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July 2007 - Posts

If this post really describes a bug, would I actually put it in the WYNN column?

There are several scripts that have the notion of case, like Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Glagolitic, and others. There are some folks like Michael Everson who believe that even if a character does not have both cased variants that they may Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 31, 2007 4:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

See that version there? It is going down, man! #2 (aka Everybody WYNNs)

When I posted part one of this two part series, I should have guessed that Dean Harding would have a good answer : Well, I'd say if the major version changes *either way* you should re-index. If a minor version changes backwards, you probably have to Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 31, 2007 4:12 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Return of the Mack^H^H^H^HMicrosoft Locale Builder!

How does that expression go, that you can't keep a good Windows International Open Language tool down? Well, you may recall back in January of this year when I was saying Please excuse the interruption how the Locale Builder beta had expired. The tortuous Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 31, 2007 8:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

See that version there? It is going down, man! #1

When I first started working in Windows and for several years, I did not really act by default like a member of the Windows team -- I kept looking at problems like an outsider and it was an effort of will to look at things from the inside. For the most Read More...
Posted Monday, July 30, 2007 11:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

-3 time's a charm!

I am on the Linguist List. Now mind you. I don't participate. I just watch the messages go by, and read the one I understand and set the others aside in case I might understand them some day. Despite my delusions notions of lingustic aptitude, I feel Read More...
Posted Monday, July 30, 2007 8:39 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Ethical problems associated with the buttered cat paradox, with parsnips

I'll admit that the logical argument here is incredibly flawed. The first principle is easy enough to state: Cats always land on their feet 1 . And the second principle is also easily stated: Buttered toast always lands butter side down. Combined together, Read More...
Posted Monday, July 30, 2007 9:59 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Vista Int'l settings via the command line!

You may have read my previous post on the 'unattend' file format info for Vista, creatively titled Unattend for Regional and Language Options in Vista . Well, now you can find the official documentation on the subject, in this recently published white Read More...
Posted Monday, July 30, 2007 12:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Men are from areas of declining population and women are from Mount Rushmore

So I was reading Language Log and saw one of Mark Liberman's latest posts . After seeing Janet Hyde's quote ("Men are from North Dakota and women are from South Dakota"), I was thinking back to the penultimate third season episode of the West Wing ("We Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 29, 2007 8:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Whether or not you're my 'type' you might see me at TypeCon 2007

That's right, the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) is putting on TypeCon 2007 August 1st-5th at the Seattle Crown Plaza Hotel . And I'm going to be there -- SIAO will be talking about the event! (I am not a speaker at the event, but there are Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 29, 2007 9:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

A difference that makes no difference, makes no difference (aka IRQL <= APC_LEVEL vs IRQL < DISPATCH_LEVEL)

It was about a year ago that someone was looking at the Windows Developer Kit documentation and had a question. They were comparing RtlUpcaseUnicodeChar / RtlUpcaseUnicodeString / RtlUpperChar / RtlUpperString versus RtlUpcaseUnicodeStringToCountedOemString Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 29, 2007 7:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Falling less is not always better

Nothing technical in this post, though I have been getting generally positive feedback on these sorts of pieces as I've been writing them. I headed to the rental office on Saturday morning from my apartment. I had a package due yesterday that I wanted Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 29, 2007 1:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

A tiny bit closer to the top of the line

Our story thus far: It started when I mentioned that my Dell laptops have a new neighbor, who says hello . A new MacBook Pro that I was going to use for my world outside of Microsoft. I was naive enough to think that would stick, and because of that it Read More...
Posted Friday, July 27, 2007 8:06 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Boot Camp 1.3 and MSKLC (also 1.3) -- excitement, enjoyment, and a wrinkle or three

It was just a few days ago that I talked about how my Dell laptops have a new neighbor, who says hello , and I foolishly claimed I would not be going the Boot Camp/Vista route with it. I only made it a few days before I ended up installing Boot Camp and Read More...
Posted Friday, July 27, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

No UTF-8 in a VARCHAR column

Francisco Moraes asks in the Suggestion Box: Mike, Is it possible on MS SQL Server to have columns defined as CHAR (or VARCHAR) and actually store the data in UTF-8 without corruption due to code page convertions? I know there is the NCHAR/NVARCHAR type Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 26, 2007 11:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Report of blank previews of unknown etiology

Over in the Suggestion Box, Olivier asked: We created Keyboard layouts for our own specific keyboards, and on Windows Vista when we look at the Keyboard Layout Preview in the Add Input language dialog, the preview is mostly empty (only tab, Caps, Shift, Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 26, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

What's up with MB_ERR_INVALID_CHARS?

It seems like it was just yesterday that I posted about how TAV is in the public use area . Admittedly the reason is that it was only yesterday.... :-) Now there is one issue that has never been discussed and which frankly has never been described well Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 25, 2007 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Not a YES man, but maybe a YEH man

People who know me at all will never claim that I am a Yes man . Keep that in mind for just a moment because I have a point here, I promise. Way back in February 2006, after I posted Every character has a story #18: U+06cc and U+064a (ARABIC LETTER FARSI Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 25, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Product [Un]fair?

You almost certainly don't care. Truly! So I spent a bit of time at the [Microsoft Internal] Product Fair today. I just scooted on over. Scooting to the various tables, seeing who was there, getting SWAG, entering drawings, asking questions. You know, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 24, 2007 4:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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TAV is in the public use area

Some time yesterday, Chris Shearer Cooper asked in a whole mess of newsgroups (microsoft.public.il.hebrew.vc, microsoft.public.il.hebrew.windows2000, microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international , and microsoft.public.win32.programmer.kernelI: Can Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 24, 2007 10:06 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Pluralization(s) can be singularly difficult

A tribute to plurals, with fondest memories of the first comedian I ever enjoyed, Allan Sherman (original inspiration of Weird Al Yankovic for those who don't know the name): One Hippopotami One hippopotami cannot get on a bus, Because one hippopotami Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 24, 2007 12:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Your LCID sucks

(Apologies to Roger Ebert, whose book I parodied for the sake of this blog post was a wonderful and not just for the great 0 star Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo review!) As a by the way, this post does NOT represent anything beyond my own personal recommendations Read More...
Posted Monday, July 23, 2007 10:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Going to Réunion?

No, this post is not about my 20-year high school reunion, that is coming up next year. In fact they are starting to gear up for that, though. I just saw that former classmate Melanie Rosenberg Luria is involved with the planning and they are looking Read More...
Posted Monday, July 23, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

The Dell laptops have a new neighbor, who says hello

Not that I was trying to follow in Brian Randell's footsteps , but like him I now have a fully loaded top of the line MacBook Pro (17" 2.4 GHz, 1920x1200, 1 6 0GB). Unlike Brian, I'm not installing Vista on it. The reason I have it is all of the interactions Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 22, 2007 9:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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Don't let commas distract you from the big money!

It was about a month ago that Language Log's Bill Poser asked in Caribbean Monetary Notation whether anyone could confirm the feedback he had received that ...in several Caribbean countries, in both English and Spanish, although ordinary numbers are written Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 22, 2007 9:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Clarification on the official Uniscribe redist story still pending, but...

Mark asks in the Suggestion Box: In a number of the Uniscribe functions' documentation, for example ScriptItemizeOpenType, there is a note which reads Redistributable: Requires Usp10.dll version 1.600 or greater on Windows XP or later. Where should I Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 22, 2007 7:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

In a much better position to handle inserts

One of the common complaints that localizers have when it comes to localizability of software projects comes into play when developers have strings with inserts that they run through the C runtime. (I'll assume that Unicode is being used but that is often Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 22, 2007 6:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

She typed in 'God damn clippy'

I had a friend complain to me the other day (the way that all folks who have friends working at Microsoft tend to do) about Clippy and how to turn him off in Office 2003. Now I have mentioned before that Clippy is off in the default install and has been Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 21, 2007 11:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Avoiding an international mailto maelstrom

The mail I got the other day from Wes Miller (yes, that Wes Miller!) forwarding someone else's question: Hi all, We encountered a problem when localizing the subject of mailto hyper link. The sample html is below: <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 21, 2007 5:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Theory vs. practice in software development

Sometimes it is easy to build implementations in software that spend so much time striving for consistency and cleanliness of design that they stop really modeling the world they are nominally attempting to represent. I was thinking about this the other Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 21, 2007 11:53 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Sometimes they are not as helpful shortcuts

I was at the Pacific NW Access Developers Group meeting last night and was talking to one of the testers on the Access team before the meeting. I was mentioning that Word "Helpful shortcut" issue that I like to complain about, when suddenly something Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 18, 2007 10:42 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

That's a lot of freaking downloads, mister!

Late last week I needed to answer a question the other day about the number of successful downloads of Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator . So I went to the tool that gives those stats and I found out that (between the 1.3 and 1.4 versions) as of last Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 18, 2007 9:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments
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If it is not documented... oh, never mind!

Way back in the end of September 2005, I was explaining how if a function is not documented in the SDK or the DDK then there was really no way to enhance documentation. Of course the point of that post ( If it is not documented.... ) can mostly be ignored Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2007 10:26 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Sometimes people use code pages even when the code pages are really lame

It was over two years ago that I first pointed out the problems with Windows code page 20269 (Microsoft's somewhat lame attempt at an implementation of ISO 6937) in Not all code pages work right . And almost two years ago when I mentioned it again with Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2007 1:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

SIAO is still underwhelmed by search engines (all of them)

You may have read in Arial Unicode MS effectively [bites|sucks|blows] about how Microsoft MVP Omi Azad likes to point out bugs.... Regular reader Cristian Secară likes to do the same kind of thing. :-) Just the other day, he sent the following to me: Read More...
Posted Monday, July 16, 2007 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Losing a title I'm fond of?

(Nothing technical, other than some blathering about a technical lead technicality) From a very young age, I have been a fan of pipes. Though I admit it was mainly because my father would periodically quit smoking cigars to move back to pipes and then Read More...
Posted Monday, July 16, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Arial Unicode MS effectively [bites|sucks|blows]

MVP Omi Azad likes to send people from Microsoft email when he runs into bugs. Usually they are our bugs, so it all works out. Though this last mail was a bit different.... First he sent a screenshot of some Bengali text: The bits in green were the problem. Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 15, 2007 10:14 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Neutral? I do not think that word means what you think it means!

It can be hard to act in a neutral manner. As an example, you may recall how I talked about neutral locales and how they are automatically converted into full locales by NLS functions in Windows in this post . Using the same logic, if you pass LOCALE_NEUTRAL Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 15, 2007 7:36 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Code pages don't overlap all that much

It was over two years ago that I mentioned how code pages are really not enough . But it is still a problem that comes up all the time.... Ahmet's question is very representative of the situation: I need help for an encoding issue while creating a text Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 14, 2007 8:21 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Fractions may be your friends, but they won't pick you up at the airport!

To me, fractions will always have a special place. The teacher pointed out we all knew what ½ was, and we all knew what 0.5 was, and we all knew about division. Then he blew my mind when he pointed out they were not connected because they were multiple Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 14, 2007 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

GetLocaleInfo for other languages?

Serdar asked: Hi, Is it possible to call GetLocaleInfo in a different language? What I’m trying to do is as follows: Installed a Vista English machine. Installed German and Spanish language packs. UI language is set to English. Want to learn what “German” Read More...
Posted Friday, July 13, 2007 1:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

What does DAO have that ADO/ADOx/JRO do not?

BLOG OWNER'S NOTE: All comments to this post are now moderated to keep the volume down. You can post to another blog if you have further comments.... If you don't care about Jet or DAO or Access then this is a post you can skip! This post is a reposting Read More...
Posted Friday, July 13, 2007 8:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 26 Comments
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What the hell is up with Timor-Leste? [Microsoft edition]

It has been not quite a year since I first explained What the hell is up with Timor-Leste . Well, the other day a developer named Julie (not associated with any other developer named Julie who I have previously known) sent me some mail as she was having Read More...
Posted Friday, July 13, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Wait til you see my 'O'[EMCP based technology]

(no, this post is not about a rap or hip hop song, or its lyrics, though I admit the title may have been inspired by one, just like last time ) Looking at Larry Osterman 's post yesterday entitled How do I compare two different NetBIOS names? .... (A Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 12, 2007 4:48 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Why can't everyone just speak German?

Remember when I pointed out how One day, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, might have to speak English? Well, as Raymond points out in this post , Germany looks to be even further along in their process of smacking down on immigrants who Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 12, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Mutual associative linkage interuptus

Sometimes, women confuse me. The conversation was kind of rambling along between different topics. Randomly. Like associative linkage, but between different people. Suddenly one of them asked me a question. "You eat bell peppers, don't you?" "Why yes," Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2007 11:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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GB18030 isn't an ACP, either

The question went something like this: I'm trying to display GB18030 text (say unicode 0x3400 character) using DrawTextA and WideCharToMultiByte. I am using the code page for GB18030 which is 54936. Why doesn't this work? Originally, I thought it had Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2007 8:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Offense in depth

It is something I found out about right after I saw the post on Shawn's blog entitled Security patch MS07-040 for .Net 2.0 breaks some culture names for .Net 2.0 on Windows XP/2003/2000 . The issue is the one I first blathered about in Important changes Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2007 8:35 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

They don't [font] associate with font linkers, among others

Back in this post and this other one , I have been kind of hinting around at the functionality known as FONT ASSOCIATION. Now in the post you are reading, I am going to explain what it is. First we'll go with a dictionary definition. I'll go with the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2007 3:33 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Any sufficiently confusing technology is indistinguishable from magic

Last month when I posted Guilt by [font ]association (aka The consequences of picking the wrong font #3) , I said I'd try to dedfine font association better. I'm not going to do that just yet. Though I will talk about another bug that might be related Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2007 7:46 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Oh Canada!

Woo hoo! They have just announced the Vancouver Development Center, as Jenna posted on JobsBlog . This rocks, for all the reasons Jenna has indicated. There have been far too many blockades to excellent candidates from around the world with all of the Read More...
Posted Monday, July 09, 2007 12:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Character Map Plus?

The other day when I wrote We've got a style of glyphs, yes we do; we've got a style of glyphs, how 'bout you? , regular reader Mihai commented : ...Character Map is not consistent. Select "Angsana New" (or Arial, or "Lucida Sans" or whatever) and using Read More...
Posted Monday, July 09, 2007 11:49 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments
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Being more like Doron

Bindesh's question was: Hi I am trying to print out the value from a reg key and have the following code: HKEY hkey; LONG returnStatus; DWORD dwRegType = REG_SZ; DWORD dwRegSize = 255; char cRegVal[255]; char regKeyPath[] =""; returnStatus = RegOpenKeyEx(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 08, 2007 9:18 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

UnLCMapString or LCUnMapString?

Just the other day, developer George was asking me about that Reversing sort keys post I wrote way back when. His main interest was not in the functionality, but in the name of the function! :-) He couldn't decide whether the name of the function would Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 08, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

TTC indexes, the easy way...

Obviously a follow-on to TTC indexes, the hard way... , this post provides the code that Sergey Malkin put together to work with .TTC files, and more importantly with the individual fonts thereof. And I think I'll save some of his helpful functions byte Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 07, 2007 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments