that's OK because I think it's the general vibe of what I'm saying that is important and not the exact literal translation. How many times have you fallen in love with a lyric that you thought went "Show me as day with Hilda Ogden and I'll despair," only to find that it went "Show me a way to solve your problems and I'll be there." I guess what I'm saying is that the song is always larger in the listeners mind because with it they attach imagery which is relative to their own personal experience. So it is your perception of what I'm saying rather than what I actually said that is the key.

But there are times that people cross the line -- what they mishear radically changes the theme of a song. And then I have to put my foot down.

It happened just last night, in fact. You see, Andrea called again.

Unlike last time, when she was expressing her epiphany about REM's Shiny Happy People and Moby's Beautiful, which ultimately was I think flawed, this time she had something different in mind.

She was expressing confusion.

Confusion inspired by me, apparently!

After seeing how interested I was in what was in the lyrics, you see, she has been listening to many of her old favorites, including an album that I had first recommended to her -- Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow.

She was having trouble with Today.

I expressed perhaps outrage or some kind of "it's 2am and I'm not drunk but I am tired" equivalent over this idea. it was a beautiful expression of love, and the first time I ever fell in love it was the image of Grace Slick's powerful and haunting voice atop the lyrics of Balin and Kantner that gave words to something I couldn't really even express.

Admittedly the effort was mostly a waste (a) it didn't work out -- which was her idea not mine, and (b) she was more of a CSN/CSNY fan than one of the Airplane. So I kept the idea here to myself for the latter reason, one that I was late grateful to due to the former one.

But anyway, I was overpoweringly curious as to how she could have trouble with Today and its idealized view of love, its building momentum, its quiet ending. What was so troubling?

"If you would shut up and quit ranting over your crush on Grace Slick I would tell you, Michael!" she said, exasperated.

It turns out the trouble she had with the very first line, which she quickly crooned to me "Today, I feel like leaving you more than before."

Leaving?

Leaving?

Leaving?

I  think my friend Andrea needs to start looking online to find out about song lyrics before reading to deeply into them.

"Andrea, darling. Honey. Sweety. The word was pleasing.

It turns out that after that word she made a few other assumptions and the song had turned into a breakup song. Which is a lot more than a Hilda Ogden kind of error, truly.

I quickly selected the song in WMP and played it, speaking along with the lyrics:

Today I feel like pleasing you more than before
Today I know what I want to do, but I don't know what for
To be living for you is all I want to do
To be loving you, it'll all be there when my dreams come true
Today you'll make me say that I somehow have changed
Today you'll look into my eyes, I'm just not the same
To be anymore than all I am would be a lie
I'm so full of love I could burst apart and start to cry
Today everything you want, I swear it all will come true
Today I realize how much I'm in love with you
With you standing here I could tell the world what it means to love
To go on from here I can't use words; they don't say enough
Please, please listen to me
It's taken so long to come true
And it's all for you
All for you....

This is really not the view I have of love now -- I am way too cynical for that (now it is more like the triumph of imagination over experience, in my eyes).

But as songs go, this one, while not being anything like where I am now, has more to do with where I came from vis-a-vis love than any one song really has a right to. If nothing else it is why I haven't fallen in love all that easily -- how often would you if the bar was placed so high? :-)

Anyway, I pointed her to a few lyrics sites and also told her that she may want to go back to listening to music the way she was before.

My need, in fact let's admit it my oddball fetish, to understand the original lyrics and the intent and the backstory behind the song is really not a reasonable thing for normal people to enjoy music.

And after trying to puzzle out the breakup version of Today for half a day, Andrea reluctantly agreed.

We talked for a bit longer, and then she had to go, so she told me I was still her favorite cylon, and said goodbye.

I don't know if how I listen to music is quite that weird, I mean it isn't really Cylon-level unusual. Perhaps it is an odd side effect of my interest in language.

But I suppose it is easy for it to distract a person too much to enjoy the song from time to time....

This post brought to you by 𝄻 (U+1d13b, a.k.a. MUSICAL SYMBOL WHOLE REST)

Kind of a meta-blog post....

I have a friend who told me how she and her boyfriend, despite often being separated by travel, have at the very least talked by phone every day for over a year -- and they alternate who calls each time.

I was stunned -- I mean, how could anyone accomplish that?

Forget about the "we're in love" crap, the ins and outs of life alone will often get in the way. How could a daily call be so consistently never forgotten?

Then she told me their secret.

They have no set time for their daily call.

If it is getting late and designated callee of the day has not heard from the caller, the callee might call and wonder whether someone forgot to call....

And then the caller can deny this and say that of course they didn't -- they had to finish doing the thing they were doing first. They were of course going to call, just not yet....

How does this relate to the blog?

Well....

I do not have a PDA.

And my handwriting is awful enough that I don't carry around a paper and pen.

I do have a laptop (actually, several of them!) but opening them up in random places to take down notes is generally not practical.

The upshot of all this is that there are lots of times when I don't have a chance to write stuff down.

This should not matter because I tend to remember everything, right?

Well, no.

For whatever reason, when I think of ideas that might be become interesting blog posts, I remember probably less than a quarter of them by the time I in a position to record it so I won't forget it.

Conversations with people, I usually remember. But even conversations about blog posts I tend to forget what the idea was even if I remember that an idea was mentioned.

Now sometimes I remember some of them later, or the idea comes up again and I remember that it was already an idea.

And obviously there always seems to be something to write about, so the blog itself is not starving -- the beast is fed pretty regularly.

But from time to time someone will ask me if I wrote about that thing that came up in a conversation, and sometimes it is one of these "lost ideas."

And I say not yet, but it'll get there eventually....

So are my friend and her boyfriend lying when they say they didn't forget?

Am I?

I haven't decided yet for sure, but I am inclined to say no.

That tickler keeps you from forgetting, so the claim that the call would happen is true, in large part because of the unspoken "because I have you to keep me from forgetting" that the other person may not even know about is a real thing.

It is much more genuine than a situation that is a lie. Like the reflex response to the late phone call question "Did I wake you?" (you know, where you almost always say no, you didn't even when you obviously did).

We never thank people for reminding us, mainly because the delicate dance of the illusion of remembering demands of us that we do not. But we owe them our thanks....

I don't mean to imply that I am in love with all my readers, or that they are in love with me. I just noticed the situational similarities!

If you wonder whether you are yourself in that same category for me, the easiest way is to put in the Suggestion Box or in email, like via that Contact link. Because once it gets there, it won't ever be forgotten, until it is done. :-)

This post brought to you by ⩬ (U+2a6c, a.k.a. SIMILAR MINUS SIMILAR)

It started just recently.

Like within the last six months.

In three different business units of Microsoft, all separate from my own.

In each case, a fairly young (well, compared to me) program manager charged with dealing with a particular globalization/internationalization issue was told to contact me for more information on some aspect of the issue they had to work through.

In all three cases, they were not told very much about me. They were told about the whole "crotchety old man" thing that is apparently part of my reputation these days, and that this came from largely from my backcompat concerns and the fact that I knew my stuff in the area.

None of them were told my age (perhaps those making the recommendation did not know it), but all three were shocked when they met me. Twice.

The first time that I looked so young, and the second time that I was as old as I was (which, since I've had a birthday in the interim was younger than I am now).

I should mention the last part of the reputation, the part that inspired the title -- that they should look out as I could be a real asshole (I think one was told jerk).

Now all of them were pleasantly surprised that I ended up being very helpful, and each separately admitted that they were expecting me to be much worse than I was, in some cases due to having witnessed e-mail exchanges where let's just say I did not always show the tolerance and patience that I would rather be well known for, all things being equal.

The most amusing of the quotes was the title of this post -- "Well, you're only an asshole in e-mail".

It gave me pause, let me tell you.

At the time I asked her "Do you mean in a good way?"

Later I asked Cindy, whose response was "i thought you were quite helpful over email actually" though as a bit of a disclaimer she has only ever been on one email thread I was on and in that one the problem was dispatched quickly and without much contention.

Maybe that points to the underlying cause of the "asshole" email behavior -- when people aren't listening or getting it or wanting them to, etc. Although I try not to, I could certainly do better there.

As far as I know, anyone who comes to me with genuine desire to understand the nature of an issue will get a ton of help from me, whereas I get curt and impatient with people who don't show much interest in the problem or the language issues behind it, and by and large I won't be an asshole to them....

Kind of fascinating to consider the forces that lead to one response versus another, huh? :-)

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

There will probably be some technical stuff in here but it will be mostly not so much.... 

I have had both friends and colleagues warn me about BWI (Blogging While Intoxicated).

They usually cite some examples from me, e.g. TechEd Orlando: Day 3 and Amazing what a difference a preposition makes (aka Boy with stick, gets no chick), and suggest that these were not good posts to do.

Of course they would do better without those citations since I enjoyed doing them tremendously at the time and I thought they were fine when I looked at them later. I simply have no idea what they mean about how bad BWI is.

If you want to think about dangerous tasks, one I have never tried to avoid is CWI (Coding While Intoxicated) because if you're up then you're up. May as well use the energy while you have it if you have nothing better to do. And a clean, tight algorithm helps one keep one's mind off the fact that it was a mistake not to kiss that girl or ask for her number or whatever (to momentarily channel my more distant past!).

Though I admit I have truly never been foolish enough or drunk enough to CIWI (Check-In While Intoxicated). No matter how smart the ideas seem when you are coding them, and how occasionally you may have been right, it is also possibly some of the most ridiculous crap that ever made its way into the source tree. So all things considered, it is better if it does not. Thus while CWI is something I have done before, CIWI is not.

Makes me wonder if the check-in suite should include a Breathalyzer or something to avoid CIWI, for people with less self-control?

Or maybe functions your write while CWI should include the Breathalyzer value in the header -- and perhaps one of the people doing the CR (code review) should be equally drunk so that they can better appreciate the algorithm and thus assure they are in the proper state of CRWI (Code Review While Intoxicated).

This might make lots of sense also for maintenance on the code later, so that they can understand the code properly? :-)

Funny how I can sit here and say it is such a big deal not to CIWI yet BWI is no big deal, now that I have committed it to show up on the blog. I mean, any check-in, no matter how late, can usually be reverted prior to the next build if it was a bad idea, while one can't ever take down a blog post.

So the consequences of BWI are potentially much worse than CIWI could ever really be.

As I write this post, I am actually BWH (Blogging While Hungover) which although I think this post is fun I definitely don't feel like I am having as much fun doing it than I remember in the past while BWI. It take a lot more effort to think through the general feeling of blah that is the downside of using alcohol as a tool to help take back the weekend, so I think I will not go down that road.

I could be crazy but it seems that I am drinking more these days after having fallen in to hanging out with a slightly younger crowd. But then I think no -- the not-quite-so-young-but-not-really-so-old crowd might do it a bit differently (wine tastings and grabbing wines from their cellars as opposed to clubs and bars) but social intercourse seems to have always included alcohol to some extent.

The only real difference is the times in the past that I have been on medications for my MS that I did not want to have metabolize too quickly. Which would make me a bit of an oddity at times (who the hell goes to a wine tasting without drinking a lot?), but I think people understood mostly. The ones who din't can actually just go and get bent.

I feel like without actually having a true mid-life crisis I have accidentally (by the people I have been hanging out with in various contexts) fallen into re-living my twenties a little bit, in the twilight years of my thirties. Though not fully re-living, since the lessons of the book I Worship the Very Dirt She Treats Me Like: The Story of a Warm, Caring Guy in a Society of Cold, Calculating Women were always in the back on my mind since I first read the book at the tender age of 21 or 22....

Lessons which I learned back in my early 20s with Chapter 5 (I Wish I Could Love You, but I Can't) and Christine's immortal words "Well, I guess there's a fine line between 'warm and caring' and just being a pest.". And then it helped me defend myself in my 30s with Chapter 2 (The 30-Year-Old's Achilles' Heel - A 23-Year-Old) -- a chapter that applies even moreso as one gets older! :-)

Though in truth I was hooked by the title and subtitle and the back-cover quote "Have you ever laid your heart on the line -- and have the skid marks to prove it?".

You can find the book used on Amazon here or here if you are curious!

This book has had way more of a shaping effect on my approach to romance than it probably ought, but it definitely keeps me much more aloof about this younger world than I was the first time I was in it. To misquote Robert Duvall from that movie The Paper for a moment:

The people you hang out with, you move in their world, but it is their world. You can't live like them. You'll never keep up.

None of which stops it from being fun, and that can certainly count as stage two of taking back the weekend -- enjoy life. Working on it, and succeeding more often than not....

I think I have now realized one of the strengths of BWH -- I forgot all about my hangover when writing most of the above, and the general philosophy of mind DCA (Don't Code Angry) makes the idea of CWH (Coding While Hungover) a much less pleasant idea.

Much better to be happy, as much and as often as one can manage, something I won't add to my commitments at work even though it will have a lot more to do with my success as an employee than any of the crap that is in there.

Can one do that with just work? Well, a little bit. But not all the time. In that way it is like sex (a night of great sex all night can make up for the fact that you got no sleep that night, but it won't work two nights in a row), and you need to have more balance between work and life if you want to be happy.

This post brought to you by ䷇ (U+4dc7, a.k.a. HEXAGRAM FOR HOLDING TOGETHER)

One of the great things about being able to spend time out in the world, with people, is getting the chance to hear things.

I tend to be a people watcher. too.

And with all that, you get to hear things from time to time, as well.

And sometimes the lines are very clever, even!

Like when they are like from the Friends episode The One Where Ross Finds Out, where Ross discovers that Rachel likes him:

ROSS: Rach, I got a message from you. Who's Michael?

RACHEL: Oh my God. Oh my God Ross, no, hang up the phone, give me the phone Ross, give me the phone, give me the phone, give me the...

ROSS: You're over me?

RACHEL: Ohh God.

ROSS: Wha, you're uh, you're, you're over me?

RACHEL: Ohh, ohh.

ROSS: When, when were you, under me? Rach. Rachel do you, I mean, were you uh... What?

The line I heard was better, I think.

Since as far as I could tell from my amateur eye it was not rehearsed or created by a staff of writers....

The overheard quote?

You're over me and I didn't even have a chance to be conflicted!

I probably would have better served by having some more context (before and after these words) to be able to fully discern their meaning. I admit I was confused at first.

Though my imagination readily filled in quite a bit of the backstory on this one....

Know what I mean? :-)

In linguistic terms, this would be the [fictional] pragmatic content to explain the semantic content.

This post brought to you by ䷅ (U+4dc5, a.k.a. HEXAGRAM FOR CONFLICT)

One of the problems in being a generalist in so many different areas is that I am interested in so many different things that I had no way of becoming an expert in all of them.

Luckily I have friends like Melanie (the technical editor and musical expert from Garden Path Menus) who are experts in areas like music (from Medieval times to now) and with her permission I am quoting an email she sent yesterday after a great conversation she was in with a few people about music, math, and more:

...I wrote up a little bit about the history of music notation, complete with pictures. J

http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/appendix/notation/Neumes.html  

The dates on the chart in the link are not quite right (it depends on what country you’re documenting), but they’re close enough for most folks.

The left column of squiggles is what Hildegard von Bingen still used in the 12^th century. In the 6^th century, when these neumes began to be used, they were not drawn on ledger lines, so there was no way to know how great the interval was between two notes—accommodating text might require that a note identical in pitch to a neighboring note be placed higher or lower on the page. These were called “unheightened neumes.”

By the 9^th century, composers started to draw ledger lines and the pitch intervals between notes began to be consistent (“heightened neumes”). For the first time, someone could accurately melodically replicate a song they had not heard, although the length of notes was still up to the individual performers. They narrowed the number of ledger lines to four in about the 10^th century (notes in a sequential scale on a row—on the line and between the lines—added up nicely to the eight notes of a modern scale. Music was still in five-note modes at the time, but because finding the drone note was an obvious way to pair voices, the octave became an important concept to the evolution of early harmony and polyphony. More on that later).

The block notes in the center column of the table began to be popular in the late 11^th century. The block notes very much imitate the earlier neumes, but the duration of a note began to be relevant. The duration was influenced partly by text and musical sensibility, but composers could add dots and little lines (called epicemas) to note shapes indicating that a note should be lengthened and by how much. The primary motivation for developing these larger note shapes was so that groups could participate (rather than soloists, for whom the earlier music was intended). They were large enough to be seen from a distance. (A whole choir sang from one large book.) Block notes are still in use by people who perform Gregorian chant. The earlier neumes are still used by Hildegardians and by scholars working on the Gregorian chants that are old enough to have been written in them originally. The neumes provide perfectly singable information, and are considerably more musically informative than modern notation regarding nuance of inflection, duration, intensity, and intention.

The link’s chart is missing a stage in development, so here’s a link to what happened next.

http://ieee.uwaterloo.ca/praetzel/mp3-cd/info/raybro/jjj1a.jpg

Next came white note mensuration. Although it was developed in the early days of the 15^th century, it was fast replaced (within century and a half, or so) by modern notation (in the right-hand column of the earlier link’s table). White note mensuration was not adopted by all countries—the Italians, always innovators, were the primary adopters. In white notes, the black diamond was a count of one beat, the open diamond with a stem was two beats, the dot meant to add half again (so a dotted open diamond was three counts, a dotted black diamond was a beat and a half), and so forth. The number of ledger lines increased to five because relatively little music took place in less than an octave. (More singers had training than ever before, and keyboard instruments began to increase in popularity and offered considerably greater range than previous instruments.) For the first time, duration of a note was prescribed by the composer. How fast or slow the piece was performed was largely up to a conductor, a role that was another new invention (someone who interpreted the music and led the group in a formal way—previously there was a leader to keep groups together, but leaders had no special training and just waved a hand around to show when to change notes). Some of the symbols (like the C with a slash through it on the top lines near the left edge) told the leader how fast to go (a C meant—and still means—common time, which is heartbeat or walking speed, or 60 beats per minute; a C with a slash meant half that speed, or twice as slow, etc.), and instruments and singers could finally begin to make complex music together because the rules of music were starting to converge on a standard.

The end of the 16^th century saw the establishment of major innovations that would change music composition forever: key signatures (how many sharps and flats), measure lines (separating a series of notes into discrete chunks), clefs (marking a range of notes. Some clefs already existed, but they were considered movable. The 16^th century created a standard and pitch range for each), and time signatures (how many beats per measure throughout the piece—a major innovation in allowing larger groups and diverse instruments to perform together).

The rules of music were pretty stable by the end of the 16^th century, when modern notation was in common usage. This is where the story I told of Michael Praetorius and Syntagma Musicum fits in, the documentation of modern music notation and performance that J.S. Bach finished, and the standards that we still use today. They got it so right that nothing has changed in 300+ years.

What we do with these notation standards has changed considerably, in large part, thanks to Beethoven. But that’s a story for another day. So is the tangent about rhythm and rhythmic patterns and its merry companion, counterpoint. In brief, rhythm wasn’t part of Western music until white note mensuration made standard note lengths. With rhythm came harmony (as opposed to polyphony), and in a hop, skip, and jump, music began to sound modern. Consider the Italian Renaissance the beginning of modern music, with rhythm, harmony, notation standards, and pitch standards. Harmony plus rhythm bred counterpoint further north. But I digress.

Here’s a little running parallel that I can’t resist. Polyphony—multiple parallel lines of melody—began to develop in the very late 12^th century and hit its height in the 14^th century (or so, depending on what country you are talking about). Harmony (in the modern sense, where chords follow an established formula and some musical lines are not at melodic, but are provided purely to fill in harmonies) evolved around the late 15^th century, right around the development of modern notation. The pianoforte had been invented and allowed faster evolution than ever before because, for the first time, a performer could play loudly and softly on a single instrument and specific emotions could be defined by a composer. Emotion hadn’t really come into it before. It was all about the math....

Do you see what I mean?

I could read a dozen books and not come out of the experience understanding as much as I did from the above.

The people you get to feel smarter just for knowing them are very cool....

This post brought to you by ♬ (U+266c, a.k.a. BEAMED SIXTEENTH NOTES)

Dan asked via the Contact link:

I'm developing a desktop app that needs to display bi-directional text fields and accordingly requires that "Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages" be checked in "supplemental language support".

I saw the post called "Installing supplemental language support programmatically". The article this post points to would technically work, but of course the user would need to load their windows installation disk. I anticipate that this might confuse some users and would really like to avoid it and make the installation of the app as simple as possible.

So...

Is supplemental language support functionality available as a redistributable? If not, would it be ok to deploy the necessary files with my app and make the required registry changes with the installation? Would you be able to provide the detail on which files and registry changes are needed? If not, are there any other ideas?

That post, Installing supplemental language support programatically, has indeed attracted some interest.

Unfortunately, the answer may not be the one people would like to hear....

it is not legal to redistribute pieces of the Windows install, and there is no separate pack for this. The only solution that does not violate the license is for them to have their Windows install disk available in the case where they never installed this support.

Given that the install controlled by those two check boxes quite literally represents millions of dollars in fonts, IMEs, and other content between them, an "easier" solution not involving the customer's original media is really assuming way too much....

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I am under attack here by spam and by splogs (hundreds of messages a day almost none of which is getting through due to my comment settings but almost none of which is getting caught by the spam filters. :-(

They seem to be equal opportunity (looking at any post as a good target) though three in particular get the bulk of the lame traffic attempts:

• The Suggestion Box
• Getting the real (localized) name of the keyboard from May of 2006
• More on cursor movement from December of 2005

Other than the Suggestion Box, which I guess is more widely seen with a link available from every page, I don't see much rel reason behind the focus in these posts. The attempts at spam are all over the map from porn to Viagra to artificial enhancements of various sorts for both sexes (or maybe the undecided of one sex), nothing really to do with the post topics.

They take two different forms, with a third formerly common one that I don't see much of these days:

• A bunch of URLs to another site, or
• A single word such as "Nice!" or "Sorry" or "Great!" or similar, with a link to their spam site, or
• Text like "This is s great resource. Thanks for posting it!" or such, again with evil links.

Things may have picked up a it since I opened up comments longer than 90 days, but I am not quite ready to give up on that just yet....

Is it unreasonable to ask for a bit more intelligent targeting of the spam here? So it can at least claim some nominal sort of relevance? Am I reaching for the stars here?

I guess providing servics in Windows to improve the searching for relevant spam targets would be counter-producctive for users, on the whole. :-)

No one really wanted to sponsor this post, though within a few days Viagra might try to sponsor it