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Today's blog starts with an inspirational video ( warning : fairly safe for work other than some language) to set the stage: Now we laugh -- and especially fans and regular readers of this Blog will laugh -- at the idea of a video game meant to be so amazingly and intensely realistic that could...

The other day in Sometimes MMM is MMMM, other times MMM is M! (aka Not all abbreviations are created equal) , I included a table of data from Day, Month, Year, and Era Format Pictures : d Day of the month as digits without leading zeros for single-digit days. dd Day of the...

I am not a localizer.. I have a little bit of knowledge in ssveral different languages, but I don't know any well enough to be able to a proper job taking the words of one language and expressing them well in another. However, due to what I know of a bunch of different topics, localizes will sometimes...

There are several LCTYPE values suitable for use by GetLocaleInfo and GetLocaleInfoEx that act as abbreviations. Like the seven LOCALE_SABBREVDAYNAME* values representing the days, which are documented as: Native abbreviated name for [Day]. The maximum number of characters allowed for this string...

Apologies to Grace Slick for the title riff! Previous blogs from this series: part 16 (We can't scale to a Xishuangbanna Dai locale, but…) part 15 (Fixing our listings up in Windows 8!) part 14 (Tifinagh, Tamazight, and Berber? Oh my!) part 13 (Divvying up locales, yet again...

SQL Server's code page, collation, casing, locale, and resource model are all direct attempts to extend the things that Windows provides in ways that make sense for SQL Server. This sentence bears repeating, I think. Because it seems (in the words of the late, great George Carlin, vaguely important...

Previous blogs from this series: part 15 (Fixing our listings up in Windows 8!) part 14 (Tifinagh, Tamazight, and Berber? Oh my!) part 13 (Divvying up locales, yet again!) part 12 (Logic dictates that we keep a sense of proportion about the RATIO) part 11 (What language is that keyboard...

Previous blogs from this series: part 14 (Tifinagh, Tamazight, and Berber? Oh my!) part 13 (Divvying up locales, yet again!) part 12 (Logic dictates that we keep a sense of proportion about the RATIO) part 11 (What language is that keyboard for?) part 10 (Perhaps it is best to think...

So, the other day, I wrote How to detect if a locale is Bidi, Windows 7/8 edition . This is a topic I had covered a bunch of times over the years, in many prior blogs, from How To [NOT] detect that a locale is bidi to How To detect that a culture is bidi to Cue the smarter version of GetDateFormat...

Previous blogs in this series: Improving genitive. Or not.... (part 4): On [not] finding the smoking gun Improving genitive. Or not.... (part 3): The hazards of "off label" usage Improving genitive. Or not.... (part 2): Explaining the point of Part 1 Improving genitive. Or not....(part...

Once upon a time, Windows had two kinds of day names. There were the actual day names, which could be queried via the LOCALE_DAYNAME* constants , and eventually the DateTimeFormatInfo.DayNames Property . And there were the abbreviated day names, which could be queried via the LOCALE_SABBREVDAYNAME...

Tomorrow. No sun in Seattle is fairly common this time of year. I've lived here since late '96 and I can count the number of sunny December 30thson one hand, and have fingers left over. It is harder to engineer in Samoa, though. However, for this year, they have achieved the goal! And...

The other day, a colleague asked me a question that disturbed me: Hi Michael, I want our product to get out of the business of maintaining timezones and leave this up to the OS. However, I realized that the system only provides one language at a time, so if the administrator language is English...

I was asked a question by a former colleague of mine. She and I both used to be collaborating consultants, me as a programmer and her as a designer -- so me without her would have been functional web sites that no would use and her without me would have been beautiful web sites that no one could use...

Previous blogs from this series: part 13 (Divvying up locales, yet again!) part 12 (Logic dictates that we keep a sense of proportion about the RATIO) part 11 (What language is that keyboard for?) part 10 (Perhaps it is best to think of it as unintelligent design? part 9 (Nastaleeq...

Previous blogs from this series: part 12: Logic dictates that we keep a sense of proportion about the RATIO part 11: What language is that keyboard for? part 10: Perhaps it is best to think of it as unintelligent design? part 9: Nastaleeq vs. Nastaliq? Either way, Windows 8 has got it...

The other day, when I blogged These aren't the MONTHS you're looking for (aka You'll never get to the 13th month *that* way) , I oversimplified some of the described results in order to concentrate on proving that GetLocaleInfo was never returning the CAL_HEBREW (Hebrew calendar) months, without distracting...

The other day I had somebody call me out about a blog I wrote a little over a year ago. I'll excerpt the mail to avoid some of the more graphic language: Dude, maybe you should read a little before you freaking write! If you query for month names of the current user default when you Hebrew is the...

So, the question I got the other day was: We are setting up SharePoint and want to know what collation to use. What support does SQL Server have for CJK Extensions A/B/C/D? Now that's an interesting question. If you think of SQL Server 2000 as the first version to support the current architecture...

Previous blogs from this series: part 11: What language is that keyboard for? part 10: Perhaps it is best to think of it as unintelligent design? part 9: Nastaleeq vs. Nastaliq? Either way, Windows 8 has got it! part 8: [Finally] taking care of some [more] languages in Pakistan part...

A few months ago, Ken Lunde of Adobe noted some mapping differences between several different vendors and the Korean KS X 1001 standard: The small table below shows the fourteen KS X 1001 code points that map differently, depending on the platform: KS X 1001 (GR) Unicode (W = Windows; M = Macintosh;...

Yesterday, I was having an interesting conversation, one that has given me pause. We were talking about Unicode, and the need for components in the OS to do a better job of directly embracing it. This is obviously nothing new around these parts, but a new twist was interjected into the conversation...

There are a lot of people in the world. A subset of those people have some interest in language and technology. A percentage of them are a bunch of people who read this blog from time to time. Some of the those people who read this Blog work for Microsoft. And some of them are in the Puget...

Leo's question was, like many of the questions I cover here, pretty interesting: Hello, I’m writing UI automation for ***REDACTED*** , and dev UI displays number in native Arabic digits for ar-SA. Hence, I was trying to convert my test integers into Arabic digit strings so I can do string...

Previous blogs from this series: part 10: Perhaps it is best to think of it as unintelligent design? part 9: Nastaleeq vs. Nastaliq? Either way, Windows 8 has got it! part 8: [Finally] taking care of some [more] languages in Pakistan part 7: That would be a "call and a raise" for Hawaiian...