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April 2005 - Posts

Pronunciational ambiguity

(light on the technical content, but there is something linguistical-ish here) I walked into a used record store not too long ago, looking for a specific CD -- the 1995 edition of Steve Taylor's "Liver" album. The store clerk did not recognize it, but Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 30, 2005 10:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Not perfect, but perfecting feedback loops

I was reading Paul Vick's discussion about Imperfect Feedback Loops and it got me thinking a bit about the various community efforts over the years. A few years ago I was visting a friend in Orem, Utah and had an opportunity to see Jeffrey R. Holland Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 30, 2005 10:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Normalization vs. .NET text elements

Ok, here is the updated code for that internationally savvy palindrome checker . It supports that interesting situation with ligatures like fl (U+fb02, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FL) vs. an lf on the far side, originally suggested by our old friend Maurits Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 30, 2005 1:39 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Getting enough exercise?

(No technical content in this post) I love Typhoon , a Thai restaurant that has muliple locations, the closest one for me in Redmond about 4 miles away. They have a dish there called General's Noodles with the following description on the dinner menu Read More...
Posted Friday, April 29, 2005 3:10 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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Where did the new StringInfo stuff come from?

I used it in a very confusing and obfuscated way in Normalization as obfuscation in C# . And then yesterday I used it again in my internationally savvy palindrome checker , in a slightly more intuitive manner. It is the all new StringInfo class in Whidbey. Read More...
Posted Friday, April 29, 2005 2:36 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Looking for that internationally savvy palindrome checker....

Jonathan Payne asked if I had an international thought about the palindrome pseudo interview question at this site: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=19171 I did. :-) Using the new StringInfo stuff in Whidbey Beta 2: bool IsPalindrome(string Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 28, 2005 10:42 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 22 Comments
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Cleaning out the suggestion box a bit

The theme for this post is going to be disappointing people's hopes.... picking out suggestions that do not go along with the probable desires of those asking the questions. The first question comes from marius mihalca : Sorry to bother you with this Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 28, 2005 8:40 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

re: Cleaning out the suggestion box a bit

The thing I would definitely note is that the solutions do not seem to handle combining chars. But I would do something like this for it: using System; using System.Text; using System.Globalization; namespace Testing { class Palindrome { [STAThread] static Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 28, 2005 10:32 AM from Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Reason #8 to not be so anxious to update your Platform SDK?

Back in March, I gave Reason #124 to update your Platform SDK from time to time (it was to pick up a fix to an AppVerifer bug that existed in unicows.lib). A comment from Nektar suggested that there were good reasons to be cautious about doing such updates. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 27, 2005 2:50 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Good things can happen when religious authorities work with science and technology

The Hijri calendar is not really subject to an easy alogorithm. As Dr. International pointed out back in August of 2000 : Perhaps Dr. International should provide some background to help explain why SQL Server refers to this as an Arabic style date that Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 26, 2005 11:20 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Intelligent unmanaged string comparison

If you look at the documentation for CompareString (but not LCMapString , though it probably ought to be there, too), there is a small security note in there: Security Alert Using this function incorrectly can compromise the security of your application. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 26, 2005 6:20 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Speaking gig tonight (April 25) in Cleveland, OH, USA

Just a quick reminder to folks in the area.... The presentation is at the Microsoft C#/VB.NET SIG on Monday night (TONIGHT!), April 25th at 6:30pm. Looking forward to seeing people there! Read More...
Posted Monday, April 25, 2005 2:40 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Limiting the languages of input

Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003 have powerful support for the input of text. On a per thread level, you can designate the support of any language you want, whatsoever. For some applications, this is not so good. One may want to block the ability to Read More...
Posted Monday, April 25, 2005 5:10 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Immoral? Illegal? Who can say? Well, I will!

There have been several interesting emails that I have gotten the last few days, relating to the Microsoft stance on the anti-discrimination bill. Many people have seen the letter Steve Ballmer sent out (either because they are employees, or beacuse they Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 24, 2005 4:00 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Free at last!

Ok, with some shovelling by me, some shovelling by my father, and a bit of time with the snowblower from the neighbor, we have made it. We are now free! I am exhausted. I swear I used to shovel this driveway sometimes. But then I used to carry two golf Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 24, 2005 12:40 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Trapped in Beachwood, Ohio?, Redux

Ok, I may have spoken too soon thinking I was not trapped in Beachwood, Ohio . The snow is a foot deep, all the way down the driveway. We may have a real problem if we cannot get someone with a plow to come by. I guess the cat is trapped on the roof , Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 24, 2005 11:27 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Trapped in Beachwood, Ohio?

Amazing. Last week they had weather that was sunny and in the 70s (some say 80s, a few days). Yet last night there was enough snow to topple trees down all over the area. In the case of the driveway in front of my parents' house, a huge branch from a Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 24, 2005 11:02 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Is Whidbey's international support finished?

Some of the international features look unfinished in Whidbey. For example: There is a RegionInfo.GeoId and no actual GEO properties like the ones from the Win32 GEO APIs. There are NumberFormatInfo.NativeDigits and NumberFormatInfo.DigitSubstitution Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 24, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Regular expressions, Unicode style....

A few days ago, Scott Hanselman asked in the Suggestion Box: I'm doing an English/Spanish site with ASP.NET using some client side validation with Regular Expressions. I wanted to write a single Regular Expression for most large text fields: ^[\w\d\s-'.,&#@:?!()$\/]+$ Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 23, 2005 5:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Do I really support the Kobayashi Maru in interview questions?

When I wrote about an interview question that I would ask (after going on about one that I would not ask ), I got some interesting feedback. One of the more interesting questions I got via e-mail was the subject line of this post. Jen (the developer asking) Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 23, 2005 2:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

SetLocaleInfo really stinks

Yes, I said it. The SetLocaleInfo function, which has been around since NT 3.1, really stinks. Why would I be so disparaging about an API that has been around so long? Well, I'll start on the outside and work concentrically in.... First of all, it is Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 23, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Exposing custom cultures?

Last night I got a piece of email from someone who had seen my talk for the .NET Developer's Association back in February and they had just downloaded Beta 2 of Whidbey. He was very impressed with a lot of the features and even played with my Normalization Read More...
Posted Friday, April 22, 2005 9:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

New experiment on the comments issue

New experiment in blogging -- I am going to try only moderating anonymous comments for a bit for new posts for a while and see if I can hit the right balance between blocking spam and not making people wait for their comments to show up. It will only Read More...
Posted Friday, April 22, 2005 8:53 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Last night's talk....

Well, there was some sort of accident on Harper that made me a little late, but nobody was too upset. And the projector was completely unwilling to work with my laptop, but we copied the slides onto Bob's laptop so I was able to get it all done. But everything Read More...
Posted Friday, April 22, 2005 8:39 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Intuitive is in the eye of the beholder

Yesterday and today, we had some customers who were visiting, to meet with people and talk about various international issues and features in Microsoft products. One of the groups they wanted to talk to was some of the smart folks over on the Office team. Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 21, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

Encoding APIs and Security Concerns, APIs and Security Decisions

The other day I talked about issues with the two big encoding APIs in Win32, in posts A few of the gotchas of WideCharToMultiByte and A few of the gotchas of MultiByteToWideChar . Both API topics ( MultiByteToWideChar and WideCharToMultiByte ) include Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 20, 2005 9:22 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Upcoming speaking gigs in Cleveland, OH

The first presentation is at the Microsoft SQL Server Special Interest Group . It is happening tomorrow night (April 21st) at 6:30pm. The second presentation is at the Microsoft C#/VB.NET SIG on Monday night (April 25th) at 6:30pm. The first talk is about Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 20, 2005 8:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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A few of the gotchas of MultiByteToWideChar

Like I mentioned yesterday, I have talked a bunch of times about the way that different forms of strings that are canonically equivalent according to Unicode and which actually look identical visually exist in the world. Yesterday, I mentioned it while Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 19, 2005 2:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments
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Whidbey Beta 2 without MSDN Universal

Run, don't walk, if you don't have MSDN Universal but want to check out the cool new international functionality in Whidbey. Because you can now get Microsoft to send you the DVD. And for a limited time the shipping is free! Just check out the Visual Read More...
Posted Monday, April 18, 2005 9:04 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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How soon is now?

The eternal question is 'Are we there yet?' and for software always gets the answer RSN (real soon now). And whether one thinks the question is best asked by The Smiths or by Love Spit Love (the former due to common sense/love of the classics, the latter Read More...
Posted Monday, April 18, 2005 1:44 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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A few of the gotchas of WideCharToMultiByte

I have talked a bunch of times about the way that different forms of strings that are canonically equivalent according to Unicode and which actually look identical visually exist in the world. My uber typical example is comparing U+00e5 to U+0061 U+030a Read More...
Posted Monday, April 18, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Brett Shirley really ought to blog

Eric Fleishman posted earlier about the fact that sometimes, blogging really is that hard in a hilarious sendup of Brett Shirley's indecisive plunge into the blogosphere. I am glad I had not just sipped any Limonata, because if I had it would be all over Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 17, 2005 9:28 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Why are the HKL and KLID of the keyboard different?

I actually get this question on a regular basis, believe it or not. People look at the two numbers, see the similarities, and then start assuming they are the same. To review from my old keyboard terminiology post: KLID -- a keyboard layout identifier. Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 17, 2005 5:40 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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My linguistic profile....

While I doubt that it is very scientific, the results were interesting: Your Linguistic Profile: 70% General American English 20% Yankee 5% Dixie 5% Upper Midwestern 0% Midwestern What Kind of American English Do You Speak? It actually kind of fits someone Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 16, 2005 2:58 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Not all keyboards are included in MSKLC's lists

Yesterday, Ovate left a comment to my post What is my locale? Well, which locale do you mean? entitled Chinese locales and Dvorak . Not entirely ontopic and probably better for the suggestion box , but I am not going to judge too harshly. :-) Ovate said: Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 16, 2005 12:40 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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The headline was 'Killer flu samples shipped via FedEx, DHL'

Nothing technical in this post! The headline that brought back a lot of memories for me was on MSNBC on Thursday was indeed Killer flu samples shipped via FedEx, DHL . Not quite flashbacks but maybe a tamer version of them. You see, I actually worked Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 16, 2005 11:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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When a user sets something. please assume they meant it

I am not going to claim our UI in Windows is so intuitive that we can trust that anything that is set is what the user really wants. In fact, I have stated many times that Regional Options is not intuitive . But when a developer tells me that the reason Read More...
Posted Friday, April 15, 2005 7:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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Instead of a 'blue screen', I am waiting for the blue screen

I was reading Mike Poulson 's I feel your pain. My first Call to Microsoft PSS (and kb890859) . And thinking about my own story about the VP who did the same thing, calling support for a technical problem. And having a degree of knowledge above a naive Read More...
Posted Friday, April 15, 2005 5:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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From Win32 to .NET (and vice versa)

Charts like the one in Some suggested updates to the Win32-->.NET mapping for NLS functions are kind of amusing when you take the context in which the System.Gloablization class was conceived. Internationalization in Windows did not really exist way Read More...
Posted Friday, April 15, 2005 3:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Comments work here (though not so you'd really notice or anything)

My friend Cathy politely asked me the other day why no one was making comments on my blog anymore. Since I had been accepting comments daily, I respectfully pointed out that they were not actually paying attention -- there were comments aplenty! She respectfully Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 14, 2005 3:21 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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On approaching international programming....

Yesterday, someone named Ben posted the following comment to my post Invariant and Ordinal Redux : I appreciate your enthusiasm for picking out common programming errors like this, but as a professional programmer, I find a lot of these internationalization Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 14, 2005 9:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

AVICAP32.DLL sucks (from the MSLU point of view)

It is all about perspective. I am sure there are people who look at this DLL as being the answer to their prayers in terms of providing helpful interface to AVI capabilities. But from my point of view, it kind of sucks. :-( The other day someone with Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 13, 2005 2:15 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments
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Invariant and Ordinal Redux

I have talked about LOCALE_INVARIANT / CultureInfo . InvariantCulture before, in Comparison confusion: INVARIANT vs. ORDINAL and Where is the locale? "Its Invariant." In where ? and talked a little about the if not noble then at least deterministic intent Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 13, 2005 7:19 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Why the proofing tools are all bundled....

Earlier this month, saturnin02 posted the following opinion onto at least seven English and Italian Microsoft newsgroups, in response to a general thread about the Microsoft Proofing Tools and the fact that they basically bundle all of the languages together, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 12, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

It is all about making sure developers respect the user's preferences

Now this is a topic I have talked about before, so I am going to put a slightly different spin on the issue, this time. To review, a user can go into Regional Options and make choices about the language they want to use. Now I could go on forever (hell, Read More...
Posted Monday, April 11, 2005 5:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

What the %#$* is wrong with German sorting?

(Apologies to those who are offended by the South Park movie scene that inspired the title of this post!) About a month ago, Daniel J. Smith asked me something that prompted me to say Dere are qvestions? In zat case ... Then last week, Martin Müller asked Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 10, 2005 1:25 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 21 Comments

Feline Update, and See You at the Show

I've had people ask me (since I posted about my cat Chelsea being on the roof ) how she is doing. So I thought I'd give people an update.... She is doing okay. Moving a bit slower, but still quite happy to be eating Fancy Feast twice a day. Although I Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 09, 2005 2:52 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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And then there is the virama....

The Virama is a fascinating sign. It has a simple job -- it surpresses the inherent vowel that the preceding Indic letter contains. I was very pleased once I understood this concept (I was dealing with Tamil at the time). And the collation rules also Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 09, 2005 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

The ever-misleadingly incorrect usage of the word DEFAULT

Back after Windows 2000 shipped, everyone though the word LOCALE was simply used too much, in fact that it was OVERused. It forced Dr. International to ask " Will the Real Locale Please Stand? " and answer it with a mondo big table of Configurable Language Read More...
Posted Friday, April 08, 2005 12:03 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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What makes a good blog?

A little while ago, tonyso wrote a post entitled If a blog falls in the forest... It got me thinking.... Now for what it is worth, I am not fishing and no one is expected or even desired to post and say that I am. This is an official request to not post Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 07, 2005 10:55 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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I will be at TechEd Europe (July 5-8)

Back in February, when I first posted about how I might be at TechEd 2005 in Orlando, Peter Ibbotson asked : Any chance of pre-conference review copies? We would honestly devour and critique just this subject at the moment, as we haven't yet shipped anything Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 07, 2005 11:53 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Definitions are context sensitive

The definition of many words depends on the context. For example, a typographer (or a dictionary) might consider a ligature to be a character consisting of two or more letters combined into one. But if you work with keyboards on Windows then you might Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 07, 2005 12:03 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Michael Penn at the Tractor Tavern on April 9th

I usually don't do this sort of thing, but it is really good music. :-) Singer/songwriter Michael Penn (husband to singer/songwriter Aimee Mann) will be at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard on April 9th (Saturday). Highly recommended, but only if you like Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 06, 2005 6:24 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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When Notepad's Find doesn't

I met Chris Walker the other day. It is amazing how you can "know" someone at Microsoft through email without ever actually meeting them. Occasionally with a name like Leslie or Sam or Chris you might even not know their gender, so you just have these Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 06, 2005 7:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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So what happened in v.Next?

A few days ago I talked about how ClearCachedData found its way into the .NET Framework . I told the whole fun story, and I waited hopefully for someone to ask the question. I explained how it was too late to do anything more extensive in the first version Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 05, 2005 12:02 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Two Birds of a Feather Sessions proposed for TechEd 2005

Ok, people pointed out to me that both MS Employees and TechEd speakers can propose Birds of a Feather sessions. Those who are interested and wanted to vote on the sessions can do so at BOF Voting . The sessions I proposed are entitled: Security and Unicode Read More...
Posted Monday, April 04, 2005 6:17 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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When casing does not need to roundtrip in .NET

A few days ago I reminded everyone about how every Unicode character has a story, and I was talking about U+03c2 a.k.a. GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA. You can read about it here . In the deep, dark past I had also talked about the the meaning of "linguistic Read More...
Posted Monday, April 04, 2005 5:14 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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TechEd Bloggers does not work for this site?