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April 2006 - Posts

Sometimes, you have to keep it in ASCII

Just over a week ago I was posting about Unicode? Zip don't need no stinking Unicode! Well, as Heath points out in this post , Palm has re-released their update, sans the non-ASCII characters in file names. Given the current limitations in ZIP and the Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 30, 2006 4:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Starlings know better

I guess there is no denying the problem. As this post from over as year ago proves, I am not even as smart as a starling . But that's okay, because as Mark points out on Language Log, no one else is either.... :-) Oh, just to keep the balance going (I Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 29, 2006 10:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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'Which comes first?' vs. 'Are they equal?'

Remember how I have talked in the past about the difference between two different purposes for collation (comparison vs. identity, or alternately the difference between CompareString and EqualString)? (if not you can follow those links for some of the Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 29, 2006 8:41 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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DEFAULT_GUI_FONT really stinks

You don't want to ever use DEFAULT_GUI_FONT. Just like the thread locale , AVICAP32.DLL , and SetLocaleInfo , it really stinks. Raymond Chen talked about some of its history of this GetStockObject derived font last year when he answered the question What Read More...
Posted Friday, April 28, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments

Stay ahead of the culture by creating the culture

Hugh may have unintentionally come up with a great new slogan for the Microsoft Locale Builder .... Though it probably would never make it past the lawyers.... :-) Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 27, 2006 9:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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The disunification of Norwegian and Danish sorting

A few days ago, I wrote a post entitled Why do we call w 'double u' -- doesn't it look more like a 'double v' ? The post itself had nothing to do with the title; it was actually about the Swedish Academy changes to consider 'w' and 'v' to be separate Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 27, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

'Doctor, it hurts when I do this.' Well, don't do that!

Regular reader Mike Lippert asked the Suggestion Box: Hi Michael, Your blog is great and I really appreciate all you've written. I just ran into some odd behavior I was wondering if you could explain. Our app uses the Symbol font to display certain characters. Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 27, 2006 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

How to NOT Parse Unicode Digits, or How to: Parse Unicode Digits... NOT!

I have talked about digit substitution many times in the past . I was reminded of it recently when developer Kollen pointed put a pretty lame article : I have a bug on parsing fullwidth Unicode digits and I noticed the (poorly named) "How to: Parse Unicode Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 26, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Why do we call w 'double u' -- doesn't it look more like a 'double v' ?

Back at the Unicode Conference, after the "Design Principles for A Regional, Multilingual Keyboard" birds-of-a-feather, I had a chance to talk with Klaas Ruppel, who has been helping with the Finnish government standards. (Among other things, he gave Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 25, 2006 9:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

No cows were harmed in the writing of this blog post

I honestly can't believe how strange the conversations I have seem to get, sometimes. I mean, Cathy came by to grab a snickers bar from the candy dish, and she was fussing with the stuffed cows on the bookshelf. She was trying to figure out why they were Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 25, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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When the documentation is confusing, it is often because the functionality is, too

It is easy to take cheap shots at documentation writers for their mistakes. But it is usually placing the blame in the wrong place, since in many cases it is the actual functionality that was confusing first. So if the writer's attempts to clarify that Read More...
Posted Monday, April 24, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Why I am not in favor of a FileSystemInfo.Compare method

Back in January of this year, reader J. Daniel Smith asked: Did I miss your other blog entry on this topic? ----- re: Comparing Unicode file names the right way Tuesday, October 18, 2005 3:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan Ah, the reasons I am resistant to *that* Read More...
Posted Monday, April 24, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

They really do look a little bit alike

Last year some time I was back in Cleveland, and I saw my first episode of Ghost Whisperer. I made the offhand comment during a commercial break that Jennifer Love Hewitt looked a lot like Alyssa Milano.... Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 23, 2006 11:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Suri [with the fringe on top]

Assuming you are on this planet, you have probably heard about the name of Tom and Katie's new baby. Of course I lost the faith I had in Katie (dating from Teaching Mrs. Tingle) by the time the second season of Dawson's Creek was over, and I don't think Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 23, 2006 4:36 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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What difference does the 'e' make?

So, the question I got in email from someone named Kenny was quite timely: The .NET Framework has a file named normalize.dll, and Vista has one named normaliz.dll. What is the difference between these two files other than the name? I say timely because Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 23, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Unicode? Zip don't need no stinking Unicode!

I have talked about the limitations in ZIP before in the post Zipping up Unicode file names , but Heath has pointed out a new and interesting wrinkle in the problem in his post Update for the Palm Treo 700w Available, with Problems . Now Heath may seem Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 22, 2006 10:48 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Getting all you can out of a keyboard layout, Part #10a

We have come a long way in this series, haven't we? :-) Look at all that we have covered: Part 0 : An enumeration with all of the Virtual Key values defined in winuser.h; Part 1 : Getting Scan codes, Virtual Keys, and a single character in one shift state; Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 22, 2006 4:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Dial 911, code page 864 isn't breathing

In the past I have had less than kind words to say about code pages 20127 , 20269 , and 1258 . Well, with this post you will be able to add code page 864 to the list.... Over in the microsoft.public.platformsdk.mslayerforunicode newsgroup, shanab asked: Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 22, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

'universal-character-name encountered in source'

The compiler error is C4428: universal-character-name encountered in source. The description of it in MSDN has a few problems in regard to understandability: Visual C++ Concepts: Building a C/C++ Program Compiler Warning (level 4) C4428 Error Message Read More...
Posted Friday, April 21, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

Every character has a story #20: U+210e (PLANCK CONSTANT)

Unicode is a standard that fits all kinds of different needs. Obviously the need to represent text that may contain important symbols used in science has always been important. At some fundamental level, the identity of that symbol goes beyond an italicized Read More...
Posted Friday, April 21, 2006 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Sample code for getting ELK cultures on other platforms

Talking about ELKs (Enabling Language Kits) again, those cool things that provide new locales outside of operating system upgrades that I first mentioned in Lions and tigers and bears ELKs, Oh my! way back in January of last year. More recently, in ELK Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 20, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

They called it the 'Surrogate IME'

A few years ago, the Chinese (PRC) and Chinese (Hong Kong) versions of Office XP shipped a new IME (Input Method Editor) that supported Unicode Extension A and Extension B, and a special version of the Simsun font that was expanded to support these characters, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 19, 2006 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

What do the latest episode of Love Monkey, Beth Orton, Kathleen Edwards, Luke Doucet, and Kristin Connell have in common?

I have seen all of them within the past few months, not necessarily in that order? :-) Let's see, I'll start with Kristin Connell . I saw her a few times recently, still love that voice and am very much looking forward to her next album, or at least the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 19, 2006 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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There is a bug in Part #9b!

There was indeed a bug in the code I posted in Getting all you can out of a keyboard layout, Part #9b . It does not exist in any prior versions.... It was first pointed out by Joku, in this comment . Here is the diff for those of you who are following Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 18, 2006 2:40 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Grouping in the managed and unmanaged worlds

Yesterday, when I talked about that post from Raymond about numeric grouping the locale sensitive way , I mentioned that I'd be back after he came back. Here goes.... Now as messy as GetLocaleInfo 's LOCALE_SGROUPING LCTYPE may seem: Sizes for each group Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 18, 2006 9:03 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

I'll see you on the Job side of the moon

It has been many years since that most powerful and dynamic duo once known as the Moon Gals (Zoë and Gretchen) had teamed together to face that wild and untamed universe known as the Blogosphere. ( And more than fifteen months since they were pulled apart Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 18, 2006 7:49 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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A cool post related to number formats

The thing about locales is that are an attempt to capture a pretty huge bundle of settings that amount to defaults for how to handle a lot of the international functionality on the machine. An application can do all of that work itself, but that is usually Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 18, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Do what I do (not what I say)?

Having to deal with the double standard symbolized by the " Do what I say (not what I do!) " that some parents find themselves having to enforce seems almost like a part of life. Earlier today I got to see us handling it in the converse sense.... Here Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 18, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Aimee Mann on the TV show Love Monkey

Love Monkey was a series on CBS that was unfortunately taken off the air after only three episodes, in a move that was further proof that any show I watch in real-time will be cancelled. :-( Luckily though, VH1 decided to pick up the eight episodes that Read More...
Posted Monday, April 17, 2006 8:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Some strings need to feel validated

Reader J. Daniel Smith asked the following in the Suggestion Box: I'm wondering about "invalid" strings in .NET; I searched through your archives and didn't find anything exactly on-point, maybe I didn't search long enough... It's straight-forward to Read More...
Posted Monday, April 17, 2006 4:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Get off my freaking key!

Regular readers may remember how I have complained in the past about the way Word interferes with key strokes on keyboards that are required for a given language. I have long hoped that the folks over in Office would fix this issue. After all, it is a Read More...
Posted Monday, April 17, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

The Unicode Lame List

It might take you back to Almost Live and the Lame List , and if so then I was able to inspire the right memories. It is not a weekly posting, so it's not ' What's weak, this week '. But it will likely just be me periodically posting something that I Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 16, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

She slipped out last Friday

As I hinted at the other day, Gretchen Ledgard is no longer at Microsoft. Since I won't be able to write about her as eloquently as Korby did, I won't try to do that. But I'll mention some of what I will miss now that she is officially no longer in the Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 16, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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MFC/CRT build instructions tweaklets

The other day I got some mail about the instructions for rebuilding the Microsoft Foundation Classes and the C Runtime with the MS Layer for Unicode: Hi Michael, two things need to be tweaked in the (otherwise, delightfully clear) docs on rebuilding the Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 15, 2006 4:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Offense can be a cultural thing

I was reading Benjamin's brief history of 'spaz' on Language Log , and I think it is quite interesting how words that can be quite innocuous in one culture can be quite incendiary in another. In the particular example with Tiger Woods and the word spaz Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 15, 2006 2:30 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Long term planning is not always done

Starting in the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework, Microsoft has had the UmAlQuraCalendar Class , which is a more secular version of the HijriCalendar class in that it is based on a table-based algorithm, and does not support the "advance date" functionality Read More...
Posted Friday, April 14, 2006 1:05 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Every character has a story; some of them have cartoons!

Adam Hill contacted me via that contact link to point out Hacklog (Blogamundo) . With a subtitle like "Poking holes in the language barrier since approximately one month from now" I guess it is saying something interesting! A quick perusal shows lots Read More...
Posted Friday, April 14, 2006 10:20 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Unicode isn't advanaced mathematics

As Peter Vogel pointed out about Unicode a few years back , Unicode is hardly nuclear physics. I am pretty sure its not advanced mathematics, either (a point that was just proven again last night!). It has been a while since I have posted about things Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 13, 2006 9:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Getting all you can out of a keyboard layout, Part #9b

(Previous posts in this series: Parts 0 , 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , and 9a ) In my last post, I promised to provide the updated version of the code sample that will handle any keyboard layout that ships with Windows, including the Canadian Multilingual Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 13, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

To Sara, from Gretchen (via Michael‽)

(If there was ever a use for the INTERROBANG, this post would likely be it.... I wish it would work in the title of the post!) I am not sure where the term 'blog pimping' came from, but I guess it is time that I used it, since everyone else seems to be.... Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 13, 2006 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Getting all you can out of a keyboard layout, Part #9a

(Previous posts in this series: Parts 0 , 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , and 8 ) Today, we're going to take a look at the more complex shift states -- like when a keyboard layout takes the Control, Alt, and/or Shift keys on the right side of the keyboard Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 12, 2006 9:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Case sensitive Visual Basic!

Ok, we start with the following code -- just paste it into Notepad, and save in UTF-8 or Unicode encoding with a nice generic name like Module1.vb: Module Module1 Sub Main() Call Pröcedure1() End Sub Sub Pröcedure1() Console.WriteLine("Schrödinger's Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 11, 2006 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

I daresay it is often <= -1

A lot of the documentation for functions in the NLS API makes the point that for a length parameter you can either pass the length or you can pass -1 to signal that the string is NULL terminated. (I have mentioned this previously .) As it turns out, most Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 11, 2006 12:06 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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Not a complete waste of space

Well, I looked at Hugh's cartoon: (you can click on the image to go to his site, and get a much bigger copy of the cartoon). I am not sure where it puts me since what I do actually gives me neither power nor money. It is true that I am able to turn useless Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 11, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Getting all you can out of a keyboard layout, Part #8

(Previous posts in this series: Parts 0 , 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , and 7 ) If you have been following this series, you may have noticed that as it moves concentrically outward it gets harder and harder to figure out why things are so freaking complicated Read More...
Posted Monday, April 10, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

It may not always end with ის or ისა, either

In the spirit of It may not always end with ի , I thought I would post another example, and though I cannot speak too much more intelligently about Georgian than I can Armenian, it will prove to be as hard of a case to research without that knowledge.... Read More...
Posted Sunday, April 09, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

It may not always end with ի

As a follow-up to IStemmer'ed the tide (based in large part on feedback from people via email), I talked in What about search for kids? about a very interesting 'phase' during language acquisition. In this phase, the child, a particular rule is grokked Read More...
Posted Saturday, April 08, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Find the [globalization] bug(s)?

This may be fun. Extra credit to those who can find problems without copying and pasting the code somewhere and compiling it (and you are all on the honor system if you want to claim the extra credit!).... It is technically a C# question, though mainly Read More...
Posted Friday, April 07, 2006 6:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

File redirection corruption?

A question I received in email: In the FRA and ESN OSes, when I type some word on the command prompt with an acute-accented e like génération and redirect it to a file (eg: “echo génération > abcd.txt”) then the file contains a comma instead of the Read More...
Posted Friday, April 07, 2006 11:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

Dandy of Johns Hopkins

(not much that is technical in this post) Regular readers may recall that I mentioned a while back that I had once seriously considered neurosurgery as a career. On this particular day (April 6th), way back in 1886, Walter Edward Dandy was born. He was Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 06, 2006 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

It's not Telugu [తెలుగు] Tubbies (and it's certainly not Punjabi [ਪੰਜਾਬੀ] Tubbies!)

Previous LIP release posts: We're drowning in LIPs! Microsoft, you giving us some LIP? Let there be LIPs Oops, we did it again Oh Kannada... (ಕನ್ನಡ) 'c' is for click sounds, and they're good enough for me (I am trying to figure out if this list being Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 06, 2006 9:32 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

Getting all you can out of a keyboard layout, Part #7

(Previous posts in this series: Parts 0 , 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , and 6 ) Ok, I have been stalling enough; the time has come to dive into getting the dead keys. Not just getting the dead keys, but the actual defined base characters that go with them to create Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 06, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

'c' is for click sounds, and they're good enough for me

There have been several posts about LIPs in the past on this blog. There was We're drowning in LIPs! , Microsoft, you giving us some LIP? , Let there be LIPs , Oops, we did it again , and there was Oh Kannada... (ಕನ್ನಡ) . I am sure that some people must Read More...
Posted Thursday, April 06, 2006 12:08 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

At the tone, the time will be

Posted today (April 5th, 2006) at three seconds, two minutes, and one hour after midnight -- the date and time being: 01:02:03 04/05/06 in any country backwards enough to have an mm/dd/yy date format (such as the United States of America!) I had an embarrassing Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 05, 2006 1:02 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments
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Ok, so there may be *some* worries here

I was admittedly being as bit glib when I posted about the Sri Lanka time zone shift when I said: We deal with it all the time, and follow whatever is going on. So there really are no worries here as the updates do happen as needed. I fell into a trap Read More...
Posted Wednesday, April 05, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Linguistic analysis in an NCIS interrogation

The episode title is ' Iced .' The scene went something like this: {Tony DiNozzo is playing Tetris on his celullar phone} Ceasar : So, like, you don't got no.... questions for me? Tony : That's a double negative. Ceasar : Huh? Tony : Don't... got no... Read More...
Posted Tuesday, April 04, 2006 9:54 PM