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July 2006 - Posts

What is it about an autograph?

Absolutely nothing technical here! There is something nice about having some with an autograph. What is the fascination with that sort of thing, anyway? The other day a friend of mine had an autographed picture of Liz Phair he had to get rid of. He had Read More...
Posted Monday, July 31, 2006 11:55 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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I before E, except after C...

Now how does that saying go? I before E , except after C, Or when it sound like 'A', like in N ei ghbor and W ei gh, Or when it sound like 'Ear', like in the word W ei rd, Unless it sound like 'Eek', like in Duncan Sh ei k! Ok, I added that last part Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 29, 2006 2:18 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments
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Now serving: International recruits

A few years back before I came to work for Microsoft full-time, I was at a VBITS in the Speaker's Lounge. I was talking to Jim Fawcette, asking him about how the international subscription base worked compared to the US one, both in methods and percentages. Read More...
Posted Friday, July 28, 2006 6:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Is that what Microsoft's thinking?

Some people seem to think that this is what Microsoft is thinking when the issue of those new ads from Apple comes up. But on the whole, I think this is. :-) Read More...
Posted Friday, July 28, 2006 10:33 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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'Localizable' is not always 'Internationalized'

The other day, developer Ellen sent me mail about the Soft-Keyboard, Spinner and List Scroller sample WPF controls for Media Center , asking if I felt like the move to get developers paying more attention to internationalization in software had turned Read More...
Posted Friday, July 28, 2006 7:08 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

The download you requested is unavailable.

Remember earlier this month when I was talking about the Update to the mitigation tools for IDN security problems ? Well, it turns out that Wikipedia has an external link to the tools in its Internationalized Domain Names article. Unfortunately, they Read More...
Posted Friday, July 28, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

When will we support Rongo-Rongo?

A few years back, John McConnell gave a day 2 keynote at the 26th Internationalization an Unicode Conference, entitled The Windows Language Roadmap or When Do We Get Rongo-Rongo? . The subtitle, in a bold tradition that was subsequently taken up by this Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 27, 2006 6:47 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

The Cantonese IME (not for input of characters from Canton, Ohio)

Last month I was talking about how Feature ideas don't always turn out to be good ones . And I mentioned how I'd probably talk about other cases in the future. What can I say besides welcome to the future . :-) In Vista, from the time when it was just Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 27, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 44 Comments

The name of the enum is KeysEx, dammit

When I read Geoffrey K. Pullum's PowerGenItalia and PenisLand , I was once again struck by how funny it is that some people can take the KeysEx enumeration and read the name differently. I have gotten the same grief for other class extensions that use Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 26, 2006 8:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

It's great to have stuff in the top 10 (sort of)

I was looking at the MSDN home page and I noticed the Top 10 Downloads list: See that MSLU link? Cool! Not bad for a technically unsupported tool! Of course it was a little sad that MSKLC was not in the top 10; in fact, it wasn't even in the top 100: Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 26, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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I bless the rains down in Afrika[ans]

Ok, if I could get اردو , മലയാളം , Qhichwa Simi , فارسی , isiZulu , ಕನ್ನಡ , नेपाली , Lëtzebuergisch , कोंकणी , Setswana , বাংলা , తెలుగు , and ਪੰਜਾਬੀ to all move over a little bit. Because the Afrikaans Language Interface Pack is now available! Some info Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 25, 2006 3:02 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

Is East Asian support installed?

Michiel Salters asked in the Suggestion Box: MLang font linking works without us asking , it's just too nice. Really too nice, because MLang isn't telling us it failed. And in fact, we can't figure out that it's failing. So what's the problem? Most of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 25, 2006 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Our non-Unicode heritage

Apologies for the small George Carlin riff in italics below, it is based on the Civil War bit he did during his New Jersey HBO special back in the early 90s. I lack the budget to have Mr. Carlin do a Podcast saying this bit, so please use your imagination Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 25, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Blogging is stupid, sometimes

I was asked by a friend if I had an opinion about Rory's Blogging is Stupid post. I am probably the wrong person to ask, truth be told. I have actually had people tell me that they stopped reading this blog because of a specific post, like this one . Read More...
Posted Monday, July 24, 2006 12:37 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Our highly internationalized OS uses DPI, aka Dots Per In-.... um, never mind!

Windows has an impressive story when it comes to both internationalization and localization. I mean, sure there are occasionally things that I don't like , but most of those bugs get fixed and I hope they will all eventually be addressed one way or another. Read More...
Posted Monday, July 24, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Garden Path Menus

Last Friday, I was having dinner with Melanie Spiller , who I had never actually met before (I just kept almost working on book projects for Sybex that never materialized). It was very cool to finally meet her, by the way.... In addition to a fascinating Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 23, 2006 12:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Behind the return of the Unicode IME

Nick Lamb is a regular reader who often keeps me on my toes. In response to my recent post Return of the Unicode IME , Nick commented [line breaks inserted by me]: Can users expect the final version to go beyond the BMP? Also it seems short-sighted to Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 22, 2006 1:09 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

We're off on the road to Korea! We certainly do get around...

(Apologies to Mel Brooks for the borrowing of the song from History of the World, Pt 1!) Back when I posted about Traditional versus modern sorts , I mentioned that: As an aside, one could perhaps argue that the whole LVT -- leading/vowel/trailing -- Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 22, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

We do seem to be short on time...

Walter asks: Hi, It seems the time format in Control Panel Regional and Language Options is only mapped to .NET DateTime.ToString(“T”), i.e. the DateTimeFormatInfo.LongTimePattern. When using Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat, the LongTimePattern Read More...
Posted Friday, July 21, 2006 6:42 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

The complexities of keyboard layout switching

Chris was thinking about how keyboard layouts work on Windows, and suggested: Windows allows a user to set up multiple keyboards within an input language, and switch between them either by a keyboard shortcut or by clicking an icon on the taskbar. However, Read More...
Posted Friday, July 21, 2006 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

MSDN Blogs has achieved Kieranosity

Linguist, colleague, and GIFT Program Manager Kieran Snyder has finally created a blog here on blogs.msdn.com. The title is Loneliness of the long-distance linguist , and her 'hello world' post is right here . I was half expecting that she would start Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 20, 2006 10:39 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Return of the Unicode IME

I have previously (like in Typing in random Unicode code points ) talked about using the Unicode IME as a way to input random Unicode code points by their code point values. It was therefore something of a shock to me when Lionel Fourquaux mentioned a Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 20, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 27 Comments

Your data will be released, unharmed

In response to the recent post Appreciation, embarrassment, and redirecting thanks , that MVP Omi I mentioned in relation to Bengali sent me an email: Are you going to change the rendering engine somehow? I mean if I press ড় it will become ড + ় = ড় Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 19, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

How is that pronounced, exactly?

The other day, Raymond Chen posted Pidls and monikers do roughly the same thing, just backwards . And in that post he had the following text (emphasis mine): When operating with the Windows shell, you will almost certainly find yourself at some point Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006 11:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments
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A new version of Unicode is released, and it's all five by five

It is official, Unicode 5.0 is out there. The official release sent to the various lists and such: Mountain View, CA, July 18, 2006 -- The Unicode® Consortium announces the release of a significant update of its widely-used Unicode Character Database Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006 9:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Occam's Razor, as applied to UTF-8

Occam's Razor is a principle easily stated in Latin (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem) or English (entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity). Applying it to UTF-8 is an obvious matter -- it is the shortest form of the encoding Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006 3:10 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

'A' and 'W' are sometimes living in two different worlds

When you think about the 'A' and 'W' decorated versions of functions, in most cases the 'A' version is a simple wrapper that converts the strings, calls the 'W' version, and then when needed converts the string back. However, there are exceptions to this Read More...
Posted Monday, July 17, 2006 2:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Appreciation, embarrassment, and redirecting thanks

I remember blushing at TechEd when Wes Miller brought Mark Russinovich over to meet me (mentioned here ). Then I remember blushing again when he was on the Microsoft campus six months later and he remembered me. Anytime I notice one of the people linking Read More...
Posted Monday, July 17, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Nobody likes change

Picture a Friends episode - the one entitled The One With The Morning After . Chandler, Monica, Joey, and Phoebe are all trapped in the bedroom. Trapped because Ross and Rachel are outside the door, and after Rachel said she needed a break, Ross had a Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 16, 2006 1:23 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Update to the mitigation tools for IDN security problems

So it was a little under a year ago that I posted about the Mitigation tools for IDN security problems , and it was about a month ago that I posted an apology about the fact that I had not noticed the lack of 64-bit support, and the lack of a redistributable Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 16, 2006 8:40 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Uighur or Uyghur?

It hearkens back to that Persian? Or Farsi? post I did back in May of this year, and indeed some very similar issues about it exist. The question is whether the name of the language is Uighur or Uyghur .... The simplest answer (were I and all my readers Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 15, 2006 12:32 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 51 Comments

How long is that non-Unicode string?

The question that came to me by email from a woman named Denise was: What is the easiest way to get the length of an MBCS string in characters , by which I mean not in bytes but having an ideograph be treated as length 1? Assuming you know the code page Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 15, 2006 10:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 22 Comments

Can the CP_ACP be UTF-8?

Just moments ago, Sergey asked in the Suggestion Box: Hello, Michael! Wouldn't it be great to be able to set UTF-8 as a multibyte code page in Windows? What do you think? Well yes, I think it would be great. :-) Of course (in the spirit of RAH) I think Read More...
Posted Friday, July 14, 2006 8:04 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Friends not only let friends eat crackers -- they show up to watch!

In the spirit of the milk bet , I got the following invite yesterday: As some of you have heard by now, there is something known as a Saltine challenge. The goal is to eat 7 saltines in 60 seconds. If you're interested and well-hydrated, join us in ##/#### Read More...
Posted Friday, July 14, 2006 7:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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IME + .NET = Input Madness Editor?

Jiajing asked in the Suggestion Box: It is difficult to find resources for IME in windows forms. I really like to see an example how to make IME fully supported with windows forms. In VS 2003, IME partial support seems pretty easy: overriding OnKeyPress Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 13, 2006 7:47 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Going out on a Date$

A quick nod to Alex Papadimoulis for his Daily WTF post Long Distance DATE$ing . :-) There is very little that I could add to this gem, other than to say that most people never realized that the syntax would even work (they assume Date$ is a function Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 13, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

How To detect that a culture is bidi

Andy Canfield asked: I read your post here: How To [NOT] detect that a locale is bidi and I have recently come up against this issue but have a slightly different problem. I know how to do what you showed in C but I need to translate it to C# for .Net Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 12, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Device fonts are people too

After I wrote Printing TrueType as graphics yesterday, I got the following from the Contacting Michael... link: I'm a regular reader of (and occasional commentator on) your blog. I work in the printer driver team and handle (among other things) device Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 12, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Is MSLU still supported?

Well, as the Windows 98 page says officially : July 11, 2006 will bring a close to Extended Support for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Me as part of the Microsoft Lifecycle Policy. Microsoft will retire public and technical support, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 11, 2006 11:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments
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More on that which breaks Windows Notepad

In the latest comment to the post that keeps on going ( Behind 'How to break Windows Notepad' ), Sanjay Vyas asks : Not all combinations of 4-3-3-5 will produce it. For example, Bush hid the truth does not work while Bush hid the facts does. Any explanation? Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 11, 2006 7:26 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Printing TrueType as graphics

Francisco Moraes posted in the Suggestion Box: This isn't much of a suggestion but more of a question: I have a program that layouts glyphs from fonts to display on the screen. This all works great until I try to print, because some printers will substitute Read More...
Posted Tuesday, July 11, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

The PUA isn't complex enough

Bob Richmond asks in the Suggestion Box: UniScribe, Opentype, Unicode versions, and the PUA As I understand it, Uniscribe divides text into runs and applies OpenType features on a script specific basis. If the script is unknown (for instance when characters Read More...
Posted Monday, July 10, 2006 7:52 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

It's gonna be Lincicome vs. Inkster

And, as I predicted, it is Brittany and Juli in the finale this afternoon.... :-) Brittany Lincicome was up by one on the 19th hole -- which means one hole of sudden death, beating out Lorena Ochoa. Juli Inkster, on the other hand was up by four on the Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 09, 2006 11:33 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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All about yesterday

(Not too much technical in this post!) This weekend, I have been in Cleveland, where my family was celebrating the 90th birthday of my grandmother. Last night a bunch of us went to Fleming's and had a meal that would have put Ruth's Chris Steak House Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 09, 2006 6:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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The fallacy of comparing out of context

Perhaps you have heard of the Fallacy of quoting out of context, where support for an argument is produced by incompletely quoting a source -- where the incompleteness alters or changes the meaning. (for more info, see the Wikipedia article about the Read More...
Posted Sunday, July 09, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

They could be a little shorter

I talked about them a bit in the post Size matters (when it comes to day names, at least) . They are known as the 'shortest day names' and are retreived by calling GetLocaleInfo with one of the LOCALE_SHORTESTDAYNAME# LCTYPE constants. Now if you look Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 08, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Avoiding the cognitive fake out

At the beginning of this year, I got a note via the Contacting Michael... link from a guy named Brent: I just read the entirety of your sclerosis-related postings, and I wanted to thank you. Last week, two days before Christmas, a neurologist gave me Read More...
Posted Saturday, July 08, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Can you handle tfeL-ot-thgiR Scripts?

An article that anyone who ever thinks about right-to-left scripts can be seen in IEBlog, it is entitled Displaying tfeL-ot-thgiR Scripts - Can your computer handle it? Of course if you read this blog I'm always assuming that you have complex script support Read More...
Posted Friday, July 07, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Results of the 'Time Zone Scenario Feedback' feared

Over on the BCLTeam blog , Anthony Moore has posted Time Zone Scenario Feedback Wanted . Now I have mentioned before in connection with this hole issue about how Time zones make me cringe . As I look at the potential list of features that Anthony has Read More...
Posted Friday, July 07, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

My take on the "interview" question

Seems like everyone wants a piece of Jason's interview question : Two MIT math graduates bump into each other at Fairway on the upper west side. They hadn't seen each other in over 20 years. The first grad says to the second: "How have you been?" Second: Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 06, 2006 11:42 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments
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Don't send me the layout that can launch 1000 ships

Mahesh asks via the Contacting Michael... link: I have a great patent on an easy to use Indian Language keyboard. The entity that acquires this patent will dominate the Indian market for decades. I'll be honest -- I did not read any further than this Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 06, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Not technically wrong

Sergei asks via the Contacting Michael... link: Hello, Michael! I have a question for you about Unicode. The MSDN article Surrogates and Supplementary Characters contains some (I think) inaccurate information: Naturally, most code points beyond the BMP Read More...
Posted Thursday, July 06, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Custom code pages?

There is an old expression about a person being like a dog with a bone -- meaning that they really want to keep at something in particular, and they don't want to let it go. We have something similar here in this blog , and it is regular reader Ivan Petrov, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 05, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

The one with all of the language info

Back when I posted about the Punjabi and Telugu Language Interface Packs ( It's not Telugu [తెలుగు] Tubbies (and it's certainly not Punjabi [ਪੰਜਾਬੀ] Tubbies!) ) I got some interesting comments, like one from Amar : Dude! you know lot about Indian Languages. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 05, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments