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June 2005 - Posts

Michael Penn wants his space....

Well, that's not right. Maybe he would say "I want my space." No, that's not right either. He would say "I want myspace ". That's it! He found it, he actually has a myspace site, right here . When someone first pointed it out to me, I was sure it was Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 30, 2005 8:00 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Query collation source data?

Recently someone asked a question via the Contact link: Hi, I was wondering if you know of a way to get the stroke count of a chinese character? This function seem to be in Word (chinese index), and also in .NET (string sort according to stroke and bopomofo) Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 30, 2005 7:50 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Update on Community Server issues that seem to affect this blog

Back in the beginning of May, I posted about Community Server issues that seem affect this blog . Looks like they have been busy fixing some bugs! Bugs #2 and #3 no longer seem to happen -- there appears to be full access via both the month links and Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 29, 2005 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Consoling people about their troubles with the console.

This is not one of those fun posts where I get to talk about exciting new features. Instead I am going to answer some questions about CMD, the console (kŏn'sōl'), and now I am going to try and console (kən-sōl') the people with questions, since they will Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 29, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Stop indiscriminate umlauting!

Cathy Wissink has threatened to have the slogan in the title of this post made into a bumper sticker. Of course she is usually inspired to think about this after seeing yet another example of heavy metal umlauting (I can't believe this topic has a Wikipedia Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 28, 2005 6:47 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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You wish.

Hugh McLeod has a cartoon-based blog named gapingvoid.com that is incredibly funny. The cartoons are mostly on the backs of business cards, like the hilarious one below (which I would love to see on a T-shirt; if you would too, click on the link and leave Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 28, 2005 5:42 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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The 'grammar' of identifiers

Ok, it is time for one of my periodic delusional episodes (you know, those delusions of linguistic aptitude I have from time to time. (this post pre-recorded, a little blog experimentation!) Now there is disambiguation, a word which may have already existed Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 28, 2005 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Giving up on the phonemes

A few days ago, Mark Liberman was talking about Spanish in Charlotte in 1965 and the way that the pronunciation of Oribe (which to most Spanish speaking people would be oh-REE-beh) became Or-bay mainly to match the phonemes of the people in North Carolina Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 28, 2005 8:25 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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GDI, GDI+, EUDC, TextRenderer. Connection?

First I posted about Whidbey's TextRenderer . Then I posted about enduserdefined characters . Two concepts that have nothing in common, right? Well, actually I am going to juxtapose these two concepts for a moment. :-) Michael Warning (one of the cool Read More...
Posted Monday, June 27, 2005 8:43 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

A few words about enduserdefined characters

EUDC stands for End User Defined Characters. The Platform SDK defines them simply: End user defined characters (EUDC) are customized characters that users install for viewing and printing documents. They enable users to form names and other words using Read More...
Posted Monday, June 27, 2005 6:56 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

A quick look at Whidbey's TextRenderer

Over the weekend, TheMuuj mentioned in a comment : As far as I know, there are new classes in Whidbey for drawing text with GDI (as a result of GDI+'s questionable screen rendering in some cases). Are these based on DrawText? This is not exactly the reason. Read More...
Posted Monday, June 27, 2005 4:59 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments
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Client side locale settings on the server?

Recently overheard in the microsoft.public.dotnet.internationalization newsgroup: Hi, I'm developing a web application, in that I have to display the short date according to the customized date format of client machine's culture. For example Culture = Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 26, 2005 7:20 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Line breaking, according to DrawText

The Win32 DrawText function and its more full-featured cousin DrawTextEx , have been around for a long time. They both have a simple stated set of purposes: ...draws formatted text in the specified rectangle. It formats the text according to the specified Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 25, 2005 11:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

多機能な CultureInfo クラスを利用して .NET の世界を身近なものにする

Remember that article I wrote for the March 2005 MSDN Magazine entitled Make the .NET World a Friendlier Place with the Many Faces of the CultureInfo Class ? Well, as title of this post hints, it has been translated into Japanese! :-) (This post is also Read More...
Posted Friday, June 24, 2005 8:02 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Многоликий класс CultureInfo — .NET-приложения станут дружелюбнее к пользователю

Remember that article I wrote for the March 2005 MSDN Magazine entitled Make the .NET World a Friendlier Place with the Many Faces of the CultureInfo Class ? Well, as title of this post hints, it has been translated into Russian! :-) (This post is also Read More...
Posted Friday, June 24, 2005 8:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

LCMapString's *other* job

To me, the NLS API function LCMapString has a full-time job, one that is crucial to the fundamental fabric of Windows -- sort key generation. I know it is crucial because if I accidentally mess up the tables then there are components that are unable to Read More...
Posted Friday, June 24, 2005 12:41 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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Seeing red. But in a good way....

I don't think there will be anything technical in this post, but we'll see how it goes.... Today, two different people noticed that the candy bowl was running a little lean if you know what I'm saying. So I skipped lunch and then took a little time to Read More...
Posted Friday, June 24, 2005 12:10 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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What normalization form does SQL Server use, REDUX

This question came up a few times at TechEd in Orlando, and recently it was asked again in the newsgroups by a guy named Tim: Does SQL server allow input in both NFC and NFD? If so does it normalize so a select on an NFC piece of text returns NFD and Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 23, 2005 11:06 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

What normalization form does SQL Server use?

This question came up a few times at TechEd in Orlando, and recently it was asked again in the newsgroups by a guy named Tim: Does SQL server allow input in both NFC and NFD? If so does it normalize so a select on an NFC piece of text returns NFD and Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 23, 2005 6:42 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Not so small as to be internationally stupid

Like many employees of Microsoft, I do look at Mini-Microsoft from time to time. Some of it I agree with, some of it I don't. I think it is that way with everyone.... But in the most recent post , there was a bit that kind of annoyed me: Sometimes, you've Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 23, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

What APIs do I own?

Yesterday, in a comment to my conversation about SHAnsiToUnicode/SHUnicodeToAnsi, Rosyna asked some interesting questions: This actually brings up an interesting point. If someone working on one group at MS sees a problem in another group's software that Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 22, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments
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Whither SHAnsiToUnicode?

In the Suggestion Box , our good friend Serge Wautier of appTranslator fame (I'll blog about that tool another day!) asked: What's the purpose of SHAnsiToUnicode() ? I mean... what advantage does it have over plain old MultiByteToWideChar() ? Less parameters Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 21, 2005 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

Number format and currency format are not always the same

Almost a month ago I was talking about how GetCurrencyFormat and GetNumberFormat take strings for their number parameters and why. And John Bates commented : One of my web forms (an invoice) has a column of currency amounts with a total at the bottom. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 21, 2005 3:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Jim Boggia in Seattle, July 13th

(nothing technical, yada yada yada...) I mentioned him back when I was explaining what was Now Playing . An excellent singer/songwriter who has been everywhere worth being and then some. He is (along with Ben Arnold, Scott Bricklin and Joseph Parsons) Read More...
Posted Monday, June 20, 2005 8:16 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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SDL International proposes acquisition of TRADOS

You can read all about it in press release info either on the SDL site or the TRADOS site . This is very cool news, I look forward to what this new entity will be able to bring to localization (and localizability) in the future.... Read More...
Posted Monday, June 20, 2005 12:42 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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'Plane ride home' story

So I was talking to Teresa about her plane ride home. The flight was fully booked, s o they asked for volunteers to take a later flight. And since she did not have to be anywhere that night, Teresa volunteered, along with a few other people and a family Read More...
Posted Monday, June 20, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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Star Trek with linguistic pretensions

I certainly used to be a fan of the orginal Star Trek series (what fans now call Star Trek: TOS ) when I was growing up, though I remember that the TV station used to show episodes out of order. Even a kid can be confused if from week to week people do Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 19, 2005 12:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Font substitution and linking #3

Earlier posts about font linking, substitution and fallback were: Font substitution and linking #1 (About font substitution) Font substitution and linking #2 (About industrial strength font linking, with MLang) Anyway, at the end of last month, M.W. Grossman Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 18, 2005 9:20 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

Anyone having trouble with MSKLC on an x64 machine?

The other day, Andreas Henriksson asked me I had no idea where to post bug-reports, and you seem to be the author that's why I'm contacting you in person. I recently bought a new computer with Windows XP x64-edition, since then I've been trying to get Read More...
Posted Friday, June 17, 2005 11:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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More on locales in SQL Server

Fascinating post about Locales in SQL Server , one that went into much more detail than I did at TechEd last week. It is from the from the new SQLCLR Integration blog and is definitely worth a read or three... They did a really good description of not Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 8:25 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

What it means to be case insensitive

Brad Eck asked (in the microsoft.public.dotnet.internationalization newsgroup): I am calling the following code in a button click event. Every click causes the result set to 'toggle'. In otherwords, the original click will display '...,lIMES,LIMES,limes,...' Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 12:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Once more into the palindrome

Back in April, in a series of posts, I talked about many cool features in Whidbey, from comparison (been there all along) to text elements (been there all along, better in Whidbey) to normalization (new in Whidbey), all in the context of one of the most Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005 3:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments

Every character has a story #11: U+???? (The Invisible Letter)

The story today is about a character that has not been encoded in Unicode as of yet. In fact, it was brought to the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) once already and been turned down. but it had enough of a history behind it that I thought it might be Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

A syllabary does not need to be encoded as one

In abecedaria, Suzanne had an interesting post last week entitled The Tamil Syllabary chez Diderot . It was a very interesting post that talked about how a syllabarium is the way that (for example) young people might well learn to read and write Tamil. Read More...
Posted Monday, June 13, 2005 8:41 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Using full locales rather than the neutral ones?

Late last year, I asked and answered two 'neutral' questions: What is a neutral culture? What is a neutral locale? And I did go to some lengths to explain in there why they were not too terribly useful except for resource loading. But most of the time, Read More...
Posted Monday, June 13, 2005 10:39 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Browsing the shoals of managed string comparisons

It was a little over a month ago that I pointed out that Similar descriptions does not mean similar methodologies , and I spent a little time comparing many of the Win32, Shell, Shlwapi, CRT, and Kernel methods of doing case-insensitive comparisons. And Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 12, 2005 7:15 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Is it Macau or is it Macao?

People get confused sometimes about the name of this place, but whether you call it: Haojing'ao (壕鏡澳 "Trench Inlet") Liandao (蓮島 "Lotus Island") Xiangshan'ao (香山澳 "Fragrant mountain Island") According to some sites (like the U.S. Library of Congress ), Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 11, 2005 10:30 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

TechEd Orlando: Day 5

The last day started with an eerie feeling -- without the Expo the lights seemed a little dimmer, and with the bulk of the people recovering from the party, the aisles between the cabanas seemed a little emptier. I saw some old friends but many I knew Read More...
Posted Friday, June 10, 2005 5:15 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Sara is right

Yes, it is true. Sara Ford is right, Gretchen is totally cool and we’re all proud of her . Of course I never take risks myself (innocent shrug and smile). But as I said the other day , both of the Ledgard clan rock. Meeting both of them at TechEd has Read More...
Posted Friday, June 10, 2005 8:53 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Getting at ALL of the older 'Sorting It All Out' posts

I have blogged about the problems with not being able to get to older posts on this Community Server install we have here on MSDN Blogs . And people have complained about the problem to me too, both by email and by the Suggestion Box. I mean, Search is Read More...
Posted Friday, June 10, 2005 8:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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TechEd Orlando: Day 4

Another very cool day at TechEd -- especially because I saw Michele Leroux Bustamante 's session WEB326 (ASP.NET 2.0: Going Global Gets Easier! New Localization Features in ASP.NET 2.0). This is an area which I tragically knew very little about, and it Read More...
Posted Friday, June 10, 2005 6:39 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Its been almost four years, Sherry....

I was looking through email today trying to find a particular one, and ran across one that slayed me. This is a story I have never really told anyone in full before, for reasons that I cannot fully explain. It was not really a love story or anything like Read More...
Posted Friday, June 10, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments
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'Just to see the heads explode would be very cool,' he said

My first podcast, I can't believe I said that it would be cool to see people's heads explode! :-) On second thought, I can believe it. That is exactly the kind of thing I would say. Look at the Geeks with Blogs TechEd podcasting list for the one entitled Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 09, 2005 7:55 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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String.Compare is for sissies (not for people who want SQLCLR consistency)

Yesterday at the TechEd booth in which I was sitting, someone was asking me how to get the comparisons in the .NET Framework to be consistent with the ones in SQL Server 2005. This is a lot harder than it has to be, unfortunately! First we will start Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 09, 2005 11:25 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

TechEd Orlando: Day 3

Ok, yesterday was the day to top all days. Truly. I will remember this one for a while! Let's see what happened yesterday.... I saw Teresa early on and she mentioned she would be at the Influencer Appreciation Party (more on this later). I also ran into Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 09, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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TechEd Orlando: Day 2

Sorry this is so late, I meant to post it last night, while it still was day two! Yesterday was another awesome day. I was Stephen Forte's GrokTalk while they were filming it (hate to break it you, Stephen -- you were only the first because there were Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 08, 2005 7:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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My first (bloggers) geek dinner and the sequelae, at Orlando TechEd 2005

I have of course had many a dinner with geeks before, but this is the first one I had that was set up in blogs by bloggers. I found it through blogs that I read (the blogs of Josh and Gretchen Ledgard!), and as I scooted over to Bahama Breeze I got to Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 07, 2005 10:50 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

TechEd Orlando: Day 1

Day 1 of TechEd was an interesting one. I had some good conversations in the cabana (including a few people who read about it here). Also, I did my first talk (DAT290). It was very under-attended, which I think threw me a little as I had people telling Read More...
Posted Monday, June 06, 2005 6:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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More on the 'Blogs I Read' list

Three new entries in the list of the Blogs I Read , given here in in the order I have added them. :-) ABECEDARIA (A blog about keyboarding in diverse scripts, literacy and digital literacy, and the history of writing system theory.) Suzanne E. McCarthy Read More...
Posted Monday, June 06, 2005 5:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

'desire to deeply understand core globalization features at their lowest levels'

The other day I posted about a Program Manager job my group is looking to fill . The text of the job description had among other things the following text in it: Desire to deeply understand core globalization features at their lowest levels Anyway, someone Read More...
Posted Monday, June 06, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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TechEd Orlando: Day 0

(absolutely no technical content!) There is a distinct possibility that you may be sick of me talking about TechEd by the end of the week (in fact, you may be sick of it now!). Well, you may just want to take the week off, or skip a lot of posts. :-) Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 05, 2005 3:48 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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The dasBlog 'Turkish I' thing figured out

Scott figured it out, and it was not a Microsoft bug.:-) You can read about the details on Scott's blog at Update on the dasBlog Turkish-I bug and a reminder to me on Globalization . Now I have talked about the Turkish I issue in general before (cf: The Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 05, 2005 1:44 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

What will I answer questions about?

I have had some people who even after reading my Stump the Chump post and at my schedule for being in Dr. International's Clinic were curious about what I would want people asking me about.... So I thought I would mention a few ideas. :-) Anything related Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 05, 2005 12:56 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Does Bengali sorting work?

I had a colleague of mine ask me this very question the other day. It was not an entirely offhand question. After all, as I mentioned in Lions and tigers and bears ELKs, Oh my! , NLS support for Bengali was added to Windows XP in Service Pack 2. The post Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 05, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Have a chat with me in the international cabana....

A good chunk of the time that I am at TechEd 2005 in Orlando, I will be in a cabana -- you can see the schedule here . To be honest, on most of the subjects that interest me I am able to talk about at least an hour longer than most normal people are willing Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 04, 2005 9:21 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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