The folks in Tamil Nadu really wanted more time to talk to people on the Unicode side -- a technical meeting of the UTC South Asia Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium on issues relating to encoding of Tamil characters.

As a colleague stated in describing this meeting: "...to understand the practical problems that are encountered with Tamil (and other Indic scripts), and what the consortium can do to help with those problems. It is also to help the Tamil participants understand what the constraints on Unicode are, and the ways in which the Unicode encoding is used to deal with Tamil text."

So some people are traveling from the West coast of the United States to Chennai, to have that conversation, and together continue to determine how best to make sure that the needs of the script and of the language are met. It is never a bad idea to have smart people discuss problems. :-)

I am one of the people who was asked whether I could be there, in light of my past work [with|in|for|on] Tamil.

Interestingly, some of the reasons for the problem is more than a little to do with Microsoft's implementation of Tamil support (even when Unicode is blamed) -- in particular:

  • the keyboard (which is really awful by any stretch of the imagination, an issue I have talked about before and tried in vain to get changed for several years now). Microsoft is the fullest and widest implementation available and unfortunately our lack is widely [inaccurately] perceived as a Unicode lack that has remained unaddressed after eight years and sucessive versions of Windows, Win2000 and beyond, and
  • to a lesser extent, the font (Latha, which is generally perceived as being a bit too "relaxed" of a style by some, depending on the intended purpose -- in part due to all of the downsides of UI fonts when used for documents, and so on).

Now this trip to India is not being funded by Microsoft in any way whatsoever -- not for the plane ticket, not even for the hours spent (I am taking it as vacation time) as the meeting "doesn’t have enough business justifications to send over a person representing Microsoft... ...and it is [therefore] considered as a personal trip."

So despite Microsoft's implicit connection to some small part the problem, a trip to talk to the people tasked to investigate, understand, and solve the issues related to Tamil and Unicode is not considered part of the job.

And so it goes -- the sophistries of large corporations. :-(

Feh, I say. And Feh again....

But this trip is important, in my opinion. So I am going to go, and use a little of my vacation time.

Since I don't make it to India very often, and since I spent my last vacation sick at home, I am going to take some actual vacation while I am there (since it is being labeled personal time anyway!).

Perhaps this is also partially to make up for a trip I made to Malaysia several years ago right around the Windows XP ship date for a presentation at Tamil Internet 2001 -- where I spent more time in the air traveling to and from the conference than I did on the ground in Kuala Lumpur, all to help meet a ship date....

Plus while I am in TN perhaps lunch or dinner with long time INFITT colleagues and a few others. That is personal time, but worth the time, I think.

I don't think I'll make it to Calcutta this trip (something I have been wanting to do for a long time, in fact one of three places I have wanted to visit in that part of the world but have not managed to yet). I'll have to figure out how to get it done another time, on another visit....

This has got to be the best time of year for me to be in India, climate wise -- which is a very pleasant coincidence that I will do my best to enjoy. :-)

I will not take any time spent at various Microsoft spots giving presentations, etc. as vacation time, for obvious reasons. But that is worthwhile, too.

It could be worse; Microsoft really had trouble with that Malaysia trip in 2001 and it was only the fact that I was not a full-time employee at the time that kept them from requiring me to send my regrets to the conference organizers back then -- something I regret to this day considering that a mere 11 days later I was in LA a mere 14 days later 9/11 happened and the likelihood of a return trip was sharply curbed. amd a year later I became a full-time employee....

Though to make sure there are no misunderstandings, I have neither intent nor inclination to speak "for Microsoft" while I am there -- I am there as someone who wishes to be helpful seriously discussing Tamil.

If I had a Tamil Linux distro up and running on my MacBook Pro I could easily have planned to spend the trip doing comparative evaluations of Windows vs. Linux in Tamil and other Indic languages, which is definitely outside the charter of my work. This is personal time, after all! :-)

I'm heading out on the 21st of January and I'll probably be heading back to Redmond on the 1st of February. If you work for Microsoft and are in Chennai or Bangalore or Delhi or Hyderabad or a few other places than I may see you while I'm there (and if you want to increase the odds then be sure to send me email or use the Contact link!).

In the meantime, while I am gone you may see a lot of pre-recorded blog posts, including:

  • The continuation/conclusion of my series on reversing sort keys, and
  • My long-promised series on the text-based TIPs like the Tamil one I have talked about previously in this post (plus a "visual order" version of it!).

For the latter, what better could I do for people who care about the Tamil language than an attempt at a solution using built-in technologies in Vista that Microsoft could simply decide to put in-box in a future version of Windows or maybe even as an optional download before that? :-)

 

This post brought to you by ௧ (U+0be7, aka TAMIL DIGIT ONE)