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September 2007 - Posts

First the music, then the lyrics -- and make it rhyme!

The question I received the other day by email: This is probably not your kind of question, but it has to do with music and with language so I decided it would be worth a try. Why do song lyrics always have to rhyme when poetry doesn't? Well, it is the Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 29, 2007 1:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Upgrade no machine[ to Vista] before its (or your) time

Years ago, I worked on the Access team. Even though the world had moved to NT4 Server at the time, one of the servers with build shares ran NT 3.51 back then, and it did so even once Windows 2000 Server builds were available and most machines were being Read More...
Posted Friday, September 28, 2007 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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I didn't write it, sorry!

IDisposable asked via the Suggestion Box: Regarding this very helpful KB page, http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;939949 Why, OH DEAR WHY, couldn't those CopyCulture stubs been automatic? The only ones that could EVER be unsafe are Read More...
Posted Friday, September 28, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Wouldn't you bet, Fret (aka You've got 50 ways to fix your characters)

Via the Contact link, 'Fret' comments: I've been debugging why my app doesn't accept 0x0218 and 0x021B characters from the keyboard on Vista. You say it's not a windows bug. What I'm seeing in the debugger is that first I get a WM_KEYDOWN, which I translate Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 27, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Don't look directly at the 951 code page if you can avoid it

K. M. Leung asks over the Suggestion Box: Big5 Unicode conversion in .net 2.0. I have read your article "Kowloon 951" and Ji Cheng's question. I know that there are a couple of ways to twist .net 2.0's encoding, such as changing the EncoderFallback. What Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 27, 2007 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Where does the time go? And when I said where, I meant when?

The question I was asked via the Comment link by William was: Very offtopic since this isn't an internationalization question, but I see you have answered questions about time zones before. So maybe you can answer mine. Why does the time change happen Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 27, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

If you're reading this as soon as it's live, you're not only wasting your time but you might not have been watching the Indians beat the Mariners

Nothing technical and if you enjoy any of what I usually write about then I doubt this will interest you. Truly, you will probably want to skip.... One never knows when I'll write something in this blog about sports -- it is pretty rare and kind of unusual Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 26, 2007 11:46 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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It is better when geopolitical issues turn out to not be a Thorn in one's side

There are many out there who think I am some sort of paid shill for Microsoft, but I am not. I will admit that posts like How to avoid stepping in it help these people prove their point, since I felt free to poke a bit of fun at Google for making a bit Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 26, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Some random off-topic, non-technical, and generally obnoxious observations from a man on vacation (aka A largely symbolic gesture)

New reader William Overington asked over in the Suggestion Box: In various recent articles in your blog you have mentioned lots of postings and discussions about the encoding of emoji and emoticons in Unicode. Yet those postings are not in the Unicode Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 26, 2007 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

What's Mac 2008 got, you wonder?

Regular reader Tom asks: I see the new Office for Mac will have 3 additional localizations, which is great. But how about input/display support for Arabic, Hebrew, and Devanagari -- any hope of seeing that? Regards, Tom To be honest, I wish I knew. I Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 26, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

They say 'No news is good news', right? Unfortunately, here is some news

Not too long ago, Ivan Petrov had a banner day in the Suggestion Box (I answered two other questions from that day here and here ). His very first question was about something slightly different: Hi Michael :-) Did you know something about any future Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 25, 2007 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Also *not* new in Vista SP1 -- Bulgarian keyboard layouts

After mentioning this issue, regular reader Ivan Petrov asked over in the Suggestion Box: Hi Michael, Is Windows Vista SP1 going to add support for the Traditional (Legacy) Bulgarian PHONETIC Keyboard Layout? Regards, Ivan. Kind of the same answer as Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 25, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments
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*Not* new in Vista SP1 -- the Add font dialog....

Regular reader Ivan Petrov asked over in the Suggestion Box: Hi Michael :-) Are there going to be any changes in Vista SP1 to the UI of the Add font dialog? Regards, Ivan. Sorry Ivan, Vista SP1 has a very hardcore philosophical principle -- no features, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 25, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Documented, schmockumented! It's still kind of cool....

(No, this post is not about my social life or anything related to it, though I suppose there may have been times the title might have been partially descriptive 1 ; this is a technical post and also a world premiere discussion of an obscure but accidentally Read More...
Posted Monday, September 24, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 11 (aka It's not like ideographic sorts were developed idiopathically)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Part 1: The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic Part 2: The string that won? Didn't have a mark on him! Part 3: Should you let a string make Read More...
Posted Monday, September 24, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

The lasting effects of interns, aka Can you fix my Vista install, aka Can they blow the Shofar, aka I should have split up this post!

Last week I was talking with Cathy about my post from late last month -- Every character has a story #29: U+1000^H^H^H^H0f40, (TIBETAN or MYANMAR LETTER KA, depending on when you ask) -- and she pointed out that although I did not specifically name her Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 23, 2007 8:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Docs can whet SiaO's appetite, but where's the blog?

As I mentioned back in How do I feel about lstrcmpi? I think it blows.... , the Mac CFString stuff has some fascinating issues related to collation that I thought I'd chat about, with me owning a MacBook Pro and with Microsoft making Silverlight run on Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 23, 2007 3:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

If it isn't Unicode, it isn't ANY code!

Raymond makes a good point in What happens if you pass a source length greater than the actual string length? about the potential dangers of the NLS semantic for length parameters.... I make a similar point about the potential problems in Encoding APIs Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 23, 2007 2:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

[In/Out]laws can be a great news source (aka Maybe Alaska Air should sacrifice more goats?)

(With a title like that, you're expecting a technical topic???) So I was over at Faye's breaking fast and brother-in-law Zack shared a fun little news story with us care of Reuter's entitled Nepal airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god . Sister-out-law Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 23, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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DropDownWidth not dropped down with a localizable attribute?

The purpose of marking properties in WinForms as localizable is to make sure that properties that localizers would posisbly need to change can be exposed to them. All well and good, but it is easy to miss properties that are in retrospect obvious ommissions. Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 22, 2007 6:41 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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A high holiday that goes to 11

When visiting family in Cleveland over Yom Kippur, some interesting issues take place. They go to an orthodox congregation now, and the scooter question is a big one. Many of the prohibitions about work on the Sabbath apply to Yom Kippur, and even if Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 22, 2007 6:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 10 (aka I've kana wanted to start talking about Japanese)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Part 1: The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic Part 2: The string that won? Didn't have a mark on him! Part 3: Should you let a string make Read More...
Posted Friday, September 21, 2007 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

If you had gotten there first, you might have staked your claim too!

I was reading Raymond Chen's blog post Find the Flowers vs. Minesweeper which is a pointer to David Vray's post over on the Shell Blog entitled The UI design minefield - er... flower field?? and it got me thinking about the most recent version of a question Read More...
Posted Friday, September 21, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 9 (aka Not always transitive, but punctual and punctuating)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Part 1: The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic Part 2: The string that won? Didn't have a mark on him! Part 3: Should you let a string make Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 20, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Avoiding entitlement (aka Don't bother, it's okay)

Absopositively nothing technical whatsofreakingever. Over the last few months I have probably taken the bus more than any previous time in my life since the bus was an American Flyer taking me to Beachwood Middle School. I just found myself needing to Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 20, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Every character[ sequence] has a story #30: The SMILEY (a 25-year old story, in fact)

Given all of the blather about emoji and emoticons and symbols, the mail I got from Sergey earlier today puts in all in perspective. It had the following in it: Note the date and time, and when this post goes live. For more on Scott and Smiley lore, see Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 19, 2007 11:44 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Don't just delete registry keys!

The other day, someone from product support was working with a customer whose Add button on the Text Services and Input Languages dialog was grayed out. You know, the Add button in this dialog: It turns out this can only happen in some pretty catastrophic Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 19, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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Depending on when/where/who you ask, that character may not be your [c]type

The customer question was: The whole story is about saving in XML format foreign symbols – from time-to-time it fails for some of them. We found a way to bypass it by filtering them out with isprintable function. The problem was solved, but some of good Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 18, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 8 (aka You can often think of ignoring weights as a form of ignorance)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Part 1: The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic Part 2: The string that won? Didn't have a mark on him! Part 3: Should you let a string make Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 18, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 7 (aka You're very thin now, but I can still recognize you)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Part 1: The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic Part 2: The string that won? Didn't have a mark on him! Part 3: Should you let a string make Read More...
Posted Monday, September 17, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

The torrents of U+fffd (aka When security and conformance trump compatibility and reality)

(The purpose for the characters below should be apparent presently!) U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd U+fffd Read More...
Posted Monday, September 17, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

That's not German, is it? (aka This kind of thing happens a lot...)

So the other day when I had my default user locale set to Fijian.... I then was looking into another bug. That bug required me to set my user interface language to German. This kind of thing happens a lot, as I am sure you can imagine. :-) Anyway, it Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 16, 2007 8:41 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 6 (aka Relax, be calm, and deCOMPRESS if you are feeling out of sorts)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Part 1: The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic Part 2: The string that won? Didn't have a mark on him! Part 3: Should you let a string make Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 16, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Becoming part of the ANTI-social?

So these Zune remote controls are very useful, I will admit. But to use, you pretty much just need line of sight and nothing much else. You can scroll around someone else's Zune if they are nearby and switch the song they are listening to and such.... Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 16, 2007 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Perhaps they don't quite get it just yet, #2

After I posted Perhaps they don't quite get it just yet, #1 , I intended to get right back to it to post the follow-up.... But then a whole bunch of other things came up, and I got delayed. Sorry about that. :-) Anyway, for my test I went to that high Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 16, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Hindsight is 20/20 and DAGGER is U+2020, coincidence? (aka I miss emoji like the deserts miss the rain)

It was a [somewhat] innocent time. Just after the bulk of the Emoji-ficationary posts had done their worst, and had their way with the minds and hearts of so many who don't know what quite what to do with a symbols proposal since no symbolic gestures Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 15, 2007 10:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 5 (aka EXPANSIONing your horizons)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Part 1: The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic Part 2: The string that won? Didn't have a mark on him! Part 3: Should you let a string make Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 15, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

I'll feel better after I eat something? Well, maybe... or maybe not!

Nothing technical, you know how it goes.... There are certain restaurants where I have some dishes that are my favorites, and I pretty much order them any time I am there. Some people upon noticing this may claim that I am in a rut. But for me, it is Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 15, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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A&P of Sort Keys, part 4 (aka It isn't a race but let's make an EXCEPTION and cross the Finnish line)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Part 1: The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic Part 2: The string that won? Didn't have a mark on him! Part 3: Should you let a string make Read More...
Posted Friday, September 14, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

How do I feel about lstrcmpi? I think it blows....

(Negative assessment word ( blows ) chosen via a magic eight ball and the info in this post ) Benski asked: Michael - Ran into a weird problem in our product. I have no idea about what caused it, but I found the solution. In a lot of places in a cross-platform Read More...
Posted Friday, September 14, 2007 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Look at the shiny happy people laughing -- push and pull aside, they're beautiful

If you're looking for technical, you likely will not find it here in this post.... Anyhow, Andrea called a few nights ago. We ended up talking for a few hours, which might have been weird since it started at 2am, but I was up then anyway and it was mid-morning Read More...
Posted Friday, September 14, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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A&P of Sort Keys, part 3 (aka Should you let a string make it's case? If so, Y?)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Part 1: The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic Part 2: The string that won? Didn't have a mark on him! I had someone ask me what the A&P Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 13, 2007 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

Dr. Seuss does Unicode, aka HOP on POP [DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING]

It is my pleasure to present a little Seussian free verse sample from typography lead program manager Simon Daniels: A poem by Si, aged 37 ½ We like to hop We like to pop We like to hop and pop We don’t take direction well We don’t like Pop Directional Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 13, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 2 (aka The string that won? Didn't have a mark on him!)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Part 1: The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic Because the nature of comparisons is such that the essentially question one is asking is which Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 12, 2007 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Having your blog and posting to it, too?

Yesterday, the question that was asked was: In Windows Vista, why don’t we see any elevation prompt for non-admin users when UAC is disabled? One example is login as a non-admin, try to change date/time. If UAC is enabled, we see a prompt for entering Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 12, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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4400 (*not* 'The 4400')

Almost (though not quite) hearkening back to 'The 44' (*not* 'The 4400') , The 4400 is still an interesting television show, one that this post has nothing to do with, either. The other day I was researching something about Micronesia and Micronesian Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 11, 2007 6:53 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 1 (aka The law of the letter -- e.g. Latin < Greek < Cyrillic)

Previous posts in this series: Part 0: The empty string sorts the same in every language Okay, we'll start with something simple, basically a bunch of simple lowercase letters with no diacritics on them. I'll take a string that grabs some of those look-alike Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 11, 2007 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Perhaps they don't quite get it just yet, #1

I'll be the first person that standards are a good thing. And when I say that, I want you to fully grok what I mean. I mean that they are truly A Good Thing™ , you know? But the truth is they often represented an idealized view of the world. And in the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 11, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 0 (aka The empty string sorts the same in every language)

So I was talking with Brett the other day (yes, that Brett , the one whose blog is only occasionally written to!), I can't remember what the original purpose if the conversation was. Though I did not mind, because our conversations and really anything Read More...
Posted Monday, September 10, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments

The SendKeys *blog post* juice was definitely not worth the squeeze

It was over a year ago that I wrote a post about a Visual Basic language feature that has been around forever, and two specific problems with it (entitled Is the SendKeys juice worth the squeeze? ) that intended to focus on two specific issues: The way Read More...
Posted Monday, September 10, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

A dash of this, a dash of that (aka MS v. Adobe? Shaping engines v. fonts? Typographers v. Unicode? Everyone v. everyone else!)

Over in the VOLT users community, Bob H asked: Is there any hope of the rtla feature being supported by Uniscribe for RTL scripts? See http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/features_pt.htm#rtla Bob Colleague Sergey had the direct answer for that Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 09, 2007 12:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments