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March 2005 - Posts

Some people should feel ashamed of themselves

According to Bill Vaughn in his post Petitions and other Silliness : When I visited the speaker’s lounge I felt like a caged bear with kids poking me with sharp sticks. It seems that the Microsoft folks in attendance took exception to the Visual Basic Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 31, 2005 8:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Overheard in microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international

In the newsgroups the other day, Ernst K. Locker asked: Are there any major drawbacks to using Big5 other than I would be restricted to Chinese? It is an interesting question, one that people often ask for different languages when they start understand Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 31, 2005 5:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Session info available on the TechEd site! (June 5-10)

Looks like they are starting to gear up for Tech·Ed 2005 (starting June 5-10). You can see session info here . My sessions (slightly modified abstracts from before, mainly to get rid of that odd use of the word "exploit" and a few other weirdnesses): Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 31, 2005 5:48 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Every character has a story #8: U+03c2 (GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA)

GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA is the sort of character that only ever gets to have the last word. The character (ς) only ever gets used when it is the last character in the word; otherwise you are supposed to use U+03c3 (σ, a.k.a. GREEK SMALL LETTER Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 31, 2005 12:48 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

He probably still works with 96% efficiency

Back in December I posted the article that I submitted (too late) for the Access Heroes pages put up when the 10th anniversary of Access was being celebrated. In the flotsam and jetsam stream of consciousness at the end, one of the points I listed there Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 30, 2005 10:17 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Even every version of XP Home is fully internationalized....

Last night, I received the following question in e-mail: Dear Michael. I wonder if you can clarify this matter. I was under the impression that Tamil Unicode was possible only under XP professional, - since regional lang settings are available in the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 30, 2005 9:06 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments
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Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde on 156th Avenue NE

(Nothing technical in this post) I'm gonna rant for a moment. Since I live right across the street from the main campus of where I work, I used to run here, and then eventually walk. I think I mentioned before that I drive a scooter to work these days Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 30, 2005 7:19 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

What does the the third letter in GIFT stand for?

Robert Scoble has a blog . Now he does not need me link to him, as he gets plenty of attention on his own. :-) Anyway, the other day he made a post entitled ' Light blogging week, first look at Longhorn fonts '. In it, he talked about Bill Hill: Today Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 30, 2005 12:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Flag behavior for the NLS APIs

Flags for APIs are an interesting thing, especially when you have APIs that you improve between versions. And the NLS APIs are no exception to this. There are two ways one could handle flag values that are undefined in the current version of an API: You Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 29, 2005 12:18 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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The WinForms DateTimePicker and MonthCalendar do not support culture settings

The issue is partially described in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (article 889834 ) but this article does not tell the full story (and some of what it tells is wrong). Let's start with the title and its problems between CurrentUICulture and CurrentCulture Read More...
Posted Monday, March 28, 2005 12:19 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Post categorization (and people who pick up the feed)

Ok, a poll for the people who read here regularly.... I was pinged a few people to register this blog as being involved with the various technology areas that it touches (Windows, the CLR, SQL Server, Office, AD, globalization, etc.) and I did so. But Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 27, 2005 2:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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Session info available on the TechEd site!

Looks like they are starting to gear up for Tech·Ed 2005 (starting June 5-10)! You can see session info here . My sessions (slightly modified abstracts from before, mainly to get rid of that odd use of the word "exploit" and a few other weirdnesses): Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 27, 2005 1:39 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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In TV and movies, language is often done without thought

On the Language Log , Bill Poser posted about the use of Chinese in a particular episode of Law & Order in his post Chinese in Law And Order : Television is confusing. I was watching Law and Order a little earlier. It was the episode in which the Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 27, 2005 5:40 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Consistency and correctness are both four letter words

Yes, I said it: consistency and correctness are both four letter words. As I have said before, one of the greatest strengths of NLS is the strong combination of linguistic knowledge and technical strength. The synthesis that these two very different viewpoints Read More...
Posted Friday, March 25, 2005 8:53 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

What is the InstalledUICulture for?

This question often comes up -- what is the InstalledUICulture used for? Short answer? It isn't for anything. Don't use it. Longer answer? It is a culture based on the return of the GetSystemDefaultUILanguage for systems that support that API. This API Read More...
Posted Friday, March 25, 2005 1:38 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Accessibility, Internationalization, and Keyboards (#4 Creating good keyboards, part A)

This post is another of the series about international and non-international issues surrounding keyboards, MSKLC , and accessibility. Through them I will deal with issues important to developers in their application, issues important to keyboard authors Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 24, 2005 8:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Being [case] insensitive without being inconsistent?

Bob Berger asked, in the suggestion box: CaseInsensitiveHashCodeProvider and CaseInsensitiveComparer are not synchronized, despite what the documentation claims. The problem is that the CaseInsensitiveHashCodeProvider does not take equivalent character Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 23, 2005 10:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Its all about respect (or it should be)

Several years ago, I was dating a writer (she wrote fiction). Although it seemed like we would have nothing in at all in common, it turned out we had a lot, strangely enough. She was explaining to me once (embarrassed) about how sometimes in the middle Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 23, 2005 8:23 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Why UNICOWS.LIB is so big, but the amount of extra size to those who include it is small

I have hinted around about this problem before, but now Raymond Chen explains how the technology works with a lot more detail in his post Why does the debugger show me the wrong function? Note that the default behavior with DELAYLOAD when the DLL or the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 22, 2005 7:41 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Just part of "the background bitmap" in Access

This is a Microsoft Access story. It is one that was related to me by Nicholas Shulman many years ago, when he was still at Microsoft and I was a contract developer working on the Access wizards. I thought of it after reading Raymond Chen 's post Windows Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 22, 2005 3:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Linguistic and Unicode considerations (or Language-specific Processing #4)

Prior posts in this series: Before you find, or search, you have to *index* (or, Language-specific processing #0) I coffee, therefore IFilter (or, Language-specific processing #1) IStemmer'ed the tide (or, Language-specific processing #2) You toucha my Read More...
Posted Monday, March 21, 2005 12:13 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Mixed feelings about the splitting out of features on Longhorn

When I read articles like WinFS on XP, a VERY big deal! from Steve Richards in his blog ( Adventures in home working ), I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I agree with Steve that it is very cool that these features will be available on more platforms. Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 20, 2005 8:04 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Font substitution and linking #1

Ok, there will be several posts on this topic, starting from the core support in GDI/Windows and moving concentrically outward to information on usage in Uniscribe , MLang , and Office. I'll start with font substitution . At the simplest level, this feature Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 20, 2005 5:35 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

Impersonation and NLS

There are a lot of people who get confused (and then subsequently complain in public fora or to product support or wherever!) about the topic of using impersonation and NLS functionality, so I thought it might be good to explain what is happening. Common Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 19, 2005 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

The picture of me is unlikely to change

Yes, the picture in the upper left hand corner is unlikely to change. Here it is full-size: You will notice it is not too much better. But I not terribly photogenic. Tamra Myers took this picture of me one day testing a camera I think I had just bought Read More...
Posted Friday, March 18, 2005 9:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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When is it a backcompat break and when is it fulfilling not-yet-fulfilled technology?

The other day when I pointed out that Backcompat is the father of the NLS APIs , there was a fairly straightforward case where the desire for a functionality conflicted with the need to not change the behavior of an API (for some values of straightforward; Read More...
Posted Friday, March 18, 2005 7:35 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Every character has a story #7: U+20a37 and U+200ae (Extension B Ideographs)

Richard Cooke, while talking about ideographs that looked identical that were added to CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B (13MB) of Unicode as a part of Unicode 3.1, said: For an example of even closer graphical variants (some might even say *exactly* Read More...
Posted Friday, March 18, 2005 2:36 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Reason #124 to update your Platform SDK from time to time

Antti Nivala asked in the microsoft.public.platformsdk.mslayerforunicode newsgroup: Our software uses MSLU . I noticed that if I run our programs with Application Verifier 2.50 with the Handles test enabled, I get a bunch of Invalid Handle exceptions Read More...
Posted Friday, March 18, 2005 1:53 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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YASG (yet another speaking gig) near Cleveland!

A few years ago I was in New York City (I have a point here, I promise!). I was there for a client visit (reviewing an VB6 application that needed better internationalization support). While I was there I also visited Stephen Forte (then CTO for Zagat) Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 17, 2005 10:23 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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The offline address book (OAB) in Exchange....

People are often curious about how this works, and Neil Shipp talks about these things at You Had Me At EHLO... (the Microsoft Exchange team blog) . In his post OAB sort orders and character handling he talks about a lot of the configuration setting rules Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 17, 2005 8:38 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Reversing sort keys?

Joe Petersen asked: I read your post at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/03/11/394359.aspx and it made me start thinking. If I have a sort key and I am looking to get back the original string, is there a way do do that? In other words, is sort Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 16, 2005 6:25 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Emptying some items out of the suggestion box

Just some minor cleanup from the Suggestion Box.:-) On February 19th, AC asked: What is a technical lead? A very good question. I have no one reporting to me and thus am technically not a lead. But then at Microsoft most program managers do not manage Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2005 12:18 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Why I didn't sign the VB6 petition....

I was asked if I would like to sign the Classic VB Petition to Microsoft that is going around. I know I was not the first person they asked (there were already signatures by then!), and I know I was not the most important. I decided not to do it (obviously, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2005 12:17 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments
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You toucha my letters, IWordBreaker you face (or, Language-specific processing, #3)

Prior posts in this series: Before you find, or search, you have to *index* (or, Language-specific processing #0) I coffee, therefore IFilter (or, Language-specific processing #1) IStemmer'ed the tide (or, Language-specific processing #2) Ok, I have talked Read More...
Posted Monday, March 14, 2005 6:22 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

The cat is on the roof

Warning -- no technical content! There is an old story/joke that has many versions, but here is the version I like best: A man is house sitting for his brother -- feeding the cat, getting the mail, etc. The brother calls to check in. "I’m sorry," says Read More...
Posted Monday, March 14, 2005 5:38 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments
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What about search for kids?

My post earlier today ( IStemmer'ed the tide (or, Language-specific processing #2) ) struck a nerve with some people. They wondered aloud to me (in email) if one combined computers that one could give voice commands with a search engine whether children Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 13, 2005 3:16 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

IStemmer'ed the tide (or, Language-specific processing #2)

Prior posts in this series: Before you find, or search, you have to *index* (or, Language-specific processing #0) I coffee, therefore IFilter (or, Language-specific processing #1) Now note that this is not a "how-to" post since the docs kind of do that. Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 13, 2005 4:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Stability of the Unicode Character Database

The following was overheard on the Unicode List: Erik van der Poel asked: Has anyone done a UCD stability survey? The kind of info that I would like to have is, for example, the percentage of characters that have a change in their General Category Value Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 12, 2005 6:33 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Performance gains at the cost of your own components

Raymond Chen posted yesterday about Performance gains at the cost of other components . I thought I would give a slightly different take on the problem, from days as a sorta Access hero several years ago.... You see, I owned the wizards, which was a funny Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 12, 2005 12:23 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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If you are sick, stay home please!

Warning: No technical content! Just recently I posted Sorry to say it, but MS sucks and I admit it was a lot of fun to write. Challenging the inherent expectations of people is often that way. I used to do the same thing in a slightly different way. I Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 12, 2005 12:19 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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When good SQL queries have trouble....

SQL Server uses the same linguistic data as that which ships in Windows, and has done so for many versions. They do not actually call our APIs, they instead took a snapshot of them and they use that to give each SQL Server install consistent behavior Read More...
Posted Friday, March 11, 2005 8:33 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Another speaking gig (near Cleveland, OH)

Yes, it's yet another speaking gig.... In addition to Tech·Ed 2005 , I will also be speaking at the Microsoft SQL Server Special Interest Group of the Greater Cleveland PC Users Group . This will be on Thursday, April 21st, in Solon, Ohio for anyone in Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 10, 2005 7:42 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Dere are qvestions? In zat <b>case</b>...

J. Daniel Smith asked about ToLower() (and ToUpper()) and some trouble he was having with them: The comment about Turkish in the docs with regards to "i" doesn't carry a lot of weight with fellow programmers and we only care about 8 languages: English, Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 10, 2005 12:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments
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The BCL Bloggers take requests....

This seemed like it might be interesting to some of the people who hang out here.... Check it out: BCL, Blog Day! Tuesday 3/15/2005 (next week) [Kit George] Thats right, next Tuesday the second coolest blog on the server (right after Raymond Chen's ) Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 09, 2005 8:10 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Who runs the keyboards?

Sung to the tune of a song whose name I cannot recall offhand. Anyone want to help with that? :-) The customer picked the keyboard, Picked the keyboard, The whole computer I daresay, But the customer doesn't pick it today.... Cuz the OEM picks the keyboard, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 09, 2005 9:23 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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I coffee, therefore IFilter (or, Language-specific processing #1)

Apologies for the title, I still cannot resist that sort of thing. Maybe one day.... If you have not read it yet, look at Language-specific processing #0 for more info about this series! IFilter is one interface that you can use to lower the barriers Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 08, 2005 9:59 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Before you find, or search, you have to *index* (or, Language-specific processing #0)

(I call this post #0 since it is more of an introduction to a topic that I will be returning to on a regular basis over the next few months.) Back in the end of 2000, I had a meeting with the lead international program manager of SQL Server. One of the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 08, 2005 12:02 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Global Development & Deployment Virtual Track at TechEd 2005

From the desk of Dr. International : Global Development & Deployment Virtual Track at TechEd 2005 Summary: This year, the team that brought you the Microsoft Global Development & Deployment Conference in 2004 have joined TechEd 2005 to introduce Read More...
Posted Monday, March 07, 2005 11:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Successful experiment

The posts I did earlier today: บั๊กที่สนับสนุนระบบปฏิทิน oleaut32.dll รุ่นใหม่ รวมถึง VB, VBA, และ VBScript A bug with the new oleaut32.dll calendar support and VB, VBA, and VBScript were, in my opinion, a successful experiment for this blog. A localization Read More...
Posted Monday, March 07, 2005 10:25 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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บั๊กที่สนับสนุนระบบปฏิทิน oleaut32.dll รุ่นใหม่ รวมถึง VB, VBA, และ VBScript

(Recycling some electrons for a fun bug that can still be reproduced in the latest versions and service packs of VB and VBA <= 6.x (despite all the pressure I was able to muster in my position of unimportance!). To see this article in English, go to Read More...
Posted Monday, March 07, 2005 12:03 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

A bug with the new oleaut32.dll calendar support and VB, VBA, and VBScript

(Recycling some electrons for a fun bug that can still be reproduced in the latest versions and service packs of VB and VBA <= 6.x (despite all the pressure I was able to muster in my position of unimportance!). To see this article in Thai, go to http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/03/07/386453.aspx Read More...
Posted Monday, March 07, 2005 12:02 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Backcompat is the father of the NLS APIs

A little while back, I was having a conversation with our fearless group's Director, Julie Bennett. Actually, I think maybe she was a Group Manager then, but it is neither here nor there. :-) I was talking to her because there was a customer who did not Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 06, 2005 10:38 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

TechEd 2005 - I'll be there!

Previously (in Tech Ed 2005 in Orlando? Moi? Perhaps.... ) I mentioned that until there were actual travel arrangements set up I would not say I was going for sure. But now there have been, so I am. If you also plan to be there and want to say hi or praise Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 05, 2005 7:24 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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"POSIX" style locale support on Windows?

Greg asked, in the suggestion box: The POSIX locale interface seems awkward in that it has a single global locale state that you have to change and then change back if you want to temporarily use a different locale. It seems like you are actually thinking Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 05, 2005 7:03 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Parenthetical karma

)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) Read More...
Posted Friday, March 04, 2005 7:58 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments
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And yet another blogger to keep an eye on!

There he is.... it is peterty's WebLog . His first post is about Localization - Chinese Languages . Interesting bit of trivia -- the feature he talks about, the Microsoft.VisualBasic's StrConv function's addition of mapping between Simplified and Traditional Read More...
Posted Friday, March 04, 2005 7:52 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Yet another site integrates Blogmap support

I suppose I should get a life, but stuff like this seems kind of cool. :-) On your left will be the button that looks like this: I guess I could have put the full map: but that seemed like overkill, and a lot of real estate. If I were ever going take Read More...
Posted Friday, March 04, 2005 7:34 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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"Michael, why does ToTitleCase suck so much?"

In the title of this post I am actually quoting email I have received on the topic, mail similar to others I have been sent many times ever since I started posting about case issues over the last few months. And that is one of the tamer ones I have received! Read More...
Posted Friday, March 04, 2005 12:02 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

The most robust software project I ever worked on

I have been talking vaguely about this project a bunch of times, so I figured I would just post about it directly once and get it over with. There is even a cool international bug in there somewhere! The project was the Partial Replica Wizard . It was Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 03, 2005 9:40 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments

Not running as Admin....

Each day, for security reasons, more and more people are making sure that we are not running as an administrator on their computers. And even though for most purposes this process has little pain, it is those small pain points that make people hesitant Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 02, 2005 8:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

Why do LCIDs skip around so much?

I have people ask me with an alarming frequency why LCIDs jump around so that for example en-US is 0x0409 and en-UK is 0x0809, and so forth. Why wouldn't it be 0x409, 0x0509, 00609, et.? To answer the question, let's look at the diagram of LANGID contents, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 02, 2005 1:35 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Code pages are really not enough....

Helen Custer, in Inside Windows NT , describes the situation back then in an interesting way: The lowest layer of localization is the representation of individual characters, the code sets. The United States has traditionally employed the ASCII (American Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 01, 2005 4:29 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Takes your breath away

More non-technical content.... You know the step you miss at the bottom of the stairs, or the one you try to take that is not there at the top? It takes your breath away. Kind of like today's news did. I'll explain... I am taking Copaxone every day, for Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 01, 2005 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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