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May 2006 - Posts

Keeping out the undesirables?

The NLS API function IsNLSDefinedString is an exercise in social engineering within software. Perhaps I should explain what the hell I am talking about. :-) This function takes a string and essentially gives you a judgment about whether this string is Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 31, 2006 8:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Beware of the whining!

It occurred to me that some could apply this cartoon of Hugh Macleod 's to Sorting It All Out .... I'll see what I can do to make sure I stay focused on solutions. :-) In other news, and there is no whining here, I agree with Jim Glass that 20 language Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 31, 2006 8:41 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Did he say shaping? It's not in the script!

Back in early 2005 (in the post Keeping it simple with complex scripts ), I talked a little bit about the way that the Uniscribe documentation gave several examples of how complex script shaping rules would be used by giving examples with Latin script Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 31, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 20 Comments

Avoiding SQL Server collation woes in the TempDB

Kimberly L. Tripp has a great post entitled Changing Database Collation and dealing with TempDB Objects . Definitely worth a read -- this is a problem I have bitten by in the past and have been defensively using per-column collation in TempDB operations Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 30, 2006 10:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Its a whole new way to look at MUI

For a long time, the National Language Support Reference contained all of the information for the Multilingual User Interface. But that is changing now, and in upcoming releases of the Platform SDK -- with these two new links (one for NLS , and one for Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 30, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

Unattend for Regional and Language Options in Vista

In previous posts, I have talked about the unattend mode of Regional and Language Options . And in the most recent of those, I promised to talk about the changes in Vista. So that is what is happening in this very post! WARNING : The stuff covered here Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 30, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

I U+2665 The Slowskys

I can't deny it, I am a fan of Bill and Karloyn, the Slowskys. In case you haven't seen their commercials on TV... Read More...
Posted Monday, May 29, 2006 7:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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When ALT+X seems to be failing...

I have mentioned the ALT+X mechanism for entering Unicode code points in passing previously, e.g. in posts such as Typing in random Unicode code points . Michael O'Henly asked via the Contacting Me... link: Hi Michael... I'm starting to learn Mandarin Read More...
Posted Monday, May 29, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Mirror, mirror... before whom I fuss, does mirroring work well in GDI+?

Indeed, this is the question I came to ask the mirror, while the wicked queen was napping (or maybe she was off getting a facial?): Mirror, mirror... before whom I fuss, Does mirroring work well in GDI+? Of course the mirror cannot lie, so it is forced Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 28, 2006 5:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Does it make sense to have 'Case' more accessible?

Regular reader Ivan Petrov asked in the Suggestion Box: Hi Michael I'm wondering have you ever thinked about adding to the Windows basic text shortcut menu, which consists of the folowing items: Undo <separator> Cut Copy Paste Delete <separator> Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 28, 2006 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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No Georgians or Armenians goed to the blog?

I was being very hopeful when I posted It may not always end with ի and It may not always end with ის or ისა, either and hoped that someone would answer my request for better information. As I somewhat intentionally attempted to apply a rule-based process Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 28, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Changing the user interface language at runtime?

Changing the user interface language really is a rather disruptive operation. Prior to the multilanguage version of Windows, you would actually have to install a fresh version of Windows based on the desired language. Even once MUI was made available, Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 27, 2006 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Consistent garbage text can be incorrect encoding identification (or detection)

Mushy asked in the Suggestion Box: Michael, You may have an old post that explains the following situation, so point me to it if you do. Here is the issue. If you look on my blog page you'll see some quotation marks printed as ’ instead of ". When I Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 27, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

Bytes over Western Europe

Over on the BCLTeam's WebLog , Ryan Byington wrote a mostly excellent post entitled SerialPort Encoding . At the end of the post he went a bit too far when he mentioned that The only encoding that converts all characters with a value 0-255 to a single Read More...
Posted Friday, May 26, 2006 6:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

7-bit UTF-8?

A while back, regular reader 'Maurits' noted in the Suggestion Box: Just submitted my first PSS support case (for an unrelated issue.) The email confirmation I received had the following amusing snippet in the headers: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Read More...
Posted Friday, May 26, 2006 5:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Two chickens in every pot, and an ASCII in every code page

Francisco Moraes asked in the Suggestion Box: Are there any code pages (exception EBCDIC) where the normal 7-bit ASCII characters are in different code points, ie, letter A is not found at 0x41? Francisco In the narrow sense of the world of [Microsoft] Read More...
Posted Friday, May 26, 2006 12:02 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Custom Case Mappings?

George asked me via the contact link: I was reading on MSDN from a topic titled 'Custom Case Mappings and Sorting Rules', and I am still not sure I understand what a 'custom case mapping' is. Can you help explain this? I think that the topic George was Read More...
Posted Friday, May 26, 2006 2:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Where'd I find that?

nikjohn asks: hi michael i'm interested in unicode from a sociological point of view (i'm writing an article about it) and your blog came up in some search. this link, actually: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/08/03/447052.aspx now, would you Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 25, 2006 9:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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SQL Server's cross-version collation support

I had the day off today, though I did end up going to a meeting or two with some SQL Server folks (they set the meeting up before I was told we were getting the day, and I didn't want to make them suffer for the tardy notice!). In between meetings, I Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 25, 2006 4:11 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Is it punctuation, symbol, or diacritic?

Developer Benjamin Westbrook asked me the following question yesterday (project name obscured for no reason in particular!): Michael, I’m debugging the Find code for 𐿿𐿿𐿿𐿿𐿿𐿿𐿿𐿿𐿿 and I wonder if you can comment on some behavior: CultureInfo cultureInfo Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 24, 2006 10:23 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Invariant vs. Ordinal, the third

Mike Sheldon is one of the smartest guys I know. You may have seen him on Channel 9 talking about Windows Shell Architecture with fellow architect Chris Guzak. And at least two people divined that he was the 'Mike' I credited in this post for his help Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 24, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Did somebody say time zones were intuitive?

One of the problems about time zones (and believe me, there are many problems with time zones !) is that sometimes it is hard to define what is meant by them. For example, I am currently sitting in my apartment in Redmond, WA, USA. I am in a time zone Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 24, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

Persian? Or Farsi? Redux

In the post from the other day ( Persian? Or Farsi? ) I briefly touched upon one of the common and reasonable answers to the question of what to call the language, which first came up a few years ago: The language name has become a confusing issue: Not Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 23, 2006 8:56 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Hebrew punctuation on the keyboard layout?

Ilya Konstantinov asked the following question (or perhaps it would more accurate to say made the following suggestion!) in the Suggestion Box: Hi Michael, This time, I'm contacting you not with a question per-se but rather with a request (which may just Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 23, 2006 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

UI language != input language (at least not always!)

Rune asked (in this post): Michael, on a related note, could you shed some light on language vs input locale? I typically use a Norwegian keyboard layout, but many applications seem to think this means I also want Norwegian language in the UI. The most Read More...
Posted Monday, May 22, 2006 11:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

What's Next?

(Feeling a little philosophical on a Sunday afternoon; feel free to disregard as needed!) That fun line from The West Wing that we'll never hear Martin Sheen say again and have it mean quite the same thing as when a PotUS with a million things on the Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 21, 2006 3:32 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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SetLocaleInfo works without notification

For pretty much its entire natural life, Regional and Language Options has passed a WM_SETTINGCHANGE message with an LPARAM value pointing to the string "intl" -- though in earlier versions, it passed WM_WININICHANGE , but astute header file readers who Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 21, 2006 12:41 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Amount owed: $0.00

You know the old joke about getting dunning letters about owing $0.00 and in order to placate the dunners needing to send a check for $0.00 ? I thought it was an urban legend. But something hauntingly familar to that has been happening to me over the Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 21, 2006 9:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments
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Love Monkey was [also] a book

(Nothing technical in this post?) I suppose it was probably a long shot that Love Monkey was ever going to be continued. I think I have gone through all the stages of grief about the whole thing (a task made much easier by the fact that I did not have Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 20, 2006 9:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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How to REALLY handle the unattended version of Regional and Language Options

I have talked about the Microsoft Knowledge Base article that describes how to run Regional and Language Options in unattend mode ( 289125 ), like in these three posts . In all three, I used a technique akin to the following to start the control panel Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 20, 2006 10:20 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

MSLU doesn't support wininet.dll

The Internet Extensions for Win32, a.k.a. WinINet.dll, has been around for a long time. Does it support Unicode? Yes, it does -- a bunch of "W" functions, though many of them seem to convert the strings from Unicode. Does it support Unicode on Win9x? Read More...
Posted Friday, May 19, 2006 6:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Where are the other Tamils?

Suren asked, after reviewing Vista: Hello, There is a Language called Tamil. it's in India & Sri Lanka as Offcial language. but in vista or in IE7 . It is only in india . what i mean is in english there is english US, UK, india, etc.. but in Tamil, Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 18, 2006 8:40 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Not all keyboard layouts are the same

Not all keyboard layouts are the same. This seems like it would be obvious, but all of the items in the list below are bugs have been reported against keyboard layouts in Windows, in most cases by people inside of Microsoft: m key doesn't work on french Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 17, 2006 9:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Persian? Or Farsi?

You may have thought it was over. I mean, at some point there was a break after there was We're drowning in LIPs! , Microsoft, you giving us some LIP? , Let there be LIPs , Oops, we did it again , Oh Kannada... (ಕನ್ನಡ) , and 'c' is for click sounds, and Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 16, 2006 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 27 Comments

What broke the input language messages?

Yesterday, when I was talking about the role of input language change events and how Even if the message is not for you, you still need to pass it on , I dangled a small morsel at the end: Now in fairness, the above deterministic process stopped being Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 16, 2006 8:40 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Even if the message is not for you, you still need to pass it on

As far back as elementary school, there may have been times when notes were being passed. The note would have on it the name of the person it is intended for; if it was not you then you would need to pass it on. Certainly you weren't supposed to throw Read More...
Posted Monday, May 15, 2006 7:43 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Harder intermediate forms of characters

In the post Getting intermediate forms , I gave an example three character sequences that look the same and that are canonically equivalent according to Unicode: ễ U+1ec5 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND TILDE ễ U+0065 U+0302 U+0303 LATIN SMALL Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 14, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Long live the Emperor

This post is telling a true story. Not only is it true, but it has been true five different times (with minor, inconsequential variations each time with different people). It is fair to say that I am hopeful that by posting it that there will not be a Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 14, 2006 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

We mimicked the display rather than the actual data

I swear that I almost ruined a keyboard yesterday by taking a sip of Limonata just before I read Raymond Chen 's post When people mimic the display rather than the actual data . Mainly because we own one of these in NLS! Just check it out under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\Locale Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 13, 2006 6:41 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Get him to the MSKLC download site!

I was reading Mark Lieberman's Cautionary Tale and that part at the end gave me pause for thought: ...rather than resorting to the sequence of Linear B glyphs that I could render in Unicode if I had the time. Mark, you should install the Microsoft Keyboard Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 13, 2006 6:40 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Which language strings to load? How to load them?

The SZ (a.k.a. Steffen) asked in the suggestion box: What is the prefered way to select the "most usefull" language in a multi language app? If I'm using "LoadString" I'm getting the os language If I'm using "GetUserDefaultUILanguage" I'm getting the Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 13, 2006 10:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Font embedding -- the intro

I used to be very naive about how font licensing worked. This is going back a few years, around the time just before I started the MSLU contract . My own website was supporting several different languages, including Hindi and Tamil, but not too many people Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 13, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

MSN in Tamil!

MSN has put up a beta of a Tamil ( தமிழ் ) portal, you can check it out here . Very cool! (found via Venkatarangan TNC, a member of INFITT 's Executive Committee) This post brought to you by "த" ( U+0ba4 , a.k.a. TAMIL LETTER TA) Read More...
Posted Friday, May 12, 2006 9:37 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Don't use lstrcmp if you don't need it

It was over a year ago I posted Performance gains at the cost of your own components , where I talked about the shell game that people play with peformance gains, sometimes. You know, where one component speeds up but it is done in such a way that someone Read More...
Posted Friday, May 12, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Let Me Make One Thing Perfectly Clear[Type]

A lot of people misunderstand the way ClearType works -- especially when it is expected to help, and how. The following, written by Vista beta tester Clayton Macleod, provides a really good explanation of the issues (reprinted with permission!). He also Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 11, 2006 6:54 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments
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ceci n'est pas un tri

(if the title of this post does not ring any bells, then the post probably will not do much for you, either!) It was delivered to Microsoft the day before yesterday, a little before 1:00pm, by someone from FedEx. In less than 24 hours it was at my office Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 10, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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So much for the West Wing retrospective

I would prefer to claim that somehow, when I was not looking, the quality of news reporting took a real downward turn. But I would probably need to ignore that it always seems to have had a problem.... The recent example started (for me) with a story Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 10, 2006 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Mission un-international

Raymond Chen pointed out a few mis-steps on the road to a movie that was researched properly for accuracy in scenes that are supposedly internationally located in his post Why doesn't Ethan Hunt have to wear identification? Now I can understand how this Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 09, 2006 7:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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The font width is broken? Well, fix it!

There are definitely times that people want to have a fixed width font. You know, times that you want the text to be like a grid and then you want every letter to fill one cell of the grid and have it all line up. Like in code windows, for example. Do Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 09, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

No offense intended, I promise

Somebody was looking at Notepad in Vista the other day, and they noticed that when they right-clicked and looked at the I nsert Unicode control character submenu, it looked like the following: The thing that they noticed was that some of these character Read More...
Posted Monday, May 08, 2006 12:09 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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See you soon?

I have been thinking about this issue since Mark Lieberman and Paul Kay mentioned it over on Language Log. It is easy enough to hear some television program where a person will say almost conversationally at the end of the show ' See you next time ' and Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 07, 2006 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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That songwriters round I was at

(nothing technical, yada yada yada) So on Friday night I was out at Caffe Bella, at the show I mentioned previously . It is always good to get out, especially after a week that did not go exactly the way you wanted it to like last one.... Playing in the Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 07, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Keyboards and time zones have something in common

Earlier today I talked about Getting the real (localized) name of the keyboard . In that post, I talked about how the change happened in XP to move from using Layout Text to using Layout Display Name , which on the whole was a good idea (the hard-coded Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 06, 2006 12:41 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Getting the real (localized) name of the keyboard

The other day, someone had asked Dr. International about how to get the names of all the keyboards, the ones that appear in the Language Bar. Now this is definitely not the easiest thing in the world, so I figured I ought to show the best way to do it.... Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 06, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

UI language of the LocalSystem account (which almost never shows UI)

I have talked about the notion of the language SKU specific nature of both MS Shell Dlg and of DEFAULT_GUI_FONT , but technically I was at least partially speaking of a bygone era. Back in the before time, in the long long ago, GDI would load its resources Read More...
Posted Friday, May 05, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

You've never heard of Access .MDX files?

(Nothing in this post is secret anymore, as the products involved have not only shipped, but they shipped over 10 years ago -- this is a purely historical post to help provide the backstory behind the answer a question that came up in the newsgroups recently Read More...
Posted Friday, May 05, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan |