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November 2006 - Posts

It may not be special, but 3 is a *magic* number, dammit!

So on Tuesday, Eric Lippert posted about how Every Number Is Special In Its Own Special Way . Now everyone over there geeked out about proving that all numbers are special, as one might expect. But as soon as I saw the title, I knew what popped in my Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 30, 2006 4:30 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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So when is Esperanto coming? (short version)

Well, depends on how fast you can create it with the Microsoft Locale Builder ! But do be sure to let us know that work is proceeding. We're kind of tired of waiting, too! (longer version here ) This post brought to you by ䷲ ( U+4df2 , a.k.a. HEXAGRAM Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 30, 2006 7:32 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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So when is Esperanto coming?

Not entirely on topic of my prior post Subsets of subsets of subsets of subsets of subsets , but Bertilo Wennergren asked in a comment to that post: So when are you going to add an Esperanto locale? There are actually quite a few people using Esperanto Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 30, 2006 4:17 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

Subsets of subsets of subsets of subsets of subsets

The big master list of locales that Microsoft has assigned LCID values for is quite large and even includes ones like Yiddish (0x043d) that are unlikely to be added to the Windows locale list any times soon. There is a subset of that big list, the official Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:26 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Where'd *that* language come from?

Now I have talked in the past about how the international settings of other accounts on the system can affect settings such as the keyboard list in the logon dialog and the actual setting of MS Shell Dlg and DEFAULT_GUI_FONT . The truth is that these Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 29, 2006 2:28 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Your layout (in all likelihood) bores me

Now if I were Rory , I might try to take the fact in the title, combine it with some girlfriends of the past who were actually in a position and/or profession to have photographic layouts of themselves done as part of their career, and move into an extended Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 28, 2006 11:27 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments
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When you ask how long it is, keep in mind that some guys may exaggerate their answer

A common question someone might have if they need to allocate a buffer is How much space do I need to allocate? The question seems simple enough to ask, right? Of course there are two different possible answers to the question when one is dealing with Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 28, 2006 11:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Any database developers reading this?

Attention all database developers out there! I have been somewhat dismayed at getting so few comments after I posted Wild[card] thing, You make my CHAR sing . Is this really what people expect out of wildcards? Is there really so little interest in seeing Read More...
Posted Monday, November 27, 2006 7:56 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Judge not one area by performance in another?

So I was kind of re-reading DeMille's The General's Daughter yesterday. I think the book goes best if you keep in mind Madeleine Stowe as Sara Sunhill and forget about John Travolta as Paul Brenner. The movie is kind of a distraction, otherwise. Plus Read More...
Posted Monday, November 27, 2006 4:10 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Strategic avoidance of stepping in a CrapFest

First I read Joel's Choices = Headaches . And then I read his follow-up ( How many Microsofties does it take to implement the Off menu? ) and of course the link to Moishe Lettvin's The Windows Shutdown CrapFest . And I think about a project I am involved Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 26, 2006 1:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Math in Unicode is hard. So let's have Murray make it easier!

I have talked about math in Unicode before, like in For those who enjoy mathematics (or, 'Also new in Vista') . I figured it is only fair to point out that Murray Sargent, who I mentioned in that post, has a blog, and that it is on the list of blogs I Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 26, 2006 9:42 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Punctuation... now, isn't that SPECIAL [weights] ?

Well, apologies to Dana Carvey and all, but actually, it isn't! The other day when I talked about The problem of string comparisons, WORD sorts, and the minus that is treated like the hyphen , Oleg was thinking about the documentation for sort keys in Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 25, 2006 11:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Even if they aren't talking international, at least they aren't stomping international!

Now I am not a stranger to keyboard shortcuts -- in fact if you look at posts like these , you might think its obvious that I have been talking abiut best practices surrounding shortcuts as they relate to languge and a they relate to keyboards off and Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 25, 2006 8:37 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

No comment, other than

No comment about this , other than that (and to agree with Michen's point that no good deed goes unpunished). Read More...
Posted Friday, November 24, 2006 1:20 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Whither U+0081?

Bart asks in the Suggestion Box: Why does WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, accept 0x0081 and turns it into 0x81 even though the acp is cp1252 and 0x81 is not defined ? http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/sbcs/1252.mspx These tables could be thought Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 23, 2006 10:46 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Fixing the sample code for getting ELK cultures on other platforms

Sometimes one blog post leads to something that explains a problem someone was seeing with another blog post. For example. take Sample code for getting ELK cultures on other platforms , which was based on ELK cultures for other platforms . There was a Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 22, 2006 5:46 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

That problem with MSKLC created layouts and Vista, again

Over in the Suggestion Box, Dejan Ristanovic asks: Please help users of your package to create keyboard leyouts in Vista. I had an old DLL file - keyboard leyout that worked in Windows 2000/XP, now it does not work under Vista. I tried creating a new Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 22, 2006 12:32 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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About that second presentation I did

So, it's now over and tomorrow I am flying back to Redmond. The talks were done last Thursday at IUC #30 and I even posted about some of the exciting things I mentioned in the keyboard presentation . But interestingly, of the two: Keyboards on Win32: Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 21, 2006 11:36 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Putting the *backward* in backward compatibility

There have been many times that I have championed backward compatibility. Or maybe it's backward s compatibility? Anyone from Language Log want to chime in on which one is right? :-) Anyway, there have been many times I have championed backward[s] compatibility Read More...
Posted Monday, November 20, 2006 7:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

No byte order marks when using encodings in StreamWriters?

Sometimes the convenient shortcuts blind us to the functionality we actually need, forcing us to work a bit harder than we have to. Like when David asked not too long ago: There are a handful of Encodings that have a preamble (byte order marks that get Read More...
Posted Monday, November 20, 2006 2:40 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Another satisfied customer!

A long, long time ago in a blog post far away (well, okay, I mean What is my locale? Which locale do you mean? from February of 2005), reader Jonathan Payne had some less-than-happy thoughts about the locale setup in XP or those in England and the potential Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 19, 2006 5:53 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Where'd *that* string come from?

Remember when I posted about Was the name ever really onghornlay? I noticed that Environment.OSVersion.ToString() was returning Microsoft Windows NT 6.0.6000.0 rather than anything about either Longhorn or Vista. I guess someone forgot to tell the .NET Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 19, 2006 4:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Even the characters with no weight can be given weight in their own special way

Coming soon to the European Union: Bulgaria and Romania! These are a couple of important events and have led to updates of the Times New Roman and Arial fonts in the European Union Expansion Font Update (a WGA download). I will pine for Romanian and Bulgarian Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 19, 2006 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

'Son, your TextBox is writing checks that your EDIT control can't cash'

In yesterday's Read-only, you say? Read-only to whom? , I ignored one of the important underlying issues even after explicitly mentioning its role in the disconnect between what someone might think the TextBox.ReadOnly property might do and what it actually, Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 19, 2006 6:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Read-only, you say? Read-only to whom?

Rick asks: We have an application written in .NET 2. In one of our controls, we use a TextBox control that’s read-only. When run on XP, the default right-click context menu for the TextBox shows the expected Cut/Copy/Paste items with Copy being the only Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 18, 2006 11:49 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

What happened on Thursday morning?

In previous years, the Internationalization and Unicode Conference has been a place where important upcoming projects/products got announced. For example, there was the 18th IUC in Hong Kong where Cathy Wissink and I snuck in a last minute presentation Read More...
Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 6:30 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Korean + French == ????

I was having a conversation with someone at the 30th Internationalization and Unicode Conference earlier today, and I realized after thinking about design consequences beyond his questions that I found a design flaw. It was one of those cool kind of issues Read More...
Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 5:24 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

The problem of string comparisons, WORD sorts, and the minus that is treated like the hyphen

William Hooper pointed me to an interesting bug report: Help Strings in .NET not always transisitve!!!!!! We need someone to help us!!!!!! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/viewfeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=236900&wa=wsignin1.0&siteid=210 Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 16, 2006 4:14 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

It seems that discrimination is the official policy at the WA Dept. of Licensing

So recently the time came to renew my driver's license. Happens for everyone, and there is only so much a person can do with extensions and such unless one is out of state for extended periods.... Anyway, I wanted to take care of it before heading out Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 14, 2006 1:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments
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Maybe it is the name that is 'Undesirable' ?

This last May, I talked about Keeping out the undesirables and talked about how the IsNLSDefinedString function took some extra conditions that it required in order to consider a string to be defined by its standards (in that case, no PUA and no unpaired Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 12, 2006 2:53 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

If I wasn't watching her blog, could you really claim I was filtering the list of blogs I read?

(About 2-5 times a week, I think of a pun that I go down the hall and mention to Judy and Carolyn on the typograhy team. My goal is usually to inspire a scroan, though they are used to it now so I seldom get one these days. But the title of this post Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 12, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Keeping out more of the undesirables

Remember my posts about stripping diacritics using normalization? Well, Feroze does. Just the other day he asked me: I had spoke to you a couple of months ago, about normalizing a string to remove diacritics, and to expand some ligatures. You had pointed Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 11, 2006 9:36 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Some people feel really insecure about the size of their [string] members

Developer Andrew Arnott asks: Michael, David Kline recommended I forward my question on to you. If you have time to point me at the appropriate Windows API I’d surely appreciate it. Michael Howard (Writing Secure Code) and this blog both suggest that Read More...
Posted Friday, November 10, 2006 3:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

You wonder if like Vista supports custom locales? Fer shur!

I asked Shawn if he could include the Valley Girl locale in his collection of some custom locale samples . And he did, you can check it out. :-) The origin of this locale and its hilarious underlying data predates custom locales and custom cultures; it Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 09, 2006 4:28 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Keeping it simple while working on MSKLC

There are lots of times that the code underneath the UI is made a bit more complicated to make the user experience simpler. Perhaps the most recognizable example of this is seen in the Save / Save As... functionality in most applications. Now Save As... Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 08, 2006 9:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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What the hell is MFCENU.DLL?

Now we saw the other day in MFC + Spanish version of Windows = Oops! one of the costs of MFC's localized DLL model that depends on the GetLocaleInfo LOCALE_SABBREVLANGNAME for the name of the satellite DLL to use, a problem that adds a very interesting Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 08, 2006 1:23 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

When it comes to duration, the little things can mean a lot

At the recent MVP Webcast that I did, one of the viewers (I want to say it was Mike Dunn?) asked what the difference was between the (new in Vista) GetDurationFormat and StringFromTimeInterval. At the time, my answer was easy -- I know what the former Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 07, 2006 2:20 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

How ConvertDefaultLocale sorta broke backward compatibility in Vista, and why

The whole situation reminded me of some dialog from a West Wing episode, the one where some politico was complaining to President Josiah Bartlett about women wanting equal opportunities in athletics. When Jed pointed out that Title IX was passed thirty Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 07, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Who owns English, exactly?

Mark Liberman's recent Language Log post English in China had me thinking about my own Uighur or Uyghur? from this last July, and also the more recent LOCALE_SABBREVLANGNAME is more than just an ISO-639 code . Specifically, there was a comment from teklimakan Read More...
Posted Monday, November 06, 2006 12:06 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Rory on the 'Hi. I'm a Mac' ads

Not to bash Apple or anything, but I think Rory is spot on with his Hi. I'm a user, and I'm sick of these effing ads . It was funny the first few times, but now it is just getting stupid.... At this point, I think they are basically subliminal Vista ads Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 05, 2006 9:25 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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It's not dead, it's just sleeping

Live from Romania, Christian Secară asks: Hi Michael, The keyboard layouts here are scheduled for an update, or are forgotten ? As you may guess, I am referring specially to the Romanian layouts :) Best wishes, Cristi Now I know one of the reasons that Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 05, 2006 1:15 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

On Thokks who don't give a Frigg, under the mistletoe

I was thinking about Balder yesterday. Balder is a fascinating character in Norse mythology, and a good description of the most important legend surrounding him can be seen here : Apart from this gushing description Balder is known primarily for the myth Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 04, 2006 1:55 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Identifying illegal characters before they cross the border?

Developer Lei Tan asked a question that comes up fairly often these days: Is there a SDK document to tell what characters are not valid for file name, i.e., cannot be used in APIs to create directory, file, etc. When I try to rename a file to, say “<”, Read More...
Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 2:32 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Concatenating display names correctly?

Paul's question to the alias: Personal names in Chinese, unlike Western names, present the family/clan name first. Unlike other instances where this occurs, it is standard practice in English to also present the family name first (for example, Mao Zedong, Read More...
Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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MFC + Spanish version of Windows = Oops!

Kurt's question was straightforward enough: Hi, Calling GetLocaleInfo on English Windows XP SP2 Professional and passing in the International Spanish LCID 3082 produces "ESN", however called on Spanish Windows XP SP2 Professional the result is "ES". GetLocaleInfo(3082, Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 02, 2006 3:43 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Sometimes Microsoft is cooler than Apple (no matter what the Apple commercials say!)

Christoph Päper asks: Considering heterogeneous networks (OS-wise), wouldn’t it be benefical if MSKLC could export to, say, XML files conforming (as much as possible) to Apple’s keyboard DTD as described in http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2056.html? Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 02, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments
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Where will Michael be?

Okay, some upcoming [restricted and non-restricted access] talks for people who enjoy my blather here and want to see if it is as much fun in person! Thursday, November 2nd (2:30pm-4:00pm PT) -- for Microsoft MVPs only! Vista Internationalization Update Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 01, 2006 6:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

If you add enough characters to a sort, intuitive distinction can suffer

I have decided that I need to channel the spirit of the father of comedian of Emo Phillips and juxtapose a few concepts that have been going on in this blog for the last few years. :-) First, near the beginning of the blog in November of 2004, I explained Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 01, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
 
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