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October 2006 - Posts

"àèìòù" < "äëïöü" but "àèìòù " > "äëïöü"

You may remember my post I need my SPACE, symbolically speaking from this past March. There are some interesting consequences of this behavior, which I thought I would talk about a bit further since they have been the subject of several recent bug reports.... Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 31, 2006 1:37 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Mapudungun is not a map to a dungeon

I am wracking my brains over here in SIAO Plaza. It was easy enough to come up with interesting titles talking about LIPs for اردو , Inuktitut , മലയാളം , Qhichwa Simi , فارسی , isiZulu , ಕನ್ನಡ , नेपाली , Afrikaans , कोंकणी , Setswana , বাংলা , తెలుగు Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 31, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

If you are more sensitive, you'll pick up on more problems

(this post is not about relationship advice!) Regular reader Dean Harding pointed out a few days ago when I talked about When collations collide? : Yeah, this is a real problem when you're developing an application that can be installed on somebody else's Read More...
Posted Monday, October 30, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Semper ubi sub ubi while doing translation badly

It was a few years back that Julie and Cathy were laughing about the Latin phrase Semper ubi sub ubi , meaning "Always wear underwear." Or I suppose one could take the inverse, Joey Tribbianiesque approach and say Nunquam ubi sub ubi (meaning "never wear Read More...
Posted Monday, October 30, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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SQL Server: compatibility collations vs. Window collations

The other day when I talked about When collations collide , John Ingres commented : We've been looking at the implications of moving our database from SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_xxxx to Latin1_General_xxx since it is the recommended practice to use Windows Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 29, 2006 12:47 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Why don't the keyboards select themselves when you install them?

Keith asks via the Contacting Michael link: I have been using MKLC for some time now and I have a question about it. It has been at times hard to explain to my users how to use the keyboards after running setup. Is there a way to make that automatic? Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 29, 2006 2:10 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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You can just byte me

Evan asked in one the many programming aliases: Hi: Anyone knows why there are 3 extra characters added to the XML file saved via XmlDocument? I viewed the file from a hex editor and found 3 characters (0xEF 0xBB 0xBF) are added to the XML file saved. Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 28, 2006 1:35 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

for(int iMoonTrip = 0; iMoonTrip == 0; iMoonTrip++)

Figured I should get some Hungarian notation involved if I was going to post about Charles Simonyi's efforts to be the first nerd in space ! If you are thinking that the code in the title is a silly and wasteful way to run a loop one time, I'll just point Read More...
Posted Friday, October 27, 2006 2:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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When collations collide?

Praveen asks in one of the SQL Server aliases in Microsoft a question about an issue that us not very well understood: Hi Let me know if this is not a appropriate question for this DL. My Sql Server (2005) has case sensitivity turned on. I create a database Read More...
Posted Friday, October 27, 2006 12:03 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

'Managing' [List] Separator Anxiety

Now I have praised the folks in GIFT Ireland in the past, like in this post and also this one , for example. But when you are not talking to someone every day, you sometimes forget they are there. Luckily, sometimes they find a way to remind you that Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 26, 2006 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

It feels good to help others, doesn't it?

Last Christmas, a man named Byron had a problem: Due to an unfortunate and marriage-threatening miscommunication, I have an Xtra Xbox 360 that appeared under a tree this morning (magical video-game elves in the forest or something). Before we return one Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 26, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Out of [implied] range

The question was something like: I have a japnese OS and japnese .net installed on it. The DateTime format is set to gregorian calendar in japnese and when I execute the following piece of code I am getting an argumentoutofrange exception. Any idea what Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 25, 2006 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

It is a challenge to make ClearType irrelevant

DPI (dots per inch) which I have discussed before previously ) has two entirely different and somewhat-at-odds uses. It can Increase the apparent sizes of fonts on the screen without modifying the applications using the fonts, or Increase the sharpness Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 25, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

Sometimes in the future 'ANSI' is really going to be unsupported!

The question to the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup was simple enough: TITLE : RegLoadMUIString Vista P Invoke Hello, I'm trying to get an MUI string out of the registry in display friendly format. From what I've read, strings Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 24, 2006 12:44 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Typos, the 5th Amendment, the 25th Amendment, and Language Log already did it!

So old friend Andrea IM'ed me last night (yes, that Andrea). She had apparently been watching West Wing reruns on Bravo, and found something that caught her eye.... The conversation went exactly like I type below as I copied it from the IM window, with Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 24, 2006 12:07 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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We missed International Caps Lock Day! :-(

Both Simon Daniels and MVP Mihai Nita have pointed me toward http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/22/happy-international-caps-lock-day/ which talks about how yesterday was International Caps Lock Day. I know I have many fans of the CAPS LOCK key (as well as Read More...
Posted Monday, October 23, 2006 11:08 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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When _wcsnicmp can't hack it, CompareStringW delivers

The question that nikos asked in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup was: This occurs within code that searches text within files If the text file (UTF-8) contains a bulgarian P (capital) and I try to match it with a lowercase Read More...
Posted Monday, October 23, 2006 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

How far will 5% coverage get you?

In the USA, when you buy a new car, the car always has a piece of paper attached to it, and that piece is paper lists the mile per gallon both in city driving and highway driving. The mechanism by which this information is calculated is firmly set in Read More...
Posted Monday, October 23, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Relaping/Remitting ≈ it's over/maybe it isn't?

(this post inspired by someone who recently changed their whole life around just to change it back a few months later, for the very reasons this post talks about. I don't think she even knows this blog exists, but at least one or two of the people who Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 22, 2006 9:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Making your own LIP?

Reader Charles Bocock asks: Is there any way for developers to build and distribute their own LIP or MUI for Windows XP? This is a commonly asked question, believe it or not. And it certainly fits in with the whole opening it all up and getting out of Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 22, 2006 4:28 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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It is Clear[Type] how the quality is being managed

Lots of people have pointed out both before and after I did in When a user sets something. please assume they meant it how unfortunate it is that so many different applications and processes turn on ClearType whether the user wants it on or not. Well, Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 22, 2006 12:02 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

Will your laptop battery explode? Check the number and maybe you'll recall....

Ok, we are now a few months into the huge battery recall that is affecting Dell, Apple, and other companies that bought battery cells from Sony that proved to have a fire hazard associated with them. The numbers are staggering, with an estimated 4.1 million Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 21, 2006 7:17 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Is Font.FontFamily localized?

Michael (a different Michael, not me) asks: Is Font.FontFamily localized? We are doing string comparisons and wanted to use the correct culture info (CurrentCulture, CurrentUICulture, etc). Some here will recall that I talked about part of the issue last Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 21, 2006 2:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

It might be getting a little less embarrassing

So I saw Mark Russinovich do a presentation yesterday. It was about User Access Control in Vista. I arrived a few minutes earlier than I might have normally, but this was intentional since when I was at his talk last week it was standing room only and Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 21, 2006 1:36 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Complex string mapping

So, the note I got the other day was: Hi Michael, This is Chris 􏰁􏰁􏰁􏰁􏰁􏰁, we met at lunch at the Unicode conference in San Francisco some months back. ... I have a new question and judging from your blog, you might have the answer to this one as well. Read More...
Posted Friday, October 20, 2006 7:03 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments
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Over One Million Served!

Maybe someone sent mail out and I missed it. Maybe Julie sent email to people about it and I missed that too. But the cool news is that there are now over one million installed copies of Windows XP Starter Edition out there, and I found it quite fascinating Read More...
Posted Friday, October 20, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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'Please email answers to me directly as I am not yet on this alias'

I swear when I saw Raymond's post No good deed goes unpunished, part 2 earlier today I almost ruined a keyboard since I had a mouthful of Limonata at the time. I get the same problem a bit, though not nearly as much as he does (he answers a lot more mail Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 19, 2006 11:50 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Sad? You can sit at your console and console yourself by putting Consolas in your console

Several people have asked me about using Consolas in CMD. Why isn't it in the list automatically, if they have the font, some of them have wondered.... The info on the requirements for a font to appear in the console on Windows are in the article Necessary Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 19, 2006 12:34 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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IE7 exposes a flaw in Apache's support of basic language filtering described in RFC 4647

Richard Ishida is concerned, as his I think IE7 is going to break language negotiation on many servers post indicates. I do disagree with his conclusion, however. Clearly, a bunch of people will blame Internet Explorer 7.0, just as he did. But that is Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 18, 2006 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

What do Shanghai and Taipei have in common? Mahjongg solitaire!

Yesterday, Norman Diamond posted (in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup, which more and more often has been a home to non-programming topics): Here's how to do I18N the Vista way. Some mahjong tiles that are made for export Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 18, 2006 9:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Mangal mangle?

The question from Adolf went something like this (in the middle of an unrelated question): Another request, please: I wrote you all about two years ago concerning using a different system font when typing the north Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 18, 2006 1:07 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

The 'T' is tough to figure out

Amazing the arguments people can have in the comments of blog posts, isn't it? I was reminded of this earlier today in looking at the comments from Raymond 's post What does the letter "T" in LPTSTR stand for? The thing I love to keep in mind is that, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 17, 2006 10:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

The version of App Locale that runs on Vista?

The question that Eiji asked me was simple enough: Do you know the apploc version that supports Vista? I got the question from Internal user (who needs it for Vista selfhosting on en-us and run Japanese ANSI apps with en system locale). I tried the existing Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 17, 2006 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 21 Comments

MSDN Magazine x 7

Fellow Technical Lead Stephen Toub posted about the coolest thing earlier today in his MSDN Magazine in 7 languages! You can look at the November issue in any of the following language versions: English German Spanish French Portuguese Russian Chinese Read More...
Posted Monday, October 16, 2006 8:16 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Loving blog post titles after uninstall breaks my Dell with winlogon worm

This post is not actually about Danny Sullivan's post (the blogosphere has already covered his post plenty!). It is actually about the title of the post: Hating Microsoft After Update Breaks My Computer With svchost.exe Error By the time you reach the Read More...
Posted Monday, October 16, 2006 7:20 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Compatibility is inconsistent; consistency is not compatible...

There are times that no matter what we do with a particular behavior at Microsoft, there will be somebody, somewhere who will find the behavior to be incredibly non-intuitive and they will consider it to be a bug. I mean it drives lots of .NET developers Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 15, 2006 3:42 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Not everything you might want out of a GetDateFormatEx, but think of it as a fixer-upper

Some may remember when I asked the question Why doesn't GetDateFormat take a CALID? Some will recall when I pointed out how even ignoring the CALID issue, They make 'em smarter than GetDateFormat . Some will have vague recollections of the updated GetDateFormat Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 15, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Understanding (and explaining) why English is everywhere

I have mentioned Mike Williams once or twice in previous posts . He actually used to work for Microsoft -- first in Australia where he helped bring out Pocket Access for CE 2.0 and then in Redmond he worked on the Access PM team. The latter is where I Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 14, 2006 9:20 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Not for use on unexplained calf pain

Back in the beginning of August when I was talking about how Google doesn't seem to get blogs , at the end of the post I talked about the phrase not for use on unexplained calf pain. I even hypothesized that the article might throw off the balance of Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 14, 2006 12:07 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

On losing non-permanent skills

I was watching the movie Ice Princess , which is I suppose a form of guilty pleasure for me (watching a movie that I know has technical flaws even before I am told about them, and which I know is tugging at heart strings and manipulating me as I am watching Read More...
Posted Friday, October 13, 2006 11:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Local experiences in Norway: the Nynorsk LIP!

Ah yes, it has happened again. As we all knew, it could not end with اردو , Inuktitut , മലയാളം , Qhichwa Simi , فارسی , isiZulu , ಕನ್ನಡ , नेपाली , Afrikaans , कोंकणी , Setswana , বাংলা , తెలుగు , ਪੰਜਾਬੀ , Lëtzebuergisch , and татарча , now could it? Norwegian's Read More...
Posted Friday, October 13, 2006 1:47 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

It's LIFO (last-in, first-out) in Hebrew

You may remember when I posted this last March about Traditional versus modern sorts , specifically talking about two different practices used for the sorting of Jamo -- one used in North Korea and the other in South Korea. And how both had a reasonable Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 12, 2006 12:56 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Who is the Hacek Girl?

I do manage to get a lot of random email (between my two main accounts, several hundred a day, not including spam). Like just the other day, I got a question from someone: Our customer hit an issue in Slovak collation where 'c' and 'č' compared differently Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 12, 2006 12:38 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

You got your latins in my hebrew! No, you got your hebrew in my latins!

Oren Novotny asks: When will Segoe UI have support for Hebrew characters? This is important because Outlook 2007 uses Segoe UI as its main font. The problem is that emails with Hebrew in the subjects and sender's name come up with ??? instead of the character Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 11, 2006 11:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Why can't the CP_ACP be UTF-8?

Bart van der Werf asks: I was working on getting a 8bit string application ready for other languages and i was suprised to see that the ACP (Ansi Codepage) character encoding (the default encoding for 8bit strings in windows) couldn't accept utf8 as a Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 11, 2006 8:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

The fonts directory is freaking huge in Vista

David (who is on the Vista beta) notes: Forgive my ignorance, but anyone else notice that \windows\fonts is about 308 megs in size?. Why are some fonts like 10 megs or bigger, are they language fonts? I understand that .TTC are font collection, but even Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 10, 2006 9:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Don't cry for me [for 24 hours] Argentina....

(Apologies to Andrew Lloyd Weber for my post title!) Carlos Alloatti asked right in the Suggestion Box: This is not actually a topic sugestion, but a request. How about in Vista you (MS) get it right and set the time Format for Argentina to the 24 Hs Read More...
Posted Monday, October 09, 2006 8:43 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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What time is it, Mr. Blog?

You can probably ignore this post in its entirety -- it is an experiment to see how screwed up the dates and times related to posts are at the moment. I'll be updating it with the actual times that occur in the minute or two after it posts. Time entered Read More...
Posted Monday, October 09, 2006 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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Where the hell did Replacement Locales come from?

Not too long ago, I was talking to a developer who was looking at an issue with Replacement Locales on Windows who pointed out that they simply saw no real purpose for them (the actual language was a bit more raw then that, but it was not terribly original Read More...
Posted Monday, October 09, 2006 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

The return of double secret Unicode!

Greg Marmalard : You're talking about Visual Basic, sir. Dean Vernon Wormer : Of course I'm talking about Visual Basic, you twerp! This applicatiion, it's gonna be different. This year we're gonna take the binary by its PDB and convert those strings into Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 08, 2006 2:23 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Stuffing the ballot box?

No, this post is not about politics. :-) It all happened in the late morning, yesterday. Robert Howard of Telligent had pointed out the Tags page on blogs.msdn.com , and I took a look at it (even broke my rule about clicking in links in random email!). Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 08, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

GetStringTypeW almost understands the Bidirectional Algorithm

Since we're gonna talk about bidirectional text, it makes sense to start with UAX #9 (The Bidirectional Algorithm) . Specifically, there is a table in there that has all of the bidirectional character types : Table 3-7. Bidirectional Character Types Category Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 07, 2006 9:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Pimping your Brazilian keyboard

Can we actually talk about pimping our Brazilian keyboards with Carnival not happening for so many months? :-) The other day when I helped Olivier with his question (well a part of it, at least) and Emerson's earlier identical question in In case you Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 07, 2006 12:09 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

If you hate the CAPS LOCK key, please read this!

Some of you who are regular readers (an odd term, since I tend to consider anyone who reads this blog with any kind of consistency to actually be somewhat ir regular!) may recall how I have talked about the latent hatred that some people have in relation Read More...
Posted Friday, October 06, 2006 3:53 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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Random irreverent thoughts about the Ultimate Fallback

Last night on TBS was an old Friends episode, The One With the Ultimate Fighting Champion. In it, Pete proved himself to be quite inadequate as the 'Ultimate Fighting Champion.' I could not help but be amused by the timing (since I was planning to do Read More...
Posted Friday, October 06, 2006 4:54 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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