January, 2008

From the recently pre-recorded blogs collection...

Always good for a laugh to see the error code make the error seem more serious. :-)

Federation Service Proxy Communication Events

Of course I always went along with Heinlein in thinking that the true Number of the Beast was

6⁶⁶ or 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056

That could be ten thousand three hundred and fourteen quadrillion, four hundred twenty-four thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight trillion, four hundred and ninety thousand five hundred and thirty-five billion, five hundred and forty-six milliard, one hundred and seventy-one million, nine hundred forty-nine thousand, and fifty-six.

Or ten octillion, three hundred fourteen septillion, four hundred twenty-four sextillion, seven hundred ninety-eight quintillion, four hundred ninety quadrillion, five hundred thirty-five trillion, five hundred forty-six billion, one hundred seventy-one million, nine hundred forty-nine thousand, and fifty six.

Base six would be cooler, though -- Base 6: 10¹⁰¹⁰ would be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, though no words for that.

Either way,  this is a number that would be an overflow for most error code and event code structures. So this Event code of the Beast would be its own little apocalypse. :-)

This post brought to you by ද (U+0daf, aka SINHALA LETTER ALPAPRAANA DAYANNA)

Posted live, because I still care....

Worth is hard to judge.
Am IDisposable now?
And who will collect?

I have to analyze the situation a bit further to be sure, but I am feeling kind of like a disposable resource at the moment. Thus the Haiku.

I suppose I'll manage.

Bleh.

This post brought to you by ␘ (U+2418, aka SYMBOL FOR CANCEL)

(Hat tip and apologies to the Goddess Aretha whose version of the Otis Redding song provided the title inspiration, which is much more appropriate and/or wholesome than a [misquoted ]P.T. Barnum reference would have been; although both are perhaps less amusing than a Joyce Botterill -- bka Judy Carne -- reference, the latter would have been to many the least recognizable of the three and I am not nearly as much of a TV snob as I am a music snob about these things!)

This post is a little bit related to another recent blog (Throwing a BRIC [with Diwali written on it] at Outlook, aka Attn. Outlook: There *is* an 'I' in BRIC) and more specifically a comment to it from Pavanaja U B:

FYI, Outlook 2003 Hindi version has the Hindu Saka calendar followed by Govt of India. It will show Hindu months in Hindi. I will send the screenshots, if you need.

Indeed it does, and the comment took me back....

I don't remember exactly when it was, but it was a long time ago.

Like maybe five years ago. It was before Office 2003 and Outlook 2003 had shipped, and way back when Vista was called Longhorn.

Cathy and I had a great idea a few months prior related to a way to stop having Windows and Office "surprise" each other with their respective features and bugs -- we would instead meet regularly to sync up on what we were both doing in the internationalization space. Technically I think it started as me grouching off about some particular mismatch and how embarrassing it was (I think it was our fault that time but both sides had been guilty at different times) and her suggesting we actually meet and communicate to keep lack of communication from being the problem, but the details are fuzzy. Eventually it led to a regular meeting that proved to be a really productive idea that was extended to other people on the team who were involved in stuff.

We also did the same thing with SQL Server as well, but that is unrelated to this post.

Anyway, fast forward a few months and the Office folks made a request of us to support the Saka era calendar for India. They were supporting it in Outlook.

But our schedule was full and our calendar support sucked overall in Windows (ref: Calendars on Win32 -- just there for show, Calendars on Win32 -- Not all there yet and others). Support for Indic would require a major overhaul that no one figured we had time for (not knowing at the time it would be over half a decade before LonghornVista saw the sunlight), so we pointed how any effort without that overhaul would just kind of suck from a customer standpoint and left it at that.

We didn't end up adding it to Vista, as they requested of us. But then, we did not do the Persian, Coptic, or Ethiopic calendars either. Lots of missing calendars, I'll talk about them another day. Well, on several different, other days.

Meanwhile the support is in Outlook, though a little hidden. You have to go to Tools|Options, hit the Calendar Options... button, and then look near the bottom of the dialog and choose the Enable alternate calendar: checkbox and choose Hindi/Saka Era:

Now what does this give you exactly?

At the very top of Calendar view, you will see something like this:

And that is really it.

The support is not exposed programatically, there is no other formatting support and no parsing support, either. It does not show up in the calendar control on new appointments, or any of the other myriad places one might expect it. The help content is just one topic with two paragraphs:

The date and time format used for each Indic language is determined by the calendar chosen. The list of calendars that you have available is determined by the languages you have enabled and by the operating system language setting you have selected in Windows Control Panel under Regional and Language Options for Windows XP or Regional Options for Windows 2000. Depending on the Indic language you have enabled, you can choose among these calendars: Saka Era (Hindi only), and Gregorian (all variants).

When a Indic language is the installed (installed language: The base language used that governs how several language characteristics will behave, such as the language of the primary dictionary, and the direction and alignment of text (left-to-right or right-to-left).) language, the predominate Indic calendar for that language will be the default calendar used— for example, for Hindi, Western or Saka Era; for Indic, Western.

Now for me, I have all languages installed, and the only choice that was Indic in that first dropdown was Hindi and the only calender under Hindi was Saka Era.

This seems strange to me given my understanding of calendars in India. I'll quote from the Wikipedia article on the Hindu calendar a bit:

Regional variants
The Indian Calendar Reform Committee, appointed in 1952 (shortly after Indian independence), identified more than thirty well-developed calendars, all variants of the Surya Siddhanta calendar outlined here, in systematic use across different parts of India. These include the widespread Vikrama and Shalivahana calendars and regional variations thereof. The Tamil calendar, a solar calendar, is used in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Vikrama and Shalivahana calendars
The two calendars most widely used in India today are the Vikrama calendar followed in Western and Northern India and Nepal, and the Shalivahana or Saka calendar which is followed in South India and Maharashtra.

Both the Vikrama and the Shalivahana eras are lunisolar calendars, and feature annual cycles of twelve lunar months, each month divided into two phases: the 'bright half' (shukla) and the 'dark half' (bahula); these correspond respectively to the periods of the 'waxing' and the 'waning' of the moon. Thus, the period beginning from the first day after the new moon and ending on the full moon day constitutes the shukla paksha or 'bright half' of the month; the period beginning from the day after the full moon until and including the next new moon day constitutes the bahula paksha or 'dark half' of the month.

The names of the 12 months, as also their sequence, are the same in both calendars; however, the new year is celebrated at separate points during the year and the "year zero" for the two calendars is different. In the Vikrama calendar, the zero year corresponds to 58 BCE, while in the Shalivahana calendar, it corresponds to 78 CE. The Vikrama calendar begins with the month of Baishakh (April). The Shalivahana calendar begins with the month of Chaitra (March) and the Ugadi/Gudi Padwa festivals mark the new year.

Another little-known difference between the two calendars exists: while each month in the Shalivahana calendar begins with the 'bright half' and is followed by the 'dark half', the opposite obtains in the Vikrama calendar. Thus, each month of the Shalivahana calendar ends with the no-moon day and the new month begins on the day after that, while the full-moon day brings each month of the Vikrama calendar to a close.

National calendars in South and South East Asia
A variant of the Shalivahana Calendar was reformed and standardized as the Indian National calendar in 1957. This official calendar follows the Shalivahana calendar in beginning from the month of Chaitra and counting years with 78 CE being year zero. It features a constant number of days in every month (with leap years).

The Bengali Calendar, or Bangla calendar (introduced 1584), is widely used in eastern India in the state of West Bengal, Tripura and Assam. A reformation of this calendar was introduced in present-day Bangladesh in 1966, with constant days in each month and a leap year system; this serves as the national calendar for Bangladesh. Nepal follows the Bikram Sambat. Parallel months and roughly the same periods apply to a number of Hindu-influenced calendars in Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Now somehow if this a brief description of the modern calendar situation for (to use the term Office does) Indic, then having the Saka Era only and having it only there for Hindi appears to me to be more than a little bit incomplete. It seems like in the I within BRIC there are a whole bunch of potential work items -- not only for different calendars but also for different formatting, and maybe even for programmatic ways to extend the support, too.

Remember how I said earlier in this blog how an incomplete effort done by the NLS folks here would have really kind of suck? Well, Microsoft did one better than the subjunctive text here; they provided Outlook to prove that it would. And does....

And of course the underlying need, which fits in with the original request the Office folks made for Vista way back when it was Longhorn, is a better Indic calendar story from NLS and from the .NET Framework. So that applications like Outlook don't need to build incomplete hacks like this. Given how late the product ended up being, we really dropped the ball here, somewhat continuously. With calendars, we still seem to be doing so.

It's funny, I was having hot cocoa the other day with a former colleague from my past life in the Office world (someone who helps prove to me that the stars can also rise!). We were talking about the Y2K effort in Office way back when and the later DST2007 nightmare, and of course the connection to the lame calendar story came up in the conversation -- seems like there is always enough time to complain about calendars even if we lack the time to actually fix them!

As product/feature areas go, Calendars seem like one that we are pretty terrible in, and I hope that the investigation on what ought to be there happens so the work can in fact happen. Because the Outlook feature seems woefully inadequate for the whole market, just as the holiday support is for the whole world in general and for Indic in particular. It is an area long overdue for fixing, especially for all of the important markets that have no good coverage at all....

This post brought to you by শ (U+09b6, aka BENGALI LETTER SHA)

From the recently pre-recorded blogs collection...

Warning -- not even remotely technical, and thus entirely skippable for people wanting that sort of thing.

You see, I've gotten some questions via the Contact Link recently from people wanting real information about the differences that multiple sclerosis can cause in a life when it comes down to the actual business of living. Perhaps not a regular "series" but I'll try one and maybe some of the other issues will be a subject for future posts.

The question I was asked via the Contact link by Jon (though he admitted it was not his real name):

I'm a regular reader here and I have MS myself (Dx 1998, Tx Avonex, relapsing/remitting) and I have found it has started to impact dating more than it used to.

You seem to hint a lot about old relationships and how MS has influenced and not influenced some of them. I wonder whether you would be willing to talk about more directly about how it impacts you.

There is one thing about multiple sclerosis that is kind of haunting -- its effect on new relationships.

Note that none of this applies to relationships that started before the MS Dx -- that is a whole different set of dynamics that I will may talk about another day....

Some of this applies to pretty much any kind of potential disability problem, and some is specific to MS.

Because multiple sclerosis isn't a phrase, and it isn't a noun. It's a sentence. And when I say sentence, I don't mean a death sentence, I mean a life sentence.

The disease itself, at first glance, I'm not shy about. And it is not as big of a blocker as you might think. I mean, it does put some women off, sure. But it inspires a bit of a maternal instinct in others -- so it kind of averages out in terms of how I do, socially. A friend of mine (who is much cooler than I am) thinks that I've got game which isn't true, but it was sweet of her to say I guess, and I suppose I get some interest. And there is some attraction in the MS, with the whole broken man thing; the "nursing a wounded spirit" concept does have appeal, to some.

Once in, there is a whole "Chuck Yeager" phase that some women go through. You know, trying to test the MS out and see what it can "withstand", what I can feel and what I can't, what works and what doesn't. Sometimes this aspect proves to be quite novel and it can at times be a rather interesting distraction.

Anyway, following all this, it would be about the time that the "honeymoon" ends.

After all, the roommate won't always ome in and say the room smells like sex and candy; life demands more from us than just disco lemonade.

This, my friends, this is about the time that the wheels come off the wagon. This is when MS can and will scare women who are otherwise interested.

The reasons vary but generally fall into two categories, that are essentially age-related.

Younger women might be thinking about the future -- a future they may never had to thought much about seriously, before, stuff like having kids some day, etc. Even before I found out how serious the problem might be in relation to both the person with MS and where the child is raised (ref: 30-40 times more likely to pass MS on to the next generation), I knew it was something to be considered. A younger woman thinking about the future can find that issue to be pretty blocking. Especially since they might prefer relationships that (if there are obstacles) tend toward the more fixable type, under the premise that since men in general are works in progress, fixable problems have a way of sometimes actually getting fixed. At least it is possible. With MS, there is less to be fixed¹.

In fact, post diagnosis, there are only four people I have ever dated who were younger than me -- they were all essentially net negative experiences as romantic relationships, in the end (sometimes we found a more stable level in friendship, sometimes not -- with only four examples it is hard to establish patterns or draw conclusions!).

Even when I was younger, I tended to be more attracted to older women, in no small part because of this very issue.

Older women, on the other hand, have usually learned that men can't be fixed, really -- that men are basically bears with furniture and you have to find one who you like as they are since mostly they don't change. Thus the unfixable nature of MS does not daunt as much. But they will have drive and direction, and they certainly tend to think longer term over life as a whole. In that context, the visual of a one-in-three chance of being the one pushing a wheelchair is one that has scared off more than one potential long term partner over the years. Especially when I don't have a lot I can say to disavow the possibility. What can I say --- that I would make it a powered wheelchair, or an IBOT? Holy missing the point, Batman!

Either way, in the end, the boy in the chair don't get busy with the au pair², and I don't mean that in the generically appealing "he won't stray" sense, either. Though I won't, of course. Look, it was just an expression!

Plus, in all cases women will get advice from their friends, some of which can be about thinking hard about the price they would have to pay to be with someone with MS. Even I have trouble selling the notion that the pros would outweigh the cons, and I have the benefit of knowing that my agenda is to genuinely be with the person. How likely is the other random friend of hers to support the idea? There is a non-zero cost to consider....

Hell, many times I am that friend -- and I can't lie to them, or I am not really being much of a friend, am I?

And this is before you get into my personality, the effect of which tends to belie my friend's claim about me having game, seriously. Although I do have a blog groupie or two (and used to even have the occasional CompuServe or newsgroup groupie), the attempted conversions have been bad enough experiences to shy me away from meeting anyone online for purposes of forming a relationship. I simply can't live up to the guy who writes this blog, even though he happens to be. :-)

These days, considering all of the above, I most often decide not to take the chance of trying to move things to the next level. I treat it as flattering, but I hold back, so afraid that the juice won't be worth the squeeze in the end that I decide go thirsty no matter how attractive or interested the fruit appears to be. That is easy for guys -- just act clueless and you don't even have to reject a person. Women expect guys to be clueless anyway, you know?

In the end, I wind up with a lot of friends. And a couple of ex-girlfriends. And occasionally, people who are both.

But significant relationships? Few and far between. I just don't take those kinds of risks anymore.

Popping the stack to get back to the original question, I'd say I allowed myself to let MS beat me more than I really should have -- it makes me too cautious, too unwilling to deal with the way people will react to it. My best advice I can give would be to not do that -- because once you do that then you need to find a truly exceptional woman to be willing to break through all those barriers and as the above might imply they are dealing with enough without all that....

1 - It is kind of ironic to me how much women are frustrated at being unable to "fix" the MS given that guys are the ones usually thought to have a tendency to really want to fix things even when women often just want to be able to talk about a problem without trying to have their guy try to jump in and solve it. Because sometimes (in fact usually) for women it isn't about saving the day, it's about spending the day -- you know, being there, and being supportive. Given that wry fact, that women don't tend to take that same approach here seems worth noting.
2 - The latest incarnation of my answer to my ex-fiance's girls with glasses gets no passes, with previous answers being boy with stick gets no chick and boy who scoots gets no beauts.

This post brought to you by മ (U+0d2e, aka MALAYALAM LETTER MA)

From the recently pre-recorded blogs collection...

Over in the microsoft.public.dotnet.internationalization newsgroup, Norman Diamond posted (in his unique way that all who know it treasure!):

What do you call it when your version of Visual Studio promises not to support its own language, promises not to support most other countries' languages, and promises only 7-bit clean ASCII?  Although such an environment is very useful when coding device drivers and maybe some other specialized projects, I have to wonder about the general case.  Should we call this deinternationalization?  D20N for short?

First, an example which isn't 7-bit clean, which supports 3 foreign languages but not Japanese:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/ja-jp/library/y99d1cd3(VS.80).aspx
* 10.  F5 キーを押すか、または [デバッグ] メニューの [開始] を
*       クリックします。
*       オペレーティング システムの UI 言語に応じて、英語、フランス語、
*       またはドイツ語のあいさつがダイアログ ボックスに表示されます。
(Press the F5 key or click the "Debug" menu "Start" entry.  Depending on the operating system's UI language, an English, French, or German greeting will be displayed in the dialog box.)

Next, how to really restrict developers to a single foreign language:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/ja-jp/library/7k989cfy(VS.80).aspx
*  バイナリ エディタを使用すると、.resx ファイルを含むリソース ファイル
*  を、16 進形式または ASCII 形式のバイナリ レベルで編集できます。
(If you use the binary editor, you can edit resource files including .resx files in hexadecimal or ASCII.)
Fortunately Visual Studio 2005 didn't obey this one.  It displayed resources in either Shift-JIS or Unicode, I'm not sure which.

Now, I'm really glad that Visual Studio 2005 supports its own language. This beats some Win32 APIs.  But MSDN's promises of D20N started out looking pretty discouraging.

What we are seeing here in the first part is a combination of two different efforts that have ended up combining in a rather unfortunate and embarrassing way.

The first effort is the one to provide better globalization/localization information and samples for developers.This is obviously a very good thing that I am sure everybody who reads here would like to see more of whenever possible.

In this case the Windows Forms Programming Walkthrough: Localizing Windows Forms provides a WinForms sample that supports English, German, and French. It would be hard for me not to be excited about content like that making it out into the world....

The second effort is the one to provide localized versions of the content in MSDN into many different languages, which I think I have mentioned before. Now this too is a very good thing that I know many people would like to see more of, seeing pages like the above one in Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese. French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and so on.

Now you can see where the problem comes in -- the localizers of the content are nor modifying the underlying samples, thus every language MSDN is localized into that does not have the list of translations match the list of app localizations will have these cases of "how can you say that support a language when your samples don't support it, even when localized into that languge....

But is the answer to

• remove the content, or
• to have the localizers update and test the sample code into their target language, or
• to have somebody do the work to always have every sample like this support every language?

Or is the status quo where these efforts being done by entirely different teams at entirely different points of the cycle are not seeing their efforts in general and their language lists in particular synchronized, due to the extreme complexity involved with maintaining such a synchronization as samples are added and as localizations are added?

Personally that is what I would suggest, although perhaps including some text to explain the apparent limitations could be worth considering.

I'll talk about the second part of Norman's posting another day....

This post brought to you by ッ (U+30c3, aka KATAKANA LETTER SMALL TU)

From the recently pre-recorded blogs collection...

The other day I had somebody ask me about a blog that was going to be posted that she could not find. She wasn't sure whether it was problems with the search capabilities or it just wasn't put up yet or some other reason.

I had to tell her that the post wasn't going to be put up (in this case because the behavior the blog was going to describe does not actually occur as it was reported (yes, I do verify stuff before I post about it!). Often times if I am talking to you about it that may be part of me investigating the issue. It may have been your answers that disuaded me!

She persisted for a moment, wondering what other factors kept a blog from being posted.

I tell her a whole bunch of reasons, and after she asked for examples I told her I'd write a blog about it.

This is that blog. :-)

There are of course the conventional reasons -- like product info that a team doesn't want covered yet, or that they want me to delay coverage. This has held up posts for months and one particular series for years, even (this is the TableTextService.dll thing, which I hope to be able to finally start posting the already written series soon).

And other conventional reasons, like information that is available elsewhere with me feeling like I couldn't really add substantive content to it.

Occasionally I just can't put it all together right, and I feel like that whole Chaplin thing where I feel like I almost have it but I just can't get it right. It hasn't been able to come together. Some posts get over-thought, which is I suppose better than the ones that are under-thought....

One reason that can hold up a blog is that I can't come up with a title that meet my particular [low ]standards for blog titles. This can hold up a post, sometimes for days or weeks or months, or even forever. Occasionally it is the other way around -- I have the title but there is some substantive content I can't get the information on to finish -- those blogs are either re-done or if I think they will come together eventually then they too may end up in blog limbo.

Sometimes when a blog is about something personal, changes in circumstances make the post's content less relevant (or, less often, less interesting) to me, causing the content to fall below my minimum criteria of "stuff that interests me". Interest may be overstated here -- I can find something to be interesting in the abstract without it being interesting to me anymore. I don't tend to delete them if they are good, but I just don't see a place where it makes sense to post them. Generally in this case the others involved know something has changed so they usually don't start asking about random undone posts....

Then of course there are times that I have just forgotten, a-la-Of course I will be doing it, I just haven't done it yet. Which is why I don't mind the reminders.

In fact the only time you never have to remind me is when you put it in the Suggestion Box or, to a lesser extent, when you use the Contact link (the latter less so since I do not look over those emails as often as I look over the Suggestion Box).

Plus if a blog is not going to happen, I can warn you about that if you are asking the "are we there yet?" question.

This post has no sponsor as the characters who sponsored blogs that are not going to be posted

From the recently pre-recorded blogs collection...

Flashback. Well, rewind and flashback. Not too far...

Way back in May of 2005, Denis Onischenko mentioned:

NativeName property of "uk" and "uk-UA" CultureInfo is misspelled.

A few clarifying questions later and the problem was clear: both the .NET CultureInfo.NativeName property and the return of Win32 NLS API call GetLocaleInfo with LOCALE_NATIVELANGNAME return

україньска

instead of

українська

I got the word off to the data owner at the time and she got the fix in. Now Vista spells the language name Ukranian spelled in Ukrainian right.

Downlevel on Windows, the bug is not fixed. Because while a misspelling is embarrassing, it has also existed in Windows since Ukrainian was added in NT 4.0 and it is a really a challenge to call it a security bug that needs to be fixed. The string is not available in the UI (except maybe in installation and/or UI language list after installation of the XP Ukrainian LIP (first mentioned here back in Microsoft, you giving us some LIP?). To date, no one has ever (as far as I know) reported the problem on any Windows platform....

Of course, it has now been nearly 2.5 years and several versions of the .NET Framework have shipped, yet the bug is still not fixed in the managed case and the CultureInfo.NativeName property, though that has to do with the fact that little to no updates have been made to the built-in data in the .NET Framework in any of those releases (if memory serves a bunch of bug fixes from the XP SP2 locale work were picked up, but I think there were some bugs in those updates not found until it was too late to fix them, which soured people on the update story a tad?).

The impact is that this misspelling is still sitting there in .NET even in the Orcas release, which is enduring proof that Microsoft can't always manage to spell thing correctly....

Now how important is this kind of bug? Hard to say. I mean, how many people would think if weird if I talked about Sotring it all Out, Mihcael Kalpan's radnom stuff of duboius value, other than me? some bugs are just really embarrassing....

In the end, I honestly have no real clue when a fix or update is planned here.

To get a report on this letter we will head over to Ukrainian Power and ask Boomchyk how a real Ukrainian person would pronounce what under-Ukrainian-educated unicode folks like myself call the CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SOFT SIGN. Thanks, Boomchyk!

Hmmm.... I wish I could have gotten out of doing fifth grade spelling tests for Ms. Simon with a note from Microsoft about it!

This post brought to you by ь (U+044c, aka CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SOFT SIGN)

From the recently pre-recorded blogs collection...

As readers here know, I mostly spent the holidays alone this year.

Somewhere between my vacation I had to take (or lose), my feeling like I wanted a little solitude, and the infection related MS exacerbation that popped up, I ended up begging off just about any plans or parties that I was invited to.

One thing that a bunch of my friends did as part of a concerted effort to make sure that I knew people were thinking about me was a massive group-led present, which was basically a set of Accoutrements action figures, shown in the picture below spread out over a bed:

The gang from left to right:
First row: Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Jung, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Ludwig Van Beethoven, William Shakespeare
Second row: Benjamin Franklin, Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Allen Poe, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Marie Antoinette, Sigmund Freud
Third row: Oscar Wilde

Many of them are posable and come with props and quotes and more.

Now the coordination was not perfect a I did end up with two Bachs and two Austens, if people are interested they can pop by and ask. :-)

I wasn't specifically depressed or anything, but had I been this would have hit the spot, for sure.

It definitely put me in a very good mood, in any case.

And when Annette called and asked me whether I enjoyed the "gift" -- these fifteen deliveries -- I got to use that title line quote: Baby, you had me at Oscar Wilde....

Awesome!

This post brought to you by ൠ (U+0d60, aka MALAYALAM LETTER VOCALIC RR)

From the not-so-recently pre-recorded but never-yet-posted blogs collection...

I mentioned this in passing in a post back in June of 2005 (Giving up on the phonemes):

Meanwhile I have sometimes considered changing my name back to the original family name ('Kaplan' is just an Ellis Island name) but I am not sure how people would respond to me as Michael Dragutsky. And then I'd have to worry about whether to fight to get people to pronounce it correctly (dry-goot-ski) or just give up and let people butcher it at will....

Now Kaplan is basically an Ellis Island name, though not in the usual sense I always thought of where the guy checking in an immigrant just gives a person a new name due to a hard to pronounce old one being stated by the immigrant.

The way the story was told to me was simple enough.

My [great-?]great-grandfather's name was Jacob Dragutsky. On the boat to America he was talking to one of the other passengers about this new country they were going to. They introduced themselves to each other, and upon hearing the name Jacob Dragutsky this other passenger seemed scandalized.

"In America," he proclaimed, boldly, "you can't have such a long, hard-to-spell name. You need a shorter, easier American name!"

"What is a shorter, American name?" Jacob Dragutsky asked.

"As an example, my last name is Kaplan."

So when they got to Ellis Island and our hero Jacob Dragutsky was asked his name, he gave it as Jacob Kaplan!

Now for years the way the story was told was that this other Kaplan on the boat was actually an ancestor (or perhaps relative) of Gabe Kaplan, best known to many as Mr. Kotter, and best known to me for his one-man-show where he played Groucho Marx, which I always thought was completely brilliant. In any case, this actually worked out well since the most common question anyone who was not MOT would ask me when they heard my name was Michael Kaplan was "Any relation to Gabe Kaplan?" at which point I could just smile, say "funny you should ask..." and then tell this nice little anecdote of a story that was part of the family tribal lore.

On at least one occasion in my early 20's this story was the crucial first of several steps that led to my first (and almost only) successfully completed one night stand. So I feel that I have to give the anecdote partial credit for that, if nothing else (not that I am being asked to show my work for the problem all these years later).

Anyway, when I wrote this post up (some time ago) I was asking my father for some additional details on the story just to make sure I had them right, and he told me that as far as he could recall, no one had actually verified that this benefactor of our family name's American leg was in fact an ancestor or relative of Gabe Kaplan, so that I probably shouldn't make this claim in the blog without providing the caveat that it may or may not actually be true.

My first thought was for the fact that no one used to tell it that way, so the occasions I had told the story I had been unintentionally misleading people.

My second thought was to try to figure out how I could find Rita again after ~15 years to give her this erratum to the story. However I quickly realized that

• Her last name (which I did know) is kind of fuzzy to me and I am not sure I can remember it;
• I only vaguely remembered where her apartment was;
• She almost certainly has moved since then (she was a grad student);
• It is unlikely that she remembered most of this story, or possibly even the encounter;
• One night stands are by their very nature designed to not have these kinds of contacts;
• If I actually did find her then that contact would be two levels beyond regular creepy stalker;
• And that given all the above this was a stupid idea.

So then I just wrote this post up and it promptly forgot about it. Until I stumbled on it the other day and decided to put it in the rotation....

After this blog goes live, perhaps I will send email to Gabe Kaplan and ask him if there is such a connection, though at this point it seems unlikely to me.

And I would send Rita flowers to apologize for the false pretenses if only I had a way to do so. The best I can actually do at this point is to dedicate the post to her, from that Michael KaplanDragutsky she met that night near the OSU campus all those years ago....

For Rita...

This post brought to you by 𒆸 (U+121b8, aka CUNEIFORM SIGN LAGAB)

I guess we all (finally!) know how important collation is if presidential candidates are talking about it (ref: Barack Obama on Sorting Algorithms):

Schmidt: What's the fastest way to sort 32 bit numbers?
Barack: Not bubble-sort.

See the post for the context by which he can be pinned down on a sorting issue!

I found myself quite impressed for the fact that the answer was intelligent and accurate, if underwhelming technically (so perhaps not for a developer job, but we seem to have many such people underfoot!).

Hat tip to Gayle Laakmann

This post brought to you by B (U+0042, aka LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B)

Written several days ago...

You may recall when I posted I guess we're not exporting the Zune just yet. It was a bit over a year ago....

In it, I pointed how that despite the Zune's clearly implied Unicode/CE roots that the full text display of large parts of Unicode was not there due to the lack of font support. And that furthermore, unlike the CE/Windows Mobile world the ability to add one's own fonts was not there.

I even took a picture of my Zune device while displaying an album with letters in the song titles outside of the fonts being used (click the link above to see it).

Anyway, then I did more recently blog Hats off to you, you naughty people...., which talks about a report that showed a successful Zune hacking job to get additional fonts on the device.

That post I linked to did not give instructions, but many people found instructions -- e.g. posts like How to: Zune Non-US Character Hack - Do It Yourself -- about which I'll just say that there is I believe a violation of one's license here since having these fonts on your desktop machine is not license to copy them to other places (or devices)....

Now in the meantime they have released Zune 2.0 and even made the software update available downlevel (incidentally and quite ironically also fixing one of the bugs that led to this decision, which was done in part for other potential applications that were not being updated), but to get back on topic the device side of the update includes an updated font that includes the same coverage as many of the core fonts in Windows for scripts like Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic!

Now I had no music in languages like Greek or Russian, so luckily Sergey was able to get a Zune showing off language support and I brought in my camera to take a pctures of it:

And what is even more fun s thst I brought my new 80gb Zune in, turned on wireless, and officially became part of the social by getting a song on my device. You can see it in these two pictures, with my Zune sitting on top of a very dusty dell Latitude D800 keyboard:

This is very exciting news, though I really am still unhappy that they are not finding a way to allow customers to add fonts. 

By which I mean a supported way....

Because even ignoring the font licensing rules and the tortuous nature of the steps in How to: Zune Non-US Character Hack - Do It Yourself, this is the kind of feature that could really enable a much more globally satisfactory experience, even beyond target markets.

If you live in one of those markets beyond the target, I would definitely encourage you to let them know! :-)

Oh, before I forget -- Goldie, there is a poster of Aimee Mann in my office, it has been there both times you were in meetings in my offce. Since I had the camera out I took a picture of it:

I suppose there is a lot going on if you take in the whole shelf, perhaps that Spies & Mango Pies bird on the right distracted you, or maybe it was the three cows....

:-)

This post brought to you by ಢ (U+0ca2, aka KANNADA LETTER DDHA)

There is a problem with posts like Burying the lead, aka A weekend perfected not by art but by mortality, which on the whole are quite well received.

I will describe the problem by way of a bit from an episode of The West wing, where Jed Bartlet had to write a toast for Abbey for her birthday and was having some trouble coming up with words:

Bartlet: Okay. Here we go.
Charlie: Time is tight.
Bartlet: That's when the juices get flowing.
Charlie: I'm not sure we have time for juices, sir.
Bartlet: I could tell the story of the ditch digger.
Charlie: Sir?
Bartlet: You know the story?
Charlie: I do not.
Bartlet: Abbey and I were walking along and we see a ditch digger, and I said, "Aren't you glad you married me? You could've married a ditch digger." And she said, "Jed, if I'd married him, he'd be President." What do you think?
Charlie: Not so sure, sir.
Bartlet: Why?
Charlie: 'Cause it seems like a story about how cool you are.
Bartlet: It is.

You see where I am going with this -- the blog is indeed a sad story with some good, long-time friends, and it is hard to imagine not being moved by it. It pulls at heart strings even though it isn't trying to, even though it tries to be as mundane as one possibly could be under the circumstances.

But it just ends up being story that points out how cool I am. Which I'm really not, not nearly as often as I likely could be, or even as often as I probably ought to be.

Just looking at the example of that post, there are many things I could have done differently, several of which I in fact should have done differently. I think in the end it represents just about as close as I can get to a perfect description of a situation imperfectly handled.

I just don't want people to get the wrong idea. I can be a great guy, a good friend, a quality developer, an amusing blog author.

I even have one reader who once made the claim (and to date has never retracted it) of being in love with my blog.

But in person? The reaction is not nearly so dramatic and neither are the feelings (and she has met me so she knows what she's talking about). There are in fact many such people who find me to be quite resistible personality wise, but they love the blog.

In the aftermath of that post, I feel about like a [slightly modified ]bit near the end of the movie Talk Radio:

Dan: That was great. You pulled it off, champ. Congratulations. I'll read you tomorrow.
Michael: Dan. What if I don't blog tomorrow?
Dan: You'll blog tomorrow, Michael. You always do.
{Dan Leaves}
Stu: She left, huh?
Michael: Yep.
Stu: I don't blame her.
Michael: Her best line was, "Michael Kaplan's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." {Pause} The blog's a washout, Stu.
Stu: Give me a break, will you? We're going national, man. Besides, it's not that important. It's just one blog.
Michael: If it's not that important, why am I doing it?
Stu: I don't know, Michael. You don't like the heights, don't climb the mountains. You know what I mean? It's like that kid just said: "Man, this is your blog."

Anyway, my advice to regular readers is to just keep it all in perspective. And keep in mind that (as I have said before), my life reads much cooler than it lives.

For the moment, I'm just very very tired. And I miss Liz...

This post brought to you by ☕ (U+2615, aka HOT BEVERAGE)

Written in Dec 2007....

A few years back I picked up a first edition copy of The Secret Archives of the Vatican, by Maria Luisa Ambrosini, and it is something I have looked at from time to time.

I am not sure why it fascinates me, but it does. An amateur historian, the unmeasurable and unfathomable amount of information contained in the twenty-five miles of documents only partilly explored is staggering to me, and this book's window into it and the interesting and odd jump into it keeps me on the edge of my seat whenever I pick it up and read a bit of it.

The other day I was reading and a cross-reference led me to the chapter on Beatrice Cenci (a victim of at a minimum attempted incest at the hands of her father, and the subsequent murder plot of her father by the family), a tragic and terrible story, and a bit toward the end of the text that caught my eye after the family had been jailed awaiting trial:

Public opinion was strongly on Beatrice's side; crowds shouted for "the Roman virgin" and prominent citizens sent in petitions for clemency. but the sentence of execution stood. "The pope is stern, not to be move or bent, a marble form, a rite, a law, a custom, not a man." Situational ethics might not have a name for another three hundred years, but Clement [VIII, pope from 1592-1605] had recognized the concept and rejected it.

[omitting paragraph on the execution itself]

It caught my eye at first because the notion that situational ethics existed in the minds of rulers and leaders even before it was well described was interesting to me -- it gives lie to the faulty notion so often expressed about language controlling thought rather than the other way around.

But then the text continued:

And Clement, in the country for the weekend, raised his arms and gave her a plenary absolution as he had promised to do. A year later he pardoned young Bernardo, though the enormously rich Cenci estate remained confiscated.

This does imply a certain seriousness of the idea here and I was interested in finding out more about the eventual absolution by Clement. I turned to the nearest alternate source (the Beatrice Cenci article in Wikipedia) and was disappointed to see that no mention of the plenary absolution or indeed any forgiveness by Clement VIII was mentioned. The story seems a bit changed by this lack, with the pope given a much darker view of the whole situation.

You can also find the text in a Google Books pointer to the later 1996 edition of the book, also -- even page references are unchanged for the information.

And then I was left wondering whether the problem was in the book or in Wikipedia (obviously it could be either).

It is most easy and perhaps most likely to blame Wikipedia for the lack given the nature of the source material in the book, but in coming to that conclusion I thought about this world where so many people get their news from The Daily Show and their knowledge from Wikipedia and found myself frightened for how much we lose in the way of knowledge by moving so eagerly to a model that is likely to have fuller coverage on Britney Spears and the next crotch shot that the Paparazzi pick up then on knowledge that has existed for centuries and relies on the interest of others in order to made and kept a full an accurate accounting.

Of course someone might update it after reading this, hopefully after looking at the identical text qand slternate sources in the later version rather than taking my word for it!), but the larger issue is that only knowledge that has champions has a safe home there -- and not all knowledge has either popularity or champions to defend it in its unpopularity. And Wikipedia, that works so hard to build consensus (usually a good thing) can work against the agenda of preserving knowledge when it is not as popular....

Books can have biases too, so perhaps this is an unavoidable situation, but I think about the accounting in parchment in the Vatican Archives entitled Report on the Death of Giacomo and of Beatrice Cenci, and of Lucrezia Petronia Cenci, their stepmother, for patricide, in Rome on Saturday, September 11, 1599, under the Pontificate of Clement VIII and on what the last 50 reports written by students based on Wikipedia have said about this woman.

And what those reports will say about our own cultures, looking through the prism of information in Wikipedia.

I know I look at Wikipedia more differently than I did before, nervous about the next 50 reports ten years from now will say, with "better" information at the possible cost of popularity deciding about the nature of coverage and to some extent of accuracy....

This post brought to you by 𝍃 (U+1d343, aka TETRAGRAM FOR DOUBT)

Written 03 Jan 2008 at 3:00pm....

I have had several people ask me via the Contact link and even a few in person about the beginning of the story in Burying the lead, aka A weekend perfected not by art but by mortality.

It really wasn't interesting, I think I said most of it in that first paragraph (relevant sections bolded):

The beginning of the story isn't too terribly interesting: an old friend comes in from out of town and tells me she wants to get really drunk all weekend. As regular readers here know, I had no plans. And this is somebody I have gotten drunk with a few times over the years. But that part of the story is pretty ordinary, so I'm going to start the telling of the story in the middle. After getting monumentally drunk twice without ever leaving the house, with the person who has to be one of my bestest friends over the years -- a PNL (Perfectly Normal Liz), the secret inspiration for normaliz.dll in Windows. My friend Liz....

And that is one would think enough.

But people kept having questions, so think of this as an FAQ, or maybe a FAQ (which one depends on whether you call it "FAK" or "EFF -- AAY -- CUE")....

It seems centedred on two topics -- sex and alcohol. If nothing else, I have a sense ofwhere the mind and hearts of some of my readers lie.

You can think about this post as a way to address these apparently burning questions.

Q) What kind of alcohol was consumed?

A) It was a combination of the following:

1. Rattlesnakes (basically Bailey's, Kahlua, and white creme de cacao) as shots, interspersed with other drinks, until the Basiley's ran out
2. Flatliners (sambuca, gold tequila, and Tabasco sauce), given up after just a few tries; we got close but neither of us could seem to get the recipe just right
3. Kamikazes (vodka, triple sec, and lime juice) as shots and cocktails -- our main staple
4. Limonata margaritas (salt, lime wedge, tequila, triple sec, crushed ice, and Limonata) -- an ill fated attempt that we drank but did not try to repeat
5. Captain and 7 (Captain Morgan spiced rum and 7-up) -- another staple, our secondary one

So mostly it was the third and fifth items, with occasional doses of the first.

Q) What did you talk about for two days if she didn't tell you what was going on with her that whole time? Were just silently hooking up grain alcohol IV lines?

A) I honestly had no idea exactly what her news was, but I knew something was up. In the past there have been times that she'd be upset and we'd get drunk (maybe just us two, maybe with others) and usually it would focus around a guy, somebody behind  recent breakup. She did hint several times about recent relationships that hadn't worked out that well, so I just assumed that it was one of those....

In retrospect it is easy to remember when she said stuff like it doesn't matter anyway and what's the point? but to be honest that would be no different had it been about a guy she had just broken up with, so I don't think it was me not paying any attention at all. She was genuinely wanting to avoid spending the whole weekend with me unable to see past the whole impending imminentness thing, and she did accomplish that with me spending the time getting drunk, watching her get drunk, and trying to cheer up (occasionally succeeding).

Q) Did you two sleep together?

A) Both of us stayed up very late two nights in a row and slept in the same bed, both nights. FYI -- Liz still snores.

Q) Did you two sleep together?

A) Okay, that is probably what the first question was about. no, we did not. The first and only time we ever even kissed was when I was getting her to her flight. And that's it.

Beyond that, it just to would have felt wrong to me after being friends for so long. It did come up as a topic of conversation a couple of times, but with the overarching conceptual framework of a break-up on her side, I had real trouble seeing how that ever could have been a comfortable thing, for either of us.

As a large group we'd had our share of random brief "friends with benefits" style flings and one-night-stand mistakes over the years, but that had really caused some people to grow apart from the group over time. I think both of us have consciously wanted to avoid that, given the difficulty in maintaining a stable "friends with benefits" type relationship for any length of time that both of us had witnessed with others.

Bottom line -- good friendships have more intrinsic worth than unsuccessful romantic entanglements....

Q) Do you think you two would have slept together had you known that it was likely to be your last weekend together?

A) A lot of interest in my sex life, people. What's that about?

I have been honestly been racking my brain a bit on this one.

Though remembering that neither of us drank a thing the last day and were not all that hungover since we drank a lot of water, I think it is obvious that even given means, motive, and opportunity that nothing happened -- this strongly suggests that nothing would have happened even had there been more time.

Q) So was all the talk about her old relationships, or were yours a topic of interest as well?

A) There was some talk about formers and mostly formers on both sides, yes. But none of that is really relevant to either that post or this one, so I'm just gonna say nothing further on that. Sorry!

Q) Are you an alcoholic?

A) I don't think I am (though I suppose all alcoholics would say that?). There is probably nothing I can really say here to convince anyone asking the question otherwise....

Q) So you stopped drinking after you she told you about the tumor?

A) Techncally we fell asleep, first. The news had a very sobering effect on me even though I was already sober by the time I woke up, nd neither of us had any alcohol once the news was out there.

This post brought to you by ‽ (U+203d, aka INTERROBANG)

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western arm on the main Microsoft campus lies a small unregarded two-story building.

Atop this building on the second floor is an utterly insignificant cluttered little office whose ape-descended life form occupant is so amazingly primitive that he still thinks taking essentially three weeks of vacation without ever leaving the country, state, city, or apartment complex just because he was sick was a pretty neat idea.

This occupant has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people working in the offices around him were working on completely different projects for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with admins driving the movements of office maps, which is odd because on the whole it was neither the admins or the move maps that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were strangers, and most of them didn't talk to each other, even the ones who took vacations.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in not moving to new buldings when they changed groups. and some said that maybe moving groups was the problem and they never should have left the group they were in.

And then, one Thursday, nearly 2000 hours after the people who left the group without leaving the building containing the group, one admin finally got through all the red tape and managed to arrange having the move maps sent out for all of the people, and she finally knew how the building could be made a more homogenous place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get to lose any of their computers or furniture.

This is not the admin's story.

This is the story of what happened when the ape-descended life form occupant of the utterly insignificant cluttered little office got back from vacation to find that the other group had moved.

Of the nine offices including and nearest his insignificant one:

• 6 of them were window offices.
• through the architectural oddnesses hinting at space-time continuum folding worthy of a Star Trek Next Generation episode involving Q, 4 of those window offices were corner window offices.
• 6 of them had no furniture in them other than the random odd connecting pieces that people leave behind in office moves when they realized their old office layout was stupid.
• All of them (save the one ape-descended life form occupant who was himself feeling insignificant under the circumstances) were devoid of people.

He wisely, realizing that if he stayed there ll day with no human contact he would see no difference between doing stuff at home due to being exacerbated and sick on vacation and being at work in terms of getting things done and would thusly work from home forever, decided to spend the day in meetings and when there were no meetings he decided to just go home early, a task made more convenient by the fact that the sidewalk construction work on 40th Street was now complete enough to allow easier passage.

And by the next day there was one other person sitting right across the hall from him from his group who was also in his office, so it seemed worth staying in his office and getting his work done.

Though the one ape-descended life form occupant did still leave early that day, since he had started working at home that day at around 2:30am.

There was a point to this narrative, but it has presently escaped the chronicler's mind.

Hat Tip to Douglas Adams, of course!