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February 2008 - Posts

A more definitive definition of[ Font ]Association (a technology that helps us put the backward in backward compatibility!)

Please read the disclaimer ; content not approved by Microsoft! I have talked about Font Association several times in the pat, like in the following posts: Guilt by [font ]association (aka The consequences of picking the wrong font #3) Any sufficiently Read More...
Posted Friday, February 29, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Newer, stronger, more case pair stability! The world's first 5.1 million dollar character encoding standard!

Please read the disclaimer ; content not approved by Microsoft! (Apologies to Steve Austin !) The announcement went out to quite a few interested parties, it occurred to me that some of them might also be here! It went like this: The Unicode Consortium Read More...
Posted Friday, February 29, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Font size scaling -- GDI vs. GDI+

Please read the disclaimer ! It is probably a good thing that there are people who feel comfortable turning to me to get information from time to time. And it is probably better for my own peace of mind that even while mired in conflict (such as is hinted Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 28, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

A blog, warning you to please read the disclaimer before looking at this Blog!

I would like to think that all of the people who read some or all of this blog (whether said reading takes place occasionally, all the time, or somewhere in between), understand the blog's nature. In particular, when I think this, I like to think specifically Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 28, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments
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Grapheme Clusters -- betcha can't eat just one[Unicode 5.1 character]....

The announcement came in this afternoon: Unicode 5.1.0 beta period now closed The beta period for Unicode 5.1.0 has closed. We are now in the pre-publication phase and expect to have the final release around March 31. No more substantive changes are planned, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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I thought that font had a lot of supplementary characters? (aka The highest number of tangents I could fit into a single blog)

Yun asked: Hello, We are investigating issues regarding to surrogated pair character on Japanese OS, we couldn’t see these chars in CharMap. Are there any other tools or do we need to do anything special to make these chars visible to CharMap? Thanks, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Learn Tamil in 30 Days (or something like that)

So while I was in India, I picked up a bunch of books (my suitcase was probably 30 pounds heavier!). One book that hardly weighed anything at all was a small one titled Learn Tamil in 30 Days by N. Jegtheesh, B.A., part of the National Integration Language Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 26, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

Making sure to TryParseReal, rather than TryParseImaginary (if you know what I mean)

Brian was once telling me about a meeting of various folks from the .NET Framework. Anders was there (yes, that Anders!). Anyway, the meeting started in the normal way but people found themselves rat-holing on some very obscure technical issues. It was Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 26, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Behold the Table Driven Text Service, Part 11 (The knights who say நீ, redux, #1)

Prior posts in the series: 0 (You have to start somewhere) 1 (Starting with a dictionary simple in every way) 2 (Three ways to convert!) 3 (Where do keystrokes come in?) 4 (Specifying when to modify, if not how) 5 (All about the language, baby!) 6 (it Read More...
Posted Monday, February 25, 2008 7:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

What the #$!*& is a KeyboardLayoutId, anyway?

One never knows how dumb one was until one gets a little bit smarter. :-) I'll explain what I mean, how I was reminded of this the other day.... I must admit the question that came to me was a bit more polite that the title, it was actually more like: Read More...
Posted Monday, February 25, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

How to get it done if Microsoft does not do it?

Last week, over on the Volt Users Community, azhary asked: Hi every one, We are designing a meroetic font ( not supported yet by Unicode). The letters (about 25 letters) should display from right to left (rtl). At the same time they are isolated (not Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 24, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

The idea has to do more than just make sense to me (aka How S-Sharp are *you* feeling today?)

I am writing this blog from my own laptop waiting in the ER at the hospital (all of the quotes are from archives of old mails on my machine, not from memory!). It all happened when I was heading back after seeing a show in Ballard last night. By the time Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 24, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Despite progression, the bug calls out to me quite LAOdly

In the early days of my ownership of the collation functionality, I did have a bit of an inferiority complex about the more linguistic aspects to the work. So I would talk about my delusions of linguistic aptitude and how I was the architect of all the Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 23, 2008 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

The triage process gives me hives

Disclaimer -- most of the examples given here are fictional, and most of the ones that aren't are not schedule bug fixes for any future version. I post a lot of my opinions here, as regular readers will readily admit. A lot of my opinions are based on Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 23, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

What's missing from the model

Let me start by saying that I think the subsidiary model for software companies like Microsoft is a very powerful one. It is a way to make sure that a group of people who are most interested in the success of a market are on the ground in that market Read More...
Posted Friday, February 22, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Optimized for English (oh, and also Invariant, and NOTHING ELSE) Redux

This post may not be of interest to all readers since it not only covers technical topics (which can easily turn off half my readers!) but does so in a slightly more sociological kind of way (which can easily turn off the other half!). Feel free to skip, Read More...
Posted Friday, February 22, 2008 6:46 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

We're back and we're embarrassing ourselves? (aka Making your localizer's life easier, Part 2)

I know regular readers have been waiting impatiently with the next post to the series after How many ways can a developer say 'File Not Found?' (aka Making your localizer's life easier, Part 1) .... Yesterday, Larry Osterman had a pretty funny blog entitled Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 21, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Why is the separator blue?

People never ask the easy questions, now do they? It starts from an early age -- why is the sky blue? Why do I have to go to school on days when nothing interesting is being taught? Why I do I like that girl? And so on.... And it never gets any easier. Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 21, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Their end-to-end scenario may not match your end-to-end scenario, though now that you brought it up what IS your end-to-end scenario?

Over in the Suggestion Box, regular reader Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven asked: Michael, any idea why MSDN offers all language packs for Office 2007, yet does not offer the multi-language one? Doing testing on this front makes installing a bit tedious Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 7:46 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Officially unofficial? Or Unofficially official?

So yesterday in The most important language in the whole wide world is yours, and you hardly even know yours! -- NOT! , post, I bemoaned a specific situation where the only documentation that existed for a particular issue was some poor hints in scattered Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 7:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

More fun and games with Comcast (aka the A&P of my Cynicality)

Nothing technical, and yes, more Comcast stuff, different from the earlier stuff , but even so, sorry! It suddenly occurs to me that someone from Comcast might be paying attention, if this comment is accurate (Gwyn doesn't think so , but even so....). Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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The most important language in the whole wide world is yours, and you hardly even know yours! -- NOT!

Some of you who grew up with Sesame Street may recall the old short they ran with the catchy lyric that inspired the title: The most important person in the whole wide world is you, and you hardly even know you! It is something that Paul C. Vitz (in his Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Insanity defined: In the real world -0 == 0, in Vista -0 < 0, and in Windows Server 2008 -0 ≮ 0

Somewhere in between zero and the smallest possible negative number there lies another number. NEGATIVE ZERO. I am being facetious here; it is not a number that is any different than zero. In the end, 0 == -0 as just about any normal person in the world Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Overheard: You don't go and change the color of the carpet when you are invited over for dinner.

The specific advice was to do with shell extensions and their "guest" status in the world of Windows Explorer, but the general principle is something that can be and should be applied quite broadly.... Even to blog comments. :-) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2008 5:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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How to avoid that problem of never being 'up to date'

I am never the type of superior elitist code snob who feels above people who improve on the things that I do. Or have done. And even if something is no longer officially supported by Microsoft , I am not the sort to just ignore people who are still trying Read More...
Posted Monday, February 18, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Hello pot, meet kettle (aka No, I don't want Comcast phone service, dammit!)

These are my opinions, not Microsoft's. They are not even informed opinions. So please feel free to weigh them with that in mind.... Disclaimer: There is some kind of Comcast/Microsoft relationship, I think. To be honest, I have no idea. I don't know Read More...
Posted Monday, February 18, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Not supporting Unicode doesn't necessarily make them evil; it merely suggests the lesser sins of narow-mindedness and laziness

So the other day I noticed a friend of mine had added a My Blogs application to their facebook profile. I figured that with very small amount of facebook activities I do I needed way to fill my mini-feed without having to do actual work -- so something Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 17, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Some of the problems with complaints about localization quality

I am not speaking for Microsoft here, so anyone who claims I am is subject to the utter moronic wingnut judgment for their lack of comprehension! People love to complain about poor localization quality in software from Microsoft. But if you think about Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 17, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

Did you spell Ω女ÆЯש correctly? That's a Triple Word Score!

One of the interesting things about being involved with internationalization is that anytime something vaguely interesting comes up with a hint of internationalization comes up, everyone will forward it to you! In this case I had nine different people Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 16, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

♫ And it seems I'm changing, for absolutely nothing will ever be the same as I was today ♫

I had a friend tell me the other day (after watching a few of the Love Monkey episodes) that she totally understands why I loved the show and that I am a total Tom Farrell. Probably the nicest thing anyone has said about me all week! Admittedly, it may Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 16, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Behold the Table Driven Text Service, Part 10 ("Even Jove nods," Atlas shrugged, "so we'll convert their old files, now.")

Prior posts in the series: 0 (You have to start somewhere) 1 (Starting with a dictionary simple in every way) 2 (Three ways to convert!) 3 (Where do keystrokes come in?) 4 (Specifying when to modify, if not how) 5 (All about the language, baby!) 6 (it Read More...
Posted Friday, February 15, 2008 6:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Moving is a huge horking pain, even to a window office

It was just a few months ago (in In my opinion, the only thing worse than an office move is a largely gratuitous one and Clarification on my concerns with gratuitous moves ) that I expressed my displeasure at moves done for let's say less noble reasons. Read More...
Posted Friday, February 15, 2008 6:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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More on license plates in Bengalūru, and in India

A quick follow up on Canada isn't Kannada, ay (ಎ)? that was inspired by a comment from Sandeep: License plates are generally a literal transliteration of English pronunciations into respective language in India. In Maharashtra also this is common. So Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 14, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Blogger lunches and such, and Have a Happy Valentine's Day, gentle reader

Very little that is technical, you know the drill. If you don't like it, then please either get over it or skip it! :-) So yesterday there was a lunch for Microsoft bloggers in the Building 16/17/18 cafeteria. I felt a little like a food snob since I Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 14, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Canada isn't Kannada, ay (ಎ)?

More fun from that India trip .... One of the interesting things that can happen as a government works to keep language in the minds and hearts of people is that the language ends up getting used. The results can be interesting or amusing or even dangerous Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 13, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

It's not what you know or even who you know; it's what you're near (aka C is for Copy, that's good enough for me)

Over in the Suggestion Box, Amie asked: What exactly does Ctrl - V stand for and how did it come about.. besides the fact that the V is near X and C? What does the V stand for in the shortcut? Can someone help me figure this one out please? Thank you! Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 13, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Behold the Table Driven Text Service, Part 9 (Will you be content if I tell you how some content can be defined?)

Prior posts in the series: 0 (You have to start somewhere) 1 (Starting with a dictionary simple in every way) 2 (Three ways to convert!) 3 (Where do keystrokes come in?) 4 (Specifying when to modify, if not how) 5 (All about the language, baby!) 6 (it Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 12, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Making a different keyboard indicate a different font

Over in the Suggestion Box, Andy asks: Hi, I am working with Word 2003, and I have a question about language keyboards and fonts. I work with Hebrew in a lot of the papers I have to write for school, and I have found Unicode support very helpful in to Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 12, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Behold the Table Driven Text Service, Part 8 (Configuration 'junk in the trunk', part 2)

Prior posts in the series: 0 (You have to start somewhere) 1 (Starting with a dictionary simple in every way) 2 (Three ways to convert!) 3 (Where do keystrokes come in?) 4 (Specifying when to modify, if not how) 5 (All about the language, baby!) 6 (it Read More...
Posted Monday, February 11, 2008 7:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Who assigns the VK_OEM_* values in keyboards?

Someone named Michael who is not me asked via the Contact link: Hello, I was interested in the process Windows uses for converting scan codes to virtual keys. Do you know anywhere where it is described precisely? Notably, things like what determines which Read More...
Posted Monday, February 11, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Microsoft still does not use the UCA; the converse is also true

In recent conversations about the atomic Malayalam chillu on Unicode's Indic list, we do find that the fact they have been encoded has not stopped widespread argument about them from several, even now. In the midst of all that, several comments about Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 10, 2008 4:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Are they premature classics, or am I just getting old?

Warning: amazingly, astoundingly off-topic by any definition of topicality! Growing up, I never had a sense of what my parents really liked in the way of music and movies and such. We had movie channels and watched what went by and we owned The Jazz Singer Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 10, 2008 3:46 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

If the [IE7 on Vista ]browser doesn't have anything nice to display, it might display nothing?

Another recent Suggestion Box item from favored "regular" reader Tanveer Badar: Another problem from the [not] random reader. Your post No charset meta tag? causes FF 3 beta 2 to crash with a buffer overflow. Hehehe. Sleek :). And in IE7 it does not show Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 09, 2008 10:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

SGCAPS and dead keys don't mix

Over in the Suggestion Box, Alec McAllister asks: I'm a long-time user of MSKLC, having made keyboard layouts to support many languages, but I'm stumped by one thing: does MSKLC allow a SGCAP+somekey combination to be used as a dead key, or not? MSKLC Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 09, 2008 9:06 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Overheard, via email

A quote that was so perfect that I just had to capture it here.... The context is not provided since I am not trying to slam the specific component (though one really could in this case), I just loved the quote: This works fairly efficiently in most cases, Read More...
Posted Friday, February 08, 2008 10:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Trends reverse themselves (an amusing way of saying our predictions were wrong)

Trends are not rules. Hell, they aren't even guidelines. Trends really are really little more than our attempt to make sense out of what is happening and perhaps to try to figure out what will be happening if our analysis of trend(s) was valid.... Anyway, Read More...
Posted Friday, February 08, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

That's [one of ]the other Michael Kaplan[s]

So Leili sent me some email yesterday. I've known her for a few years now. She works on the .NET globalization team and I reported to her husband a few years back when the World Ready Guides were the World Ready Guys -- the alias now forwards to an entirely Read More...
Posted Friday, February 08, 2008 6:46 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Taking Lufthansa's Ark across the universe in search of my own Kobayashi Maru: The Sandalwood Bunny, aka Much ado about scooter

Another of the stories about that India trip .... The last night I was there, Kumaran wanted to take me out to dinner. What with the publishing deadline that just struggled to hit, he and I did not have much time to chat and all. But then his boss Anandan Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 1:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Alphabetical [dis]order?

It has been a while since I had a Broom-Hilda strip that had me laughing like this one: I suppose I could ask people what they thought the optimal sorting algorithm might be. Could it be any worse than Obama 's foray in this space? :-) (Hat tip to Tina) Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

The utility of a feature like font fallback in Uniscribe can often be somewhat obviated by its design flaw

(This is information I talked a bit about at Microsoft Research India when I was in Bangalore) Now there have been many times that I have talked about the wonderful feature that Uniscribe's font fallback provides for us (ref: these blogs). Of course there Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 06, 2008 6:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Funny thing about a reputation (aka It takes quite a character...)

Once you get a reputation among your readers, you can find them emailing you as they run into items of interest on the web, or just the opportunity to talk about your own oddities.... Like when fellow MSFTie Kim Hamilton will claim in Facebook that I'm Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 06, 2008 6:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Attention PARENT [windows] -- You aren't me and you don't own me, so I'm not going to tell you about all of the characters that visit me here

In Windows, as in life, it is important to keep a bit of independence from one's parents. They may have lot to do with your initial placement, sure. But beyond that, they don't get to be too involved.... I remembered this a while back when Naga asked: Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 05, 2008 6:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Remember Oolong!, aka Happy [I have no idea what you're talking about... so here's a bunny with a ]Pancake [on its head ]Day!

This post brought to you in care of associative linkage -- I know where it starts but no one knows where it will end! :-) So yesterday was the first day of Carnival in a bunch of places. And tomorrow is Ash Wednesday in a whole bunch of places. And today? Read More...
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