Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

August 2005 - Posts

Sometimes it *does* pay to be neutral

I can hardly believe it has been a year since I asked and answered the questions What is a neutral culture? What is a neutral locale? I spent a bunch of time talking about how lame neutral locales were on Wn32 given how they are not supported by any of Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2005 12:03 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Keyboard Convert Service goes Bidi!

This is undeniably cool -- the Keyboard Convert Service localized into Arabic! If you are interested in getting it now (or even if you are just interested in looking at the download page in Arabic!) you can see it at: خدمة تحويل لوحة المفاتيح لـ Arabic Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 30, 2005 6:40 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
Filed under:

They're asking about Vista, even if they don't know it....

People keep on using that Contact link to ask me questions that essentially either shouldn't be asked at all or should be asked in the suggestion box. Sigh.... Ok, I'm over it. Now here are some of those questions. And you, the reader, already know the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 30, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
Filed under:

Keyboard Convert Service - русский вариант!

I have previously talked about the Keyboard Convert Service, and the fact that its UI can be found in English , Greek , and Czech . Let's add Russian to that list! Or in Russian, Служба преобразования клавиатуры . Who knows what language will be next? Read More...
Posted Monday, August 29, 2005 12:12 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
Filed under:

Compilers are hard working and dumb?

Philipp Lensen explained Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb . I thought this was a great and funny post, made even funnier by a small piece in the middle: In the endless battle between a programmer and the compiler, it’s best for the programmer to Read More...
Posted Monday, August 29, 2005 9:04 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Everybody picks on Brett

Yes, it is true -- everybody picks on Brett . Adi has even gotten into it now.... In some ways it seems totally unfair (I mean he has a full time job and it is not like they are sitting around doing nothing over there!). In other ways it seems immature Read More...
Posted Monday, August 29, 2005 7:58 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
Filed under:

About [not] writing books

(Nothing but a bunch of navel gazing in this post, you may want to skip if you have a temperment like mine; I would have no patience for this type of rubbish, myself!) A few days ago when I shook my fist at the heavens and proclaimed my kingdom for some Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 28, 2005 6:30 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
Filed under:

Vietnamese is a complex language on Windows

Back in May of 2004, Quan Nguyen sent a message to Dr. International about Vietnamese collation in Windows and the .NET Framework: I tried to sort Vietnamese characters according to Vietnamese collation rules, as precribed in http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/charset/vietalphabet.html. Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 27, 2005 7:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Has it been three years?

Yes, as it turns out, it has been exactly three years since I started at Microsoft on a full-time basis. And my dork badge still let me in so I have not been fired just yet.... :-) Ordinarily, this would mean I should put out 3 lbs of M&Ms in front Read More...
Posted Friday, August 26, 2005 10:34 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
Filed under:

The Czech is in the email

Well, in an email I just received, at least (and now in yours if you have email notifications for this blog turned on). :-) The Czech localized version of the Keyboard Convert Service has been released, joining English and Greek .... Read More...
Posted Friday, August 26, 2005 6:50 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
Filed under:

The Milk Bet lives!

They are never going to learn this one. Marlins suspend batboy for milk-drinking dare I'll ignore the suspension issue and talk about the "milk bet" here. Now this particular bet has been around for a long time. I first heard about it when I was working Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 25, 2005 3:25 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 30 Comments
Filed under:

My kingdom for some Unicode controls

I have certainly done my share of pushing for Unicode controls in various programming languages on Windows. From the UniToolbox controls link on this very blog to the book I wrote for Visual Basic (see Chapter 6 online!) -- this is the one that Joel Spolsky Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 25, 2005 7:40 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

The loader without the loaded

I have mentioned in the past about customers who did not need the Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Win9x Systems itself. They had their own layer, perhaps built based on the article written by F. Avery Bishop, David C. Brown, and David M. Meltzer. But they Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 24, 2005 8:08 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
Filed under:

It didn't make my brown eyes blue

Crystal Gayle would be so disappointed.... The Novantrone did not make the whites of my eyes take on a bluish tinge, as I thought it might . Darn, I was thinking that might have been kind of cool. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 24, 2005 5:49 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
Filed under:

You probably don't want to use Microsoft's code page 20269

Yes, there is a problem with code page 20269. And there has been, since birth. It is intended to be an implementation of ISO-6937. Unfortunately it cannot really be used for its intended purpose, to provide a form for combining characters for Latin-1. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 24, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
Filed under:

What the hell does HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE mean?

The question is a simple one: what the hell does HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE mean? The answer is also quite simple: IT DEPENDS. The user is sending information from their browser, and could mean any of the following things: language/locale to use for formatting/collation Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 23, 2005 4:12 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

What if my strings are > 2 gb?

We do get our fair share of silly questions here in NLS. I should perhaps explain what I mean by silly. :-) I don't think I'd ever consider a question where somebody is asking about language and how it might work in a certain situation and call that silly. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 23, 2005 3:30 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 23 Comments
Filed under:

Yellow and blue make green

WARNING - a least one regular reader of this blog has told me that this post contains TMI (too much information). If you are easily offended, you probably shouldn't read this post -- on the other hand if you're easily offended, you probably shouldn't Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 23, 2005 12:30 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
Filed under:

National Punctuation Day? #$!%&-A it is!

I just read that it is National Punctuation Day.. The US has some of the most unbelievably goddamndest freaking holidays here,, let me tell you.. Anyway,, In honor of that special occasion,, every punctuation symbol I use appropriately in this post will Read More...
Posted Monday, August 22, 2005 6:43 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
Filed under:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly

Maybe our good friend Bill Shakespeare should have hired Kate Gregory 's Gregory Consulting to do some of the writing for his play Macbeth. Because then the line in the title could have been distilled down into the much shorter term Fail Fast . Now I Read More...
Posted Monday, August 22, 2005 4:30 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Is the Keyboard Convert Service Greek to you?

If the Keyboard Convert Service that I posted about previously seems kind of like Greek to you, then you might really love or hate this post, depending on whether you meant it literally or figuratively.... The localized Greek version is now available Read More...
Posted Monday, August 22, 2005 9:57 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

International support as a developer 'tax' ?

I read Raymond Chen 's post entitled How do you convince developers to pay their "taxes"? with interest. And it made me wonder whether you could lump international support in this list, any time an international market is not specifically being targetted. Read More...
Posted Monday, August 22, 2005 9:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments
Filed under:

Why I think the thread locale really stinks

I do not like the thread locale. Yes, GetThreadLocale and SetThreadLocale are two of the many NLS functions that the GIFT team supports. And yes, if we are to look at the functions we own as if they are our children then we are supposed to love them all. Read More...
Posted Monday, August 22, 2005 12:03 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Unicode text in a VB6 RichTextBox?

Galit Avieli asked (via email): My name is Galit, we are a few students from Israel working on a project using visual basic. We ran into a problem we're dealing for a few days now. Searching for a solution on the web, we saw a response you wrote in a Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 21, 2005 8:00 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

GetNumberFormat: not used by the Microsoft CRT....

Serge Wautier asked: I just blogged about GetNumberFormat() and why it may be confusing to users. It led me to wonder why GetNumberFormat() is not used by the CRT, such as in printf-like functions, even though GetDateFormat() is used by the same CRT. Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 21, 2005 6:30 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

The meaning of the word 'unsupported'

You would think that I would need to go no further than dictionary.com to find out the meaning of the word unsupported : adj 1: not sustained or maintained by nonmaterial aid; "unsupported accusations" [ant: supported ] 2: not held up or borne; "removal Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 21, 2005 1:05 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
Filed under:

Mitigation tools for IDN security problems

Back in January, just before the flap at the hacker's convention with the paypal.com like that used a cyrillic 'a' to prove that IDN without a way to ferret out phishing attacks, I posted my own post entitled International Domain Names? The sign on the Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 20, 2005 9:16 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments

The Keyboard Convert Service

Some of you will remember a while back about when Kate Gregory inspired me to talk about why sometimes the keyboard does not do what I tell it to! Sometimes you think you are typing in one keyboard, but it turns out you are typing in another. So some Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 20, 2005 3:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments
Filed under:

what's with the anchor tattoo?

I have had a few people ask me for a little of the back story here.... You see, track 9 of Aimee Mann's new album (The Forgotten Arm) is entitled 'That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart' and the first verse goes something like this: I drew Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 20, 2005 3:30 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
Filed under:

New in Vista Beta 1: Updated OS casing tables

Not too long ago, I posted about New in Vista Beta 1: giving more strings weight , where I explained about how in Vista we are adding all of the assigned code points in Unicode 4.1 to the collation tables. Well, there is another set of tables that needed Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 20, 2005 1:15 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
Filed under:

GetDateFormat is Gregorian based

The GetDateFormat function either takes a SYSTEMTIME struct or if you pass a NULL for that parameter it uses the GetSystemTime function to retrieve the current date in the form of a SYSTEMTIME struct. One weird thing about all of that? Well, SYSTEMTIME Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 18, 2005 6:15 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

Every character has a story #13: U+0241 and U+0294 (upper and lower case glottal stops)

It started just the other day when John Jenkins asked on the core Unicode mailing list: Now that we have an uppercase glottal stop, any recommendations as to how it should look in a font? Both the uc and lc glottal stops occupy the full space from baseline Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 17, 2005 5:32 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Please don't let this be summerlong

Last weekend was an interesting one, to be sure.... First of all, it started on Thursday. I was going down to the Bay Area to visit a friend of mine who had something on his mind, so I took a few days off and headed down. Some of the people I talked to Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 17, 2005 5:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
Filed under:

Program Managers vs. Developers? :-)

I remember the day many years ago when Paul Vick sent out this mail about how to be a PM and how to deal with PMs. It is still just as funny as it was back then! Though I will differ from Paul on one point -- after kicking arround the hallways since the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 16, 2005 5:47 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
Filed under:

The .NET Framework is not Windows (and vice versa)

The title of this post seems like such an obvious point, but people have a tendency to mix them up. Now in fairness to these people, it is largely due to the integration that has been done to help them work together. Still, I am often left wondering how Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 16, 2005 2:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

It may make my brown eyes blue

(computerized apologies to Brenda Gayle Webb, better known as Crystal Gayle, for the use of her song title) The other day I was talking about Novantrone . Well, I did not bring up this 'napalm of the MS world' first, my neurologist did. After some careful Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 16, 2005 6:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
Filed under:

MSLU and the Windows Common Controls

Recently in the microsoft.public.platformsdk.mslayerforunicode, someone with the handle Alpha Siera posted the following: Hi, I have converted one application to use MSLayer for unicode for Win 9x. The application is staticaly linked with unicows.lib Read More...
Posted Monday, August 15, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Changing the code page of a text file

Ken Skingle asked: Is ther an easy way to change the default code page from OEM United States to say Western European (ISO) on the import/export wizard? Ver being used is Access 2002 SP3 Thanks in advance Well, if you are using Access 2002 then I have Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 14, 2005 5:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Why lunch out can be cool, even conceptually!

I was explaining the other day about how I thought Gretchen is totally cool . I then went on to suggest that even ignoring Gretchen the person (who is cool for the reasons given and more), there is a conceptual coolness related to her job here as well. Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 14, 2005 3:23 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
Filed under:

Is there a new scam going around?

In the past few weeks, I have had messages coming to me from many different sources (my email addresses, my home phone number, the contact link on this site, etc.). Each message is different, but each has one thing in common with the others: someone claiming Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 14, 2005 12:06 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments
Filed under:

Hardware is still not always software

Dawn asked me: Hiya, well I am not up on all this bumph, but i was wondering if you could help me at all?? the problem is that when ever i try to type a pound sign this is what i get # so then when i try the oppisite and us the hash key to get a pound Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 13, 2005 11:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
Filed under:

Code units vs. code points

Dmitiri suggested: You mentioned somewhere in the blog that the length of unicode strings passed to windows API calls is to be counted in code points. MSDN however usually mentiones 'number of TCHARs' or 'number of wide characters' (WideCharToMultiByte) Read More...
Posted Friday, August 12, 2005 2:39 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
Filed under:

Jet indirect/internet replication requries the Jet synchronizer....

Approximately 1.5 lives ago (or two to three versions of Office ago -- pick your own preferred meaurement method), I was something of a guru when it came to Jet replication -- for Jet 3.0x, 3.5x, and 4.0. I was doing a lot of consulting for companies Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 11, 2005 12:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
Filed under:

Your program is crashing. Are you listening?

I am not currently going to the PDC , but if I were I would probably want to attend the session entitled Windows Vista: Improving your Products Code Quality through Windows Feedback Services which, as Raymond Chen pointed out , could have been named with Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 10, 2005 1:12 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
Filed under: ,

Double compressions -- Hungarian goulash?

Different languages bring different expectations. And people who natively speak, write, and read languages have those different expectations. Now that is fine, and of course the time it gets harder is when those different expectations conflict with each Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 10, 2005 7:38 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Suits you to a _T()

The other day, Jeremy asked me: I thought that with your wealth of unicode knowledge, you may be able to answer a few questions for me. In a C/C++ program, is it necessary to wrap single character conversions in a _T( ) macro? For instance... TCHAR tch Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 10, 2005 5:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Tysabri still down for the count

Some of you may recall my post about how the new MS drug Tysabri took my breath away with two reports of Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy (PML), a rare but usually fatal disease of the central nervous system. Since that time there has been in Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 09, 2005 12:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
Filed under:

ELK stampede!

Back in January I was saying Lions and tigers and bears ELKs, Oh my! when I first started talking about these new beasts here and the way that new locales were being added. Now, the ELKs are stampeding again! You can look at 897338 in the Knowledge Base Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 09, 2005 4:50 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments
Filed under:

Wow, Wikipedia even links here?

I guess this blog is an actual thing now. Wikipedia's Internationalization and Localization page, the last link listed, is to the Sorting it All Out home page. It may not last; two people have told me that the Wikipedia community often votes down links Read More...
Posted Monday, August 08, 2005 5:33 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
Filed under:

There is no Regional Options cartel

Shawn Neidig asks: I know that within Microsoft there are many different teams working on the vast number of Microsoft products. Because of this there are many inconsistencies that occur between Microsoft products. I have posted a few questions below Read More...
Posted Monday, August 08, 2005 5:15 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Anyone volunteering for bee stings?

Someone pointed the following out to me in a contact post: It is likely you have already heard about this before and either already tried it or perhaps dismissed it as bunk, but - talking about your Multiple Sclerosis with my girlfriend, she remembered Read More...
Posted Monday, August 08, 2005 6:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
Filed under:

Recognized in public by a reader of this blog!

(nothing technical here, sorry!) I have posted about Aimee Mann's new album The Forgotten Arm; She is actually touring now on the West coast and I got to see some shows.... She appeared Saturday, July 6th at South Lake Union Park in Seattle, WA to do Read More...
Posted Monday, August 08, 2005 1:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
Filed under:

New in Vista Beta 1: giving more strings weight

Back in January I put up that post entitled The jury will give this string no weight . In that post I mentioned three reasons why a code point might have no weight: It may actually not be a valid, encoded Unicode code point, in which case it would be Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 07, 2005 11:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

The space key has limitations

Arash asked (via the Contact link rather than the proper place, the Suggestion Box): I was wondering why it is not possible to assign any Shifted state to the Space key using MSKLC? (I'm not sure about the terminology, basically I'm asking about Shift+Space). Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 06, 2005 11:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
Filed under:

What MSKLC can't do (since it is not supposed to)

Someone sent me the following about problems they were having with MSKLC related to a specific keyboard they were trying to create ( it would have made more sense in the Suggestion Box, but... ): 1. Virtual keys aren't being resolved. e.g. if I remap Read More...
Posted Friday, August 05, 2005 6:00 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
Filed under:

What MSKLC can't do

This one came out of the suggestion box: In general, can you comment on what MSKLC cannot do that you could do if you built a keyboard layout "from scratch" via the DDK? In particular, it appears that ligatures (multi-codepoint sequences) cannot be universally Read More...
Posted Friday, August 05, 2005 12:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
Filed under:

Let's get vertical

(computerized apologies to Olivia Newton John) Dmilat asked (in the Suggestion Box): @-prefixed fonts If you try to manually type a font name like @Arial Unicode MS in MS Word font selection combo-box and then enter a text with some CJK hieroglyphs (make Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 04, 2005 12:00 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

The further you look into it, the further things stick out

This line from a David Byrne song has a lot of truth in it and it could be applied well to collation. :-) Just recently I was reading some posts from ものがたり (diary for AtsushiEno) , specifically from June 17th of this year, here . The first post is entirely Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 03, 2005 10:20 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments