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June 2007 - Posts

Sometimes if the two wrongs are consistent, they may make a right!

John Caffrey, one of the awesome SDETs we have over at the EDC (European Development Center) over in Dublin, sent mail the other day reporting a bug in the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class : Hi guys, We’ve noticed that the CalendarWeekRule setting being Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 30, 2007 11:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Beauty is in [the] Bones?

I was watching a Bones rerun the other night (The Truth in the Lye) and one of those funny language moments came up: Angela Montenegro : What you thought were teeth marks, Dr. Saroyan, turned out to be Chinese characters engraved along the side. Jack Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 30, 2007 12:06 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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DST 2007 -- too big to judge

Based on The Dark Knight Returns , with apologies to Frank Miller (and to the people who really were working hard during the recent DST crisis): siao fan : you stand for everything i believe in, michael. i've always wanted to be the kind of guy you are Read More...
Posted Friday, June 29, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Planning a party for between 26 and 388 of your colleagues

One last heads-up to Microsoft full-time employees, everyone else may as well ignore.... Going into this presentation going on Friday at 4pm in 33/Kodiak at the 2007 Engineering Excellence & Trustworthy Computing Forum (the one I mentioned before Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 28, 2007 11:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Tell yourself 10 times that you don't own that anymore

One of the issues that tends to pop up after something like Track change (a.k.a. A new job that has a few things in common with the old one) happens, when all of the following is true: You still work for the same company You are still in the same building Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 28, 2007 11:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Behold the [non-fa-IR default] PersianCalendar class

From the MSDN Feedback Center.... The title is simple enough: Jalaali Calendar should be default calendar for fa-IR culture . Well, maybe. I mean, it makes sense to me. And the site is tracking it as a top issue, I guess since people agree with the idea, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 26, 2007 11:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

The MB_PRECOMPOSED flag is stupid, and the MB_COMPOSITE ain't no genius either

The other day when I suggested that if Your VC++ files don't support Unicode identifiers? Drop a BOM on them! , John Bates commented : RC.exe can properly compile .rc files saved as UTF-16LE (strangely not UTF8-with-BOM though)... The reason UTF-8 is Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 26, 2007 9:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Sometimes you drop the BOM, and sometimes the BOM drops you!

Back when I posted Your VC++ files don't support Unicode identifers? Drop a BOM on them! , I promised I'd say more about how Microsoft's Visual C++ was deciding what parts of Unicode could be used as valid identifiers. And if you'll recall, I talked about Read More...
Posted Monday, June 25, 2007 10:16 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Sometimes when you say 'the fix is in' you mean it in a good way

It was just a few months ago that that I posted about a particularly bad bug in Vista in Double Secret ANSI, part 2 (the brokenest one yet, sorry 'bout that!) . And of course our favorite Romanian Cristian Secară has talking about this bug in the newsgroups Read More...
Posted Monday, June 25, 2007 8:47 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Marshaling your resistance

I was recently involved in one of those interesting email discussions where I had the opportunity to both help and hinder my reputation. And at the same time the conversation got to make something in the design of a programming language look like it both Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 23, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Same time, bigger station

Just a heads-up to Microsoft full-time employees, everyone else may as well ignore.... You may have read about the presentation I am doing at the 2007 Engineering Excellence & Trustworthy Computing Forum next week in this post . They just moved me Read More...
Posted Friday, June 22, 2007 4:05 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Your VC++ files don't support Unicode identifers? Drop a BOM on them!

What with Unicode being the default way that things are compiled in Visual Studio, the fact that identifiers were limited to ANSI has really been a sore point for a lot of people. Including me. :-) Thankfully, VC++ Architect Mark Hall helped set me straight Read More...
Posted Friday, June 22, 2007 12:10 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

Liaison may not be the best role any more (for me)

I haven't talked about Tamil for a while, and I think that is mainly an exercise of the stages of grief. Not talking about is the denial phase, where I avoid acting like there is an issue by not mentioning it. But the problem is still there, so perhaps Read More...
Posted Friday, June 22, 2007 10:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

TTC indexes, the hard way...

I swear that I had already answered this question, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Hopefully it isn't a repeat. :-) Meema asked in the Suggestion Box: hi! I have been looking for a solution that doesn't require parsing the actual TTC file bytes. Is there Read More...
Posted Friday, June 22, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Oops! Somebody did broken it!

Some times, things get broken and nobody notices. Other times, things have been broken for years and nobody noticed that, either! As an example, back at the end of May, Arunaabh asked over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup: Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 21, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

RTF is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad file format

(Apologies to Judith Viorst!) The other day Michael Michael asked me: My team has been caught in a situation that is affecting our globalization plans. Basically, we have the following scenario: We are using richtextbox’s in several places in our GUI Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 21, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Overheard recently

Someone showed me a special sequence off the Forever Charmed DVD where they were doing interviews with cast and crew and fans, after the show was ending. An interesting bit From Rose McGowan (Paige Matthews) on seeing herself in the different language Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007 6:41 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Tell the meeting organizer that she is going to be a little late, please

This is what popped up from Outlook: Given that the meeting occurred over 148450 days ago, it is fair to say that she is gonna be a little late. It feels like a Steven Wright joke or something. You know, like "I went into a restaurant that said they served Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Why is the NULL GLYPH not the glyph representing NULL?

So yesterday Judy and I were talking about the 'NULL GLYPH', which is what several of the typography folks I have known over the years use as shorthand for the glyph to show when the requested glyph is not available. Though technically, that is not the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 19, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

IsCharSomethingOrOther?

Reader/colleague Aldo Donetti asked: HI Michael, would you know what Unicode categories are supported in the IsCharAlpha function? (the Unicode version, of course) The MSDN doc doesn’t really specify that… Thanks, Aldo True, the IsCharAlpha topic in the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 19, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

If you don't always preserve case, you don't always preserve meaning

You may recall last week when I mentioned that In any CASE, it is somewhat INSENSITIVE to point out to someone how well PRESERVED they are . Those words are very true, by the way -- I would suggest never trying that! In any case, just the other day, Marý Read More...
Posted Monday, June 18, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

The built-in attempt to support multi-monolingual keyboards is kinda broken

The plan for the design isn't flawed, though there is a flaw in its implemenation. It starts with something I did not mention explicitly but talked a bit about in Keyboard UI in setup hoist by its own petard? and also a bit in On building a list of keyboards Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 17, 2007 9:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Good blog post titles at SIAO are all about following Beaver

David Beaver of Language Log, that is 1 . And his recent post Confused? Read on... , which although it does not explain the reasoning behind the posts on this blog, certainly does delve into the real nature of most headlines in both print and online media, Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 17, 2007 9:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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You don't have to trust Microsoft's choices about fonts

You probably don't always trust Microsoft. And that's OK, as far as I am concerned. Most days I don't trust it either (using the metaphor a PM I used to work with, you could fit all of the people I trust across the whole industry in a minivan and still Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 16, 2007 2:25 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Apparently the [DataGridView] train might sometimes skip a [FULL] STOP

(HR would probably recommend against any more clever of a title for this blog post than the one with which it is currently saddled) I have mentioned previously that I hate the Keys enumeration in the .NET Framework. And I even have explained a bit about Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 16, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

+1 on what he said (and some girl's ones are bigger than other girl's ones)

In what is probably the biggest 'make me stop and think about it' moment in recent blog comment history, Mikkin had a comment that began with the words: +1 what Mihai said, only more so. My first thought was to smile and wonder. You mean like maybe +2 Read More...
Posted Friday, June 15, 2007 8:05 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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The last XP LIP? We'll head it off at the Pas[hto]

I have talked a lot about Language Interface Packs for Windows XP here in this blog. And now after having covered Mapudungun , اردو , Inuktitut , മലയാളം , Qhichwa Simi , فارسی , isiZulu , ಕನ್ನಡ , नेपाली , Afrikaans , कोंकणी , Setswana , বাংলা , తెలుగు Read More...
Posted Friday, June 15, 2007 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

The pixel grid vs. the font designer

Just a few hours ago I said a few words about Safari on Windows in the post entitled Let's go Uniscribe / ClearType has a real good vibe / So please use them in Safari, Steve [Jobs]! . Now admittedly I did not talk about some of the bigger issue, and Read More...
Posted Friday, June 15, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments
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Let's go Uniscribe / ClearType has a real good vibe / So please use them in Safari, Steve [Jobs]!

(Title based on Surfin' Safari ; apologies to both Brian Wilson and Mike Love, they deserve much better than this sort of nonsense -- I did not save the rest the lyrics I came up with out of respect for them Regular reader and Apple user Tom asked via Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 14, 2007 6:02 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

The one-way trip of installing supplemental language support

Robert asked over in the Suggestion Box: In your post Installing supplemental langauge support programatically you strongly advised against accessing the .inf file to install Language support, pointing people to 289125 to explain how to use unattend to Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 14, 2007 6:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

SIAO -- Upcoming live appearance

Just a heads-up to Microsoft full-time employees, everyone else can ignore.... I will be presenting at the 2007 Engineering Excellence & Trustworthy Computing Forum, talking about both the security issues and the less dire (but still buggy) consequences Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 14, 2007 6:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

In any CASE, it is somewhat INSENSITIVE to point out to someone how well PRESERVED they are

There are two concepts that, while related, are not completely equivalent. In fact, one could not even technically be considered a subset of the other (although in fairness I will point out that some of the times where one is not a subset of the other, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 13, 2007 6:56 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell....

Nothing technical, you know the drill... I heard there was a cold going around. I think I caught it. Of course I figured out through that weird way I always do -- I had one of those acute onset M.S. exacerbations. The emotions involved were weird though Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007 9:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Not exactly reverse engineering....

I had somebody ask me after they read Launching the keyboard layouts dialog directly? how I knew about this. I mean, since it did not seem to be available in the documentation they could find. It actually dates back a few years. Like to XP during the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007 5:23 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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The difference between 'Dangeous Characters' and 'Dangerous Minds' is the lack of Michelle Pfeiffer

In internationalization contexts, one often hears about the notion of dangerous characters . This is not (as it may sound) about the criminal element, but rather about specific Unicode characters that can cause problems if their consequences are not taken Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007 8:35 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Unicode did it's thing, and we got served? That's right, now its on[line]!

(Holy over-twisted and tangled metaphors, Batman!) Remember when I posted A new version of Unicode is released, and it's all five by five , when Unicode 5.0 was officially released? Well, strap in, my pretties. Because Unicode 5.0.0 is now available at Read More...
Posted Monday, June 11, 2007 4:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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The difference between C1_SPACE-ing out and drawing a C1_BLANK

Over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup, PLS asked the following question: Can someone please explain the difference between C1_SPACE and C1_BLANK in the character types returned from GetStringTypeEx? What characters fall Read More...
Posted Monday, June 11, 2007 8:39 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

LCID vs. Powerman and the Locale-name-go-round

(If you can tell what CD is playing over here in the background right now, be sure to give yourself two cool points!) ph_arnaud asks over in the Suggestion Box: Are there Win32 (Win2000/XP) functions that convert from LCID to Culture names with same result Read More...
Posted Monday, June 11, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

One day, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, might have to speak English?

Not yet happening, and not yet final. But depressing, nevertheless. ref: Benjamin Zimmer's Language Log post English declared "national language" (again) Thankfully both Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray said nay. At least the state of Washington understands Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 10, 2007 5:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Don't IM, Don't Translate

Bill Poser is spot on in his Language Log post Don't Ask, Don't Translate . But he also raises an even better aspect of the issue -- the whole "don't ask, don't tell" policy was violated how, here? My (perhaps naive) understanding of the sham policy was Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 10, 2007 4:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Unicode and ISO -- MFEO

From time to time I am asked explain the differences between ISO's 10646 and Unicode, though I was relieved to see that I would now always have a place to point people to. :-) Andrew West and his post Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 from the beginning of last Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 10, 2007 1:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Did someone re-calibri-ate a font?

Julia Lerman posted a while back about How Calibri Font gave her reports a Russian accent and I put it on my list of things to mention. And I have been something of a slacker in that I am just getting to it now. Sorry about that, Julia.... (though maybe Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 10, 2007 12:29 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

When do voices vanish? Upon the death of languages....

From down the hall, Jennifer Shepherd (yes, the person who did the cool graphic I talked about before ) has recommended a book by K. David Harrison, entitled When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 09, 2007 9:25 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Guilt by [font ]association (aka The consequences of picking the wrong font #3)

(Previous posts in this series can be read here and here ) There are a lot of different distribution lists at Microsoft covering various technical topics. People can ask questions and then other people who know the answer can explain it (and people who Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 09, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Putting the 'U' in Unicode (and the 'G' in Galacticode)

In a recent thread on the perennial topic on The Unicode List where someone suggests that 17 planes is not enough room and that the rest of the code space beyond U+10ffff is needed (in this case in the context of non-terrestrial/extra-terrestrial scripts!), Read More...
Posted Friday, June 08, 2007 1:04 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

año del ano, a.k.a. This sentence has several non-skarklish Spanish flutzpahs....

The primary title of this post is meant to be a warning. One that you probably won't get unless you know a bit of Spanish. But I suppose you could probably ask someone, or go to an online translation site or something.... The alternate title is more of Read More...
Posted Friday, June 08, 2007 6:42 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

The consequences of picking the wrong font #2

(I am abandoning the previous attempt to use a volleyball metaphor, started in this post !) So now, as part of the set, I'll bring up another problem along the same lines. The recent question was: Hi, We have a service which runs in the context of the Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 07, 2007 10:14 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Putting the camel's nose in Building 24

There is an old expression, usually attributed to an Arab (without citation) that goes something like: Do not allow a camel to put his nose under the edge of your tent, for soon you will have a camel in your tent. As a phrase it is appealing since it Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 07, 2007 11:24 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

My heart palpitates at the thought of receiving 'Zugesagt: The big feature!'

There are all kinds of special messages that Microsoft Outlook will send. Like when you accept a meeting request, or reject one, or propose a new time. The interesting (well, maybe not so interesting) part about this is that it is done in the UI language Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 06, 2007 10:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Quote of the week

Provided without context, dedicated to those who inspired it.... I trust you both with my life. Just not with my love life! No character was willing to sponsor this post Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 06, 2007 8:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Launching the keyboard layouts dialog directly?

So the other day I was asked how launch the Text Services and Input Languages dialog directly. You know, this dialog: This is from XP; the one in Vista is a little different. Now usually people click on the button in the middle tab in Regional Options. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 05, 2007 11:43 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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The consequences of picking the wrong font #1

Have you ever played volleyball? I have, in a past life (back when I was able to stand upright!). and I was most struck by the pattern of using three hits -- receive it, setting it up, and spiking it. I was not a professional player or anything, and obviously Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 05, 2007 8:42 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Who's down with F.T.P. (All the RFCs)

(Thanks to that [fictional] band Geek by Nature for doing the Naughty by Nature cover song that inspired the title!) Just the other day, Cristian Secară, regular reader from Romania asked me about a newsgroup post in microsoft.public.windows.inetexplorer.ie6.browser Read More...
Posted Monday, June 04, 2007 9:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Coming up this fall in San Jose -- the 31st Internationalization & Unicode Conference