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November 2005 - Posts

Not sure if I am blue, but the Novantrone is!

Just a quick M.S. update for the curious.... I just had my second Novantrone infusion this morning, but I am starting to doubt that thing about the whites of the eyes getting bluish. I think they tell people that since it encourages folks like me to sign Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 30, 2005 2:06 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Expectations around collation

Back many years ago when I first moved to Columbus, OH (the place I lived before Redmond, WA) I owned a cat named Kim (short for Kimberly Cleopatra). Well, I didn't really own Kim; no one ever really owns a cat. I think she pretty much owned me. :-) Anyway, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 30, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Oops, we did it again

I could not resist the Brittney Spears reference, sorry! But there is yet another Language Interface Pack , this one for Nepali ! A tiny little bit of info about the Nepali language: Nepali (sometimes also referred to as "Nepalese") is the official language Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 30, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 25 Comments
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SQL Server's cultural sensitivities

Souri asked me: Michael, Does SQLServer 2005 support culture aware Sorting? Thanks, Souri Hi Souri! Not only does SQL Server 2005 do this, but SQL Server 2000 does as well; even SQL Server 7.0 supports a limited version of it. But the word 'culture' in Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 29, 2005 6:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Custom keyboard, custom language?

Madhava Tennakoon asked me: I am a developper of fonts for Sinhala/Sinhalese Language - Sri Lanka. Those days we developped fonts for Sri Lankan Standerd like ANSI (256 Chrs). After the Unicode standerd came now there is a page for Sinhala(Sinhalese) Read More...
Posted Monday, November 28, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

See Lewis Black at the Paramount on December 3rd

For all those who thought I had no political opinions? :-) Lewis Black, one of the most awesome forces of nature to hit The Daily Show since John Stewart, is going to be at The Paramount on December 3rd, a show definitely worth seeing! More info at foolproof.org, Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 27, 2005 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Technically it *is* a hungarian sort

Back in August in the post Double compressions -- Hungarian goulash? I described how double compressions worked in Windows and the .NET Framework. And then a week ago in Hungarian is even more complicated than I thought I talked about an additional interesting Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 26, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Getting all of the alternate sorts for a locale

Recently, Eman asked in the newsgroups: Please help me clear up general LCID logic. As far as i understand the SORT_xx values make sense in a pair with PrimaryLanguage only. In other words, a Sort ID has the same meaning for a set of LCIDs where PrimaryLanguage Read More...
Posted Friday, November 25, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

And you can't set all of the properties all of the time...

There is some sort of implicit belief that if a locale property is settable that it should be set. Up to and including the .NET Framework 2.0, there are a few of the properties that violate that belief in the NumberFormatInfo class and that should not Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 24, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

CultureInfo thoughts

Brad Abrams posted about The SLAR (vol2) on System.Globalization.CultureInfo and included quotes from members of the GIFT team (Shawn Steele and Ihab Abdelhalim). One bit in particular stood out in my mind: Except for Invariant, don’t expect the culture Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 24, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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100% roundtrip ASCII? 100% roundtrip ANSI?

Back in January I was talking about the new compiler error C4819 and how the compiler detected invalid characters . And anyone who has been reading here knows that the reverse solidus is always the path separator , even when it looks like a yen or a won. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 23, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments
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More on the fabled EqualString

If you go back all the way to April and look at some of the comments to the What the %#$* is wrong with German sorting? post you will see one of those times that the fact that we have to equate sorting and comparison can confuse people about the results. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 22, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 22 Comments

29th Internationalization and Unicode Conference

That is right, the 29th Internationalization and Unicode Conference will be going on soon, and you can be there, too! The conference will be happening on March 6-8, 2006 in Burlingame, CA, USA. The Unicode Consortium press release is right here . And Read More...
Posted Monday, November 21, 2005 8:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

What does 'accessible' mean? Is U2 accessible?

Or, more properly, is the hotel owned by (among others) U2, The Clarence Hotel in Dublin city center accessible? Most properly is the simple question "is there an accessible entrance to the hotel restaurant?" This was the question that was posed to the Read More...
Posted Monday, November 21, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Private fonts: for members only

About a month ago, I had someone ask me about the images that appeared in MSKLC for characters that had no visible representation, wondering whether they were part of a font or not. After I explained that they were, she asked me how this font was able Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 20, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Screw language; it's about the dialect, baby!

I figured I knew English pretty well. At least once I was no longer under the anal-retentive authority of the prescriptive linguists, I mean. Every time I spend some time in Ireland (or Australia, or the UK, etc.), I remember that it is not about knowing Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 19, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments
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Some sort of order to collation

Last weekend, Dean Harding commented when I was talking about preferring uppercase before lowercase or vice-versa: The whole idea of sorting (at least for latin-based scripts) is just convention anyway... I mean, you may well ask "why should 'A' come Read More...
Posted Friday, November 18, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Kathleen Edwards at The Village in Dublin

As much as I hate to quote Eric Cartman -- this show kicked ass. :-) The venue did unfortunately have no elevator. Their workaround? Four bouncers literally lifted me and the scooter in one package up the flight of stairs. Cool! I decided early on that Read More...
Posted Friday, November 18, 2005 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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The journey to visit Godot.... Er... Dublin

(Note: If you are uninterested in the journeys of me, then you will almost certainly want to skip this post) About the title -- I was tempted to make the title " The way to Emmaus.... Er... Dublin" but I was not sure who would get the reference, and of Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 17, 2005 9:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Using multiple keyboards

The other day, Jerry Pisk asked in the Suggestion Box: How does Windows handle input from multiple keyboards? Can each keyboard have a different layout? Do dead and control (shift/control/alt/win/context) keys cross keyboards and what happens if each Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 17, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Parse vs. ParseExact, revisited

It is hard to believe that it has been almost a year since I talked about 'Evil date parsing', Parse, and ParseExact . But that post was done on November 26, 2004, so it must be true. But the same sort of issue has come up recently in all sorts of other Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 17, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

My thoughts on the scare quotes issue

The other day in The Language Log , Mark Lieberman mentioned about how "even Reuters, contrary to its stated policy against using the words terrorist and terrorism outside of quotation marks, sometimes uses these words in headlines and news stories". Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 16, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Heading to Ireland

I will be heading out of town in a little while until just after Thanksgiving, for a little vacation (I will actually be back in Cleveland for a few days over Thanksgiving). I mention "a little vacation" since I will be working some of that time, too. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 16, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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It is not easy to chain dead keys on Windows

The title says it all -- and not just for the most obvious reason -- because MSKLC does not support it. In many different posts on this blog I have said a little or a lot about chaining dead keys. It is in the post Dead keys are not intuitive that I probably Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 15, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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SIAO to Search engines -- would you please normalize, already?

Suzanne has been riffing on me in relation to Vietnamese and then she shifted over to talk about Google and other languages , so I thought I would riff off of her a bit. :-) By the way Suzanne -- I did not find your terminology to be inaccurate; it was Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 15, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Doing a globalization conference again? Kewl!

If you were one of the people who was at the Microsoft Global Development and Deployment Conference (GDDC) in February of 2004, you know that a great conference with a lot of good information happened, and there was not even a major product released that Read More...
Posted Monday, November 14, 2005 4:10 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

ISO 8601 is asinine

From the I Can't Believe Michael Said That Out Loud files.... A few years ago, Aimee Mann was talking about the song Long Shot from her album I'm With Stupid: There are at least four songs on it that I wrote for myself and said, 'It's fine. This will Read More...
Posted Monday, November 14, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 41 Comments

Rookit begone, foul tempter!

As reported by the Anti-Malware Engineering Team in their post about the Sony DRM Rootkit , after analysis of the situation the course of action is clear: the Malicious Software Removal Tool the Windows AntiSpyware Beta the online scanner at the Windows Read More...
Posted Monday, November 14, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Happy Birthday to the blog

That's right -- the very first post on this blog was put up on Saturday, November 13, 2004. And now, 365 days, 29 articles, 726 posts, and 3721 comments later it is still around. Thanks for your continued support and interest! Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 13, 2005 5:03 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Hungarian is even more complicated than I thought

Back in August in the post Double compressions -- Hungarian goulash? I described how double compressions worked in Windows and the .NET Framework. It can indeed be a complicated feature to support, and not just for the reasons I explicitly stated but Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 13, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 20 Comments

Which comes first, 'a' or 'A' ?

A wise man (well, I think it was the comedian Emo Phillips, does he count?) once spoke the following little fable: I had an argument with my father. I argued that Plato was the father of philosophy. My dad of course took the opposite position, that I Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 13, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments
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The Software Tester's Axioms

Like any science (and please do not for a moment doubt that Test is an engineering discipline, and at heart a good engineer is an applied scientist!), software testing has some basic principles which cannot be proven but are simply universal truths upon Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 12, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 24 Comments
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One last post about genitive dates

About a year ago I talked about " What the %$#! are genitive dates? " and then yesterday and the day before I talked about them again and then again and then again . Hopefully this will be the last post about them for a little while! In a comment to that Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 12, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

What to do with the Vietnamese keyboard on Windows?

By the way, I am not implying we must do anything at all. It is probably important to start with that disclaimer. :-) If you think back to previous posts I have done on Vietnamese ( here and especially here ), it is clear that the implementation has been Read More...
Posted Friday, November 11, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 23 Comments

Any Sami speakers reading this blog? :-)

About a year ago I talked about " What the %$#! are genitive dates? " and then yesterday I talked about them again and then again . It turns out there may also be different behavior for Sami, a language for which we added nine locales in Windows XP SP2: Read More...
Posted Friday, November 11, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

Do genitive dates always work properly for Greek?

About a year ago I talked about " What the %$#! are genitive dates? " and a little while ago I talked about them again. We are facing an interesting question right now when it comes to genitive dates in the .NET Framework. It all boils down to reports Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 10, 2005 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Genitive dates, revisited

It was almost a year ago that I answered the question " What the %$#! are genitive dates? " on this blog. And then today for some reason, the issue kept coming up again and again! The day started with an international PM from Office asking for information Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 10, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Shrinking URLs down

I know people like to talk about things like TinyURL , but I am talking about something different, something I found out the other day when looking at a URL that Raymond Chen had made to a blog post (which they put in an email). Take for example the link Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 09, 2005 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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Getting around the default system locale

Last month, Duncan asked me: Awhile ago, I was running an app that required me to run in Japanese mode, so I've been doing that for quite a while. In the mean time, I downloaded some videos online that were named in Chinese (in terms of content at least, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 09, 2005 5:27 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

More than you ever wanted to know about CP_SYMBOL

If you look at the Platform SDK topics for both WideCharToMultiByte and MultiByteToWideChar , you will notice one very interesting code page entry: CP_SYMBOL Windows 2000/XP: Symbol code page (42) Of course if you go up to the reference information on Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 08, 2005 12:23 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

SQL Compatibility collations are a bit too retro for me

Now when I say that 'SQL Compatibility collations are a bit too retro for me' I mean retro in the sense of retrograde.... Last month, Richard asked me: Still working on our implementation of this and having problems with the sort of collation SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 08, 2005 4:59 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

SQL Server and the CLR have different ways of getting the money

Yoshihiro Kawabata said (in the suggestion box): Hello, Michael I listed up NumberFormatInfo's Culture related property in .NET by C#. The result posted below blog. http://blogs.sqlpassj.org/yoshihirokawabata/archive/2005/11/06/14767.aspx And then, the Read More...
Posted Monday, November 07, 2005 12:20 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Saying please and thank you

Saying please and thank you is something that is taken for granted here in the USA and other places. I remember being struck as a tenager by Jonathan M. Ford's take on such terms, through the eyes of a Klingonaase captain: The Admiral got up from his Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 06, 2005 1:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 30 Comments
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Time zones, GEOs, and Percents

John Bates asked in the Suggestion Box: 1. Will Vista/future NLS support expose timezone info get/set APIs? If so will it also be tied to the GeoInfo APIs? 2. Will Vista expose the percentage-related formatting currently in .NET's NumberFormat class in Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 06, 2005 10:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Word rage is in Southeast Asia, too

Over at Language Log Plaza, Mark Lieberman's post Word rage outside the Anglosphere? gave me a chilling sense of deja vu. Why? Well, because over on the Indic List hosted by the Unicode Consortium (and other places), we have some interesting rhetoric Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 05, 2005 7:33 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Sony uses up a few of MSLU's 15 minutes of fame

As reported by Mark Russinovich , there is more to the story on the Sony-installed Rootkit (perhaps the defenders of Sony from that first post will have second thoughts once they see the elaborate web that does in fact appear to be Sony's process!). If Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 05, 2005 5:11 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Sticky keys vs. Reading Order

There are many times on this blog where I have talked about how accessibility features and internationalization features work together to create a better user experience. It can sometimes happen even if no actual attempt to work together was taking place! Read More...
Posted Friday, November 04, 2005 6:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

I'm not a big fan of blog stats

No, it's true -- I'm not a big fan of blog stats. I mean, if I were doing this for the hit count or the comments or any of the usual reasons people seem to have, I would almost ceratinly being doing it differently.... Now I still feel that way, though Read More...
Posted Friday, November 04, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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My own personal thoughts about collation in the Mono project

(IMPORTANT NOTE: this post is just my personal delusions opinions about the topic, I am certainly speaking for neither Microsoft nor the Mono project. If there was ever a time to read this blog's disclaimer, it is right now !) (IMPORTANT NOTE #2: I am Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 03, 2005 3:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Math is hard, let's do Unicode!

(dedicated to the '_____ is hard, let's go shopping!' crowd in Building 24) A reader of this blog by the admittedly unlikely name of Mr. Blobby asked in the Suggestion Box back in the end of June: I would love to learn about the specific challenges (if Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 03, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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What do Sony and a straw have in common?

Well, if you use either one of them, significant suckage can occur. Rootkits? Don't ever install the crap they put on CDs and DVDs (I tried not to, anyway). (From Mark Russinovich ) Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 02, 2005 10:06 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

Random clearing of topics from the Suggestion Box

The Suggestion Box seemed to be building up some topics, so I thought I would clear a few of them out here.... Back on May 15th of this year, QFlash asked me: How to write a txt file as Unicode in .NET? It is actually pretty straightforward.... if you Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 02, 2005 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

UTC #105 -- Day 1

Well, today was day #1 of the Unicode Technical Committee meeting. By the way -- why doesn't the Unicode Consortium have a blog? They could call it UniBlog! It would like 470 BC, when much of the world looked like the cover of the Led Zepplin album "Houses Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 02, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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I WON to talk about the YEN

(terrible pun in the title, sorry!) It was early last month that I shook my head about the REVERSE SOLIDUS and stated for all the world to hear that I'd rather call it the path separator . And I have been a strong advocate for keeping everything in Unicode, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 01, 2005 7:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

The 8.0 instructions for rebuilding MFC and the CRT Redux

Remember when I posted the 8.0 instructions for rebuilding MFC and the CRT ? Predictably, some changes were made after Beta 2 so that the RTM instructions had to change. You can find the updated doc here . Thanks for the update, Mike Ted! :-) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 01, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan |