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August 2006 - Posts

And if your language starts playing a different TUNE

Warning to readers : this post is completely and totally my own opinions based on my efforts to assist with Tamil's representation in Unicode, and truly have nothing to do with Microsoft's opinions on the matter (whatever they are). If you quote anything Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 31, 2006 3:46 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments

The advanced feature in MSKLC doesn't really scan

Earier this month, Emerson asked me via the 'Contacting Michael' link: Hello, My name is Emerson, I'm from Brazil and I am kind of desperate. I have a question concerning the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and I would like to know if you can help me Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 30, 2006 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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If you wanted to get it done with the font...

It wasn't all that long ago that I was talking about how Sometimes, uppercasing sucks . And between that post and the follow-up one I was showing example strings like Ρύθμιση σήματος which a native would expect to be capitalized not as ΡΎΘΜΙΣΗ ΣΉΜΑΤΟΣ Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 30, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

When you think it couldn't get any harder, it gets easier

From the prophet Douglas Adams: Click, hum. The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breath-taking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background of a billion distant stars Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 29, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

No, Virginia, Technical Aides do not report to Technical Leads

So when Bryan asked me the other day whether a Technical Aide was someone who reported to a Technical Lead , I had to smile. It is not like the titles, which aim for consistency, really meet their goals. A Software Development Enginner reports to a Development Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 29, 2006 12:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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There should always be a fallback available

So during the season finale of Entourage, one of the sage pieces of advice given to Vince about his plan to fire Ari was that he really ought to get a feel for what is out there in terms of agents before he actually fires Ari. It is all about having a Read More...
Posted Monday, August 28, 2006 1:10 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

What the hell is wrong with TranslateCharsetInfo, anyway?

The other day, Colin had a customer with a question about some unexpected results from the Win32 function TranslateCharsetInfo : My customer is having issues with the TranslateCharsetInfo API. They are using the TCI_SRCLOCALE to use the LCID as the source Read More...
Posted Monday, August 28, 2006 6:49 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

It has not always been so invariant

The other day, Bill asked the following question: Anyway, I have the following code: SYSTEMTIME st; memset(&st, 0, sizeof(SYSTEMTIME)); st.wYear = 2005; st.wMonth = 9; st.wDay = 12; st.wHour = 12; st.wMinute = 30; DATE date; SystemTimeToVariantTime(&st, Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 27, 2006 5:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

About the Fonts folder in Windows, Part 3 (aka What changes in Vista?)

Previous posts in this series: About the Fonts folder in Windows, Part 1 (aka What are we talking about?) About the Fonts folder in Windows, Part 2 (aka Adding Fonts) This time, I will be just quickly talking about the changes in Vista. Qucik, because Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 27, 2006 1:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

I must admit that an example would be nice

Regular reader and Internationalization MVP Mihai asked in the Suggestion Box: Just read the today post ("Creation of transliterating input methods") And I do agree with Thakara that the TSF documentation is very poor. If TSF is soo alive and well in Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 26, 2006 2:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

The myth of cross-product compatibility

Editorial note: there will be a certain type of Drunkard's Walk feel to this post, but that is because the navigation is actually controlled by a specific customer's attempt to understand behavior in SQL Server. The timeline will be a little abbreviated, Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 26, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Shortcuts can be so Goth, you know?

Cameron mentioned to me via the Contacting Michael... link: In your blog posting "Getting rid of your extra yen" on 2005/12/28, someone made a comment that even after the locale was changed from Japanese back to English, "MS Gothic" (rather than Lucida Read More...
Posted Friday, August 25, 2006 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

The Seattle Times plays Quechua-up, or 'How soon is now?'

Some may recall when I posted about Quechua me if you can! just this past June, which included a link to the download for the Quechua LIP. Well, the Seattle Times managed to break the news yesterday in their article Microsoft launches software in Andean Read More...
Posted Friday, August 25, 2006 5:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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It's not my imagination; that function is ignoring me!

There is an alias at Microsoft that is the front line for the Shell team, the one place where the important issues like build breaks and blocking issues get brought up. Since even within Microsoft so many people assume that Windows == the Shell , this Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 24, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Everybody's working for the weekend

Peter asks: My customer is programming with .NET. Now he wanted to know if there is a way to determine if a given day in a Calendar is a weekend based on certain culture. It is “Friday/Saturday” in the Middle East, “Saturday/Sunday” in Europe/Americas Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 24, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

From crappy to snappy in five steps

Earlier, when I posted What would a 'Kartika Fixed' font for Malayalam, do, exactly? , a few people noticed the screenshot I posted that used the Consolas font (and the Kartika font via Uniscribe font fallback) contained text that looked liked crap: Yet Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 23, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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What would a 'Kartika Fixed' font for Malayalam DO, exactly?

Way back in February of this year, Cibu posted about how (apparently) he thought that the idea of Monospaced fonts for Malayalam was foolish. He said: May not be.. The real issue is stacked conjuncts. Nobody should/can enforce that one particular conjunct Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 23, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

A localizability problem is an application bug, or alternately: Ρύθμιση σήματος

(Note: the title of this blog post has incorrect Greek text in it, to help highlight a bug that will be explained later in the post!) I had no idea when I posted Sometimes, uppercasing sucks that I'd find so many people who were unaware of how much of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 22, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

'Unicode' doesn't corrupt, but 'ANSI' can corrupt, absolutely!

The post that came from Chris Becke on the microsoft.public.platformsdk.gdi and the [now defunct] microsoft.public.platformsdk.localization newsgroups was: We had a problem with DrawTextA corrupting chinese text. Inside our Dialog's WM_PAINT handler we Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 22, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Decimal vs. hexadecimal LCIDs, backcompat, and being weird

The other day, developer Jamie Laflen had a question which VSTS International Program Manager Aldo Donetti forwarded on to me: I have a test that enumerates all collations in SqlServer and verifies that the string generator can, well, generate strings Read More...
Posted Monday, August 21, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

I missed a 'case' pun....

Damn. You know, if you read here regularly, that I am no stranger to making puns out of the word case . But I never used the one that Mark Liberman mentioned on Language Log in his post Just in case . Which is a little embarrassing as I actually knew Read More...
Posted Monday, August 21, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına

That's right, I said Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına. (I want to see how soon it shows up in search engines after this post goes live; at the moment, it gets no hits at all, in Google or MSN Search ) Anyway, it is a great word that I learned Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 20, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

You're doing it wrong.

(Title inspired by that Michael Keaton/Teri Garr movie, the one with all the role reversal!) Regular reader KJK:Hyperion mentioned in the Suggestion Box: Hey Michael, can you please spank the Application Verifier people for me? thanks. Their logging is Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 20, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Who I [supposedly] look like

Ok, this is the last silly viral blog game I will play today. :-) Using the picture at the top of my blog and taking it up to http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/tryFaceRecognition.php , here is who it claims I look like: William Hurt : 67% (I don't Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 19, 2006 3:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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I'm Evil? That sucks.

You read about it here first, I guess. But the results are in. How evil are you ? I actually have been telling people I am, all things being equal, a nice guy. Apparently this is one of my evil ploys.... I'd talk about the differences in the terms (evil Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 19, 2006 1:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Extending the MS Transliteration Utility

Regular reader KJK:Hyperion asked in the Suggestion Box: ...when will Transliteration Utility support Romaji and Hiragana transliteration for Japanese? That's basically the only one I need. At the moment I use http://www.j-talk.com/nihongo/ but I'd prefer Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 19, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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What the hell is up with Timor-Leste?

Regular reader Mark Brooks asked in the Suggestion Box: What's up with Timor-Leste? How did it get such an outlier GEOID here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/intl/nls_locations.asp Yes Mark, it is hard to look at the items in the Table of Geographic Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 19, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Sometimes, uppercasing sucks

Case differences in casing scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, Ecclesastical Georgian, Coptic, Glagolitic, etc.) ought to be easy. But it's not. And not just for the reasons I have talked about in the past . All the technical folks want is a simple Read More...
Posted Friday, August 18, 2006 12:04 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Creation of transliterating input methods

Not too long ago, Thakara asked in the Suggestion Box: Hi, I’m working on a Transliterating Input Method for the Sinhala language. One that would allow Sinhala to be entered phonetically. I.e., you would enter ‘ka’ to get KAYANNA (“\u0D9A”), ‘kaa’ to Read More...
Posted Friday, August 18, 2006 8:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

You don't order Tatar sauce for your Filet-o-Fish!

What does the татарча (Tatar) language have in common with اردو , മലയാളം , Qhichwa Simi , فارسی , isiZulu , ಕನ್ನಡ , नेपाली , Afrikaans , कोंकणी , Setswana , বাংলা , తెలుగు , ਪੰਜਾਬੀ , and Lëtzebuergisch ? That's easy.... it too has a Language Interface Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 17, 2006 11:13 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Thump! Thump! Is this thing on?

A question came to myself and a few others the other day, about how to make people more aware of international support in Windows. You know, how to evangelize the area. My first thought was indeed the title of this post. I mean, I'm no Robert Scoble, Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 17, 2006 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Sometimes it seems like everyone hates Microsoft

Note that this is NOT a Dell exploding battery story -- I do not own a single battery that is on the recall list despite having four different batteries, each one of which had a chance of being on that list! The other day I was bringing my laptop out Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 17, 2006 4:24 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Walking off the end of the eighth bit

My recent post Keyboard UI in setup hoist by its own petard? , or more specifically one of the screenshots in that post, caused dmanchester to ask : In that second screenshot of the Vista installation, what's going on with the window title and the "Enter Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 16, 2006 12:06 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Something .NET does more intuitively than Windows

Back when I wrote Invariant vs. Ordinal, the third , two of the interesting points I made were that, in most cases: equality results will be better off using CompareStringOrdinal ; sorting results will be better off using CompareString . Now obviously Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 16, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Customizing date formats in ASP.Net

I have known Paul Litwin for a while, now that I think about it. He and I have spoken at the same conferences, been involved with the same book projects, and so on a bunch of times in the past, and there was even a period back during the Access 95 beta Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 15, 2006 4:40 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Did software developers ever learn their ABC's?

Developers always think they are right. Especially when they are not. I mean, if you asked any random English-speaking person if they had an ordered list of characters whether they would expect all of the following letters comes before B : aÀàÁáÂâÃãÄäÅåĀāĂ㥹ǺǻḀḁẠạẢảẤấẦầẨẩẪẫẬậẮắẰằẲẳẴẵẶặＡａ Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 15, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Every character has a story #22: U+0c27 (CARON)

The CARON has a long and unhappy history, one that is tied up with that whole Sk / Lm general category thing I talked about in this post . Ken Whistler laid it out for the CARON just recently, starting with the meandering path through UnicodeData.txt: Read More...
Posted Monday, August 14, 2006 12:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Optimized for English (oh, and also Japanese, and maybe a few others)

The recent post about Are ligatures supposed to be thought of as 'single characters'? had a comment from RubenP that I thought could use some further conversation: It must be said, but all the ClearType fonts with automatic fi ligatures look exceptionally Read More...
Posted Monday, August 14, 2006 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 26 Comments

Whassup with the 'Measurement System' on Windows?

I got lots of feedback from the post Our highly internationalized OS uses DPI, aka Dots Per In-.... um, never mind! , and one reminder from a friend about an old issue related to the Measurement System in Regional and Language Options: The issue has to Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 13, 2006 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Snakes on an Invisible Plane

Julie Bennett was telling me that Samuel L. Jackson called her to tell her about seeing Snakes on a Plane , and while I admit that I was somewhat skeptical I should have realized that Julie would never deceive me. Someone among her many friends must have Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 13, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

You think that's bad? Just wait, it gets worse...

The story I am telling here is completely true. I have only omitted project and people names to protect the guilty, and perhaps also the [rightfully] embarrassed.... The original mail that came to me was from someone who was getting some unexpected results Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 12, 2006 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Getting string comparisons of file names right

I have spoken of the importance of using .NET 2.0's OrdinalIgnoreCase and Vista's CompareStringOrdinal for comparisons of symbolic identifiers in the past many times. But not everyone reads this blog, of course. :-) Just yesterday, a question that was Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 12, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Are ligatures supposed to be thought of as 'single characters' ?

Just yesterday, I got an email from Paul Dempsey (the guy who did all of the groundbreaking work to Uniscribe-enable Vistual Studio) about a particular (unrelated) bug to see if it was my area (it was). He mentioned after we worked out the bug assignment Read More...
Posted Friday, August 11, 2006 12:08 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Why are there MODIFIER LETTERS that are not in the Letter, Modifier category?

An interesting question that comes up periodically when people look at Unicode.... As is true of other cases , this question has a true ' drive on a parkway, but park on a driveway ' feel to it. But the truth is that there are many Unicode characters Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 10, 2006 11:10 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Remember [the non-Robert Plant version of] Ship of Fools?

It was like 19 years ago, and it was the summer before my senior year of high school, perhaps a month or two before I moved to Philadelphia. I drove to the west side of Cleveland, to see a band that had a song called Ship of Fools which was an MTV Hip Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 10, 2006 9:02 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Roman numerals are Latin script!

Earlier this year, I talked about the stability of the Unicode Character Database . And about how there are really not all that many changes that happen to items like the general category that the CharUnicodeInfo class depends on. And the same is true Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 10, 2006 2:12 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Happy 'Not Aimee Mann's Birthday' !!!

It only comes once a year, the day that is erroneously reported as the birthday of singer/songwriter Aimee Mann. Mann fan and owner of the MannList Jill Weisenfeld muses on the reasons for this anuual mistake: Yes, Aimee's birthday is September 8th. I Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 09, 2006 4:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Changing more than just the conversation

Maybe I am just watching too much TV. But another commercial struck me funny. There is a clip of it right here: The transcript: Mother :I have not had it up to here with you, young lady! Daughter :Why do you insist on treating me like an adult? Mother Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 09, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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When the font is the boss of you

The other day when I was talking about You say ĭtalics, I say ītalics. It is much more complicated in Cyrillic , the difference between the way italic/oblique font styles are thought of in different languages/locales was one of the interesting issues, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 08, 2006 8:57 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Collation != case, still

Richard asked in the Suggestion Box, and I decided to dispatch quickly: Why is it that English (en-US, because there is no en-GB) Windows and .NET don't know how to upper case a Latin Small Latter Sharp S even with the de-DE locale specified: "\u00DF".ToUpper(CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("de-DE")) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 08, 2006 11:10 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

They really do look a little bit alike, revisted

It is not just celebrities who look alike -- it happens to regular people too. Now perhaps they were separated at birth. Or maybe it's just me. But doesn't developer and blogger Marco De Sanctis look more than a little bit like Mr. Gretchen Ledgard ? Read More...
Posted Monday, August 07, 2006 12:43 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Fixing a bug in the documentation

Back when I posed the question the other day about 32 bit vs. 64 bit HKLs? , SDiZ properly identified the issue as sign extension, and Igor Tandetnik even pointed out the MSDN article that explains it (search for the "USER and GDI handles are sign extended Read More...
Posted Monday, August 07, 2006 7:49 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

You say ĭtalics, I say ītalics. It is much more complicated in Cyrillic....

Okay, I admit it. When I pronounce the word italics , I say EYE-talics, not IH-talics. But I do say IH-talian, not EYE-talian when I see the word Italian . I point this out because although she had never corrected me on this particular point even once Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 06, 2006 11:32 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

Sometimes it pays to be on drugs

(Nothing technical in this post, sorry!) I swear that none of what I am about to talk about has been intentional. I am merely a victim of circumstance. I have been taking Lipitor for a borderline cholesterol level which, when combined with my lack of Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 05, 2006 9:13 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments
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Google doesn't seem to get blogs

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