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May 2008 - Posts

Wonder about mother tongue vs. fatherland? Ask a terminologist!

There are some fascinating aspects of language that cross into the practical needs of software products. One of them is the field that that the terminologists occupy. There is even an alias within Microsoft that I used to belong to for terminology issues. Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 31, 2008 9:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Character Map is being quite the [Ol ]Chiki monkey

If you watched Saturday Night Live way back when, you might have remembered the Mike Myers skit involving Simon , the one who was always calling the viewer a "cheeky monkey". I was thinking about this the other day when Paul asked over in the Microsoft Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 31, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Backf-rmati-n -f deity, revisited

Y-u may recall when I first wrote the Backf-rmati-n -f deity bl-g, back in April. Y-u kn-w, when I talked ab-ut the interesting way that replacing God with G-d , intended in part to h-ld deity seperate , actually saw the argument s-mewhat hurt by using Read More...
Posted Friday, May 30, 2008 1:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Somewhere between a glossary and a lexicon, safe[ enough] for work

WARNING : if you are easily offended, LEAVE NOW. Get out. Get the hell out. Do not read this particular blog any further. If you are still here then the implicit assumption is that you are not offended, or are irretrievably stupid (since a smart person Read More...
Posted Friday, May 30, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Rhapsody, iTunes, Zune & some @#%&*! smiles about @#%&*! Smilers :-)

So there is good news and bad news. Gather around boys and girls and I'll tell you what's what.... The good news? Aimee Mann's upcoming new album ( @#%&*! Smilers , which I mentioned previously in When in doubt, blame it on the @#%&*! SMILERS Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 29, 2008 9:16 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Ask a simple question, and then duck!

The whole thread started innocently enough, with a simple question: Check out this shell command I typed & the result it got. Note the stuff in red. C:\>dir d:\enlistment\che f *.* /s /b d:\enlistment\LHC\tools\che c k_imports.cmd d:\enlistment\tools\che Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 29, 2008 5:14 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Not to get in the middle [dot] of the problem, but...

The other day, MVP Mike asked me via email: Hi Michael, Have you heard about this problem? It's starting to make the "rounds" since XP SP3 came out. It appears to be a very serious problem, and the only reason (which is selfish) that I'm bringing it up Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 28, 2008 10:26 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Summer vacation, the 2nd

(A continuation after Summer vacation, the 1st , and there may well be a part 3 though perhaps in a later season) The wedding was amazing, as was the whole weekend, really. I'll be posting a bunch of pictures on facebook soon and I might even change my Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 28, 2008 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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SQL and the CLR? (2008 edition!)

Self-identifying software developer and SQL Server database administrator Julia asked via the Contact link: Last November you talked about Windows only cultures providing a potential solution for the collation differences between SQL Server and the .NET Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2008 11:06 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

You want to know what's weak? Strong password rules, that's what's weak!

Regular reader Jan Kučera asked over in the Suggestion Box: Hi, Okay, this might be a little bit non-technical question, but... every day, somebody wants a _strong_ password from me. The best one would be of course kilometer long, with some crazy stuff Read More...
Posted Monday, May 26, 2008 11:11 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

On the fear of [consequences of ]rejection

Some questions, I find myself holding my breath as I am reading them. Confirmatory questions (questions where one has a hopeful assumptgion about the answer but with some [perhaps lingering] doubts prompting the interogatory statement) in particular. Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 25, 2008 12:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

What the hell is wrong with WC_NATIVEFONTCTL?

Have you ever done something in a wild, partying social situation when you wee younger that seemed like a great idea at the time, but then you just woke up the next morning and realized it was not such a great idea? Extended this slightly inappropriate Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 24, 2008 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

SQL vs. Windows collations: the tricycle versus the Porsche

Now with gas prices being what they are, there may be some real advantages to considering riding the tricycle instead of the Porsche, especially if one can fit in the smaller space and one does not have to take it as far. And if one does not need the Read More...
Posted Friday, May 23, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

When the LANGID in the LOWORD of the KLID doesn't match the LANGID you want keyboard under?

Joost van Doorn asks (via the Contact link): Hello Michael, Since your name appears in a lot of MSDN questions on International application programming, I ask my question directly to you. I'm working on an application that supports various languages. Read More...
Posted Friday, May 23, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

It's a known fact (disputed but not disproven) that Clippy's removal from Office was due to Earl knocking up Scribble

The title of this blog is yet another episode in the grand tradition of titles that do not match the content they introduce, with no substantial comment about either the Office Assistant in general or the pregnancy scandal in particular beyond the intro, Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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"Fall over" is not the same thing as "fall back"

The other day, in response to my The song[ and the answer] remains the same blog where I explained once again how the Uniscribe font fallback list cannot be customized, regular reader/MVP/colleague/friend/Romanian/Adobian Mihai asked in a comment : "You Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

String.StartsWith || String.EndsWith != String.Equals, either

Research Developer Mahmoud's question was quite reasonable on its face: Hi All, I was having a problem, and I kept debugging it till I reached to a very strange problem, below is a simplified code that explains the problem I am facing. static void Main(string[] Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Summer vacation, the 1st

Absitively, posolutely n othing technical here whatsoever; if that is not your thing then why the hell are you still here reading? :-) My very first bit of summer vacation is happening this weekend -- May 23rd to 27th. I'm heading back to Cleveland, or Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 21, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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That would be "Full Service" unattend

On close to the second anniversary of my blog Unattend for Regional and Language Options in Vista , Ryan Hamshire asked : Question! I see that sort order is not one of the options under user locale, which makes sense because sort order is not a parameter, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 20, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

When your friends know your meds, you have no privacy

The season finale of House was on last night. A pretty bad situation came up (I am being oblique in my description to avoid spoilers!) and the drug Amantadine (aka Symmetrel) came up. I received two phone calls within an hour after the show was done from Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 20, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Everyone seems averse to the BOM these days; Should we blame TSA? :-)

Sometimes things work by accident. You know -- no one ever planned for it to work, no one tested it to make sure it kept working. Of course it was never documented; the people behind the scenes may not have even known the feature ever worked the way some Read More...
Posted Monday, May 19, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Have you had your [auto]fill of Outlook?

Pamela asked via th Contact link: How do I clean out my autofil. I can clear out Outlook's Contacts, but not the autofill, and I have loads of mistyped, altered addresses, which has me sending to all and having the wrong ones returned as "undeliverable". Read More...
Posted Monday, May 19, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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The song[ and the answer] remains the same

The question Asaf asked via the Contact link: Hello Michael, I was going over your blog, and I'm very impressed at the amount of information and depth that you have posted. Saying that, from reading some of the material, I was trying to figure out if Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 18, 2008 2:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

If spamming me multilingually, please encode the language correctly!

I get a lot of email spam. Most -- probably 250 a day -- are caught by the spam filter on the server, about 20-30 get through. An interesting one made it through yesterday: From: club16@ubbi.com To: club15@ubbi.com (presumably I was bcc:ed, the header Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 18, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

The undocumented limits are the ones that can trip you

Over in the Suggestion Box, regular reader Andrew West asked: Hi Michael, Here's another weird bug with the IE font configuration dialog that I've just found. I've been creating a suite of Ogham fonts, and I've been finding that some of them show up in Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 17, 2008 5:04 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Do your utmost to be conventional (and then pimp, q.d. or p.r.n.)

The message I got the other day via the Contact link was very well-timed: Hello Michael, I don't remember where was it, that I read you were the author of the Microsoft Keyboard Layout creator, but well... here I am, emailing you because I found a very Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 17, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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My Spidey senses blame the rogue text editor

Via the Contact link, someone with the handle of BP asked me: How come MSKLC source files break if you edit them in a text editor although they are plain text files? At least deadkeys would be much easier to edit that way... Regards, /BP My first reaction Read More...
Posted Friday, May 16, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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The risk of "Hebrew Smatter"

The mail I got the other day via the Contact link was a tad scary for me: Hi Michael, I come from Switzerland. I'm 21 years old and I'm studying tourism. I was looking for some helps on the Internet as I have a passion for Hebrew and all the jewish culture. Read More...
Posted Friday, May 16, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Install Vista SP1 and get 674 MB of memory, free!

An experiment -- I am wondering the spam filters will pick up comments with the above title as spam, especially since registered users can't change the title ! Regular readers may recall when I mentioned in Pretty damn close to top of the line and referenced Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 15, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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A celebration of the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S

I have not officially decided whether to laugh or cry about this fascinating way to celebrate the encoding of U+1e9e : But I have no plans to get these to wear as cufflinks at Jenny and Alex's wedding the weekend after next. You can read about it (in Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 15, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Windows is too busy being consistent with the user to be consistent with itself!

The mail that came on the other day was: We’re seeing an issue that doesn’t seem correct to me, but I just wanted to confirm. In debugging the issue, the developer found that operating system shows the special genitive month name for Hebrew locale and Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 14, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

We'd have been better able to give a Whit if we hadn't been in such a HoliDAZE

I can't help feeling that Outlook HoliDAZE thing again (and I just added that word to my spell-checking dictionary -- I think we've not seen the last of this!). So this last Monday was Whit Monday for some people, as Outlook let me know: Interesting. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 14, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

WinZip, the [long awaited] Unicode edition!!!

I have talked about WinZip and Zip in the past, in particular their odd relationship with Unicode, in blogs like: Zipping up Unicode file names Unicode? Zip don't need no stinking Unicode! Sometimes, you have to keep it in ASCII Zipping up Unicode file Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

XKCD with A Better Idea

Randall Monroe over on xkcd has done it again.... In the words of Miss Stephanie H., there are no words . :-) Thanks for this one, Randall. YOMAK, big time! This blog brought to you by ䷗ ( U+4dd7 , aka HEXAGRAM FOR RETURN) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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What happens when you involve an unenabled Uniscribe with vertical text, given that Uniscribe doesn't handle vertical text?

So I got email from a developer colleague the other day. It was that same developer who had previously impressed me -- as described in Expertise isn't always everything (aka When the one who is learning teaches us something important) -- and kept me from Read More...
Posted Monday, May 12, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

İn tıtlıng thıs ınclusıon ın re: the ınterests of Turkısh İSVs, am İ just tryıng to buıld İ's and ı's ınto the tıtle of thıs daıly contrıbutıon to SİAO (SıaO), amıgo?

It is a commonly reported issue in Windows and many components that run upon it, a recent one can be seen on the Connect site, here : Description : There is a conversion problem in the c/c++ runtime library. Turkish characters ı/I and i/İ are converted Read More...
Posted Monday, May 12, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

The vector of this spam is [apparently] indeterminate

I have talked in the past about my feelings regarding the REPLACEMENT CHARACTER in blogs such as The torrents of U+fffd (aka When security and conformance trump compatibility and reality) . And I have even mentioned in the A less intelligent strain of Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 11, 2008 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

On the popularity of Unicode: percentages are not raw numbers

There has been a lot of recent buzz based on the Moving to Unicode 5.1 post in the googleblog written by Mark Davis. Enough that people keep sending me email asking if I had seen it, much of that traffic being there because I haven't blogged about it Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 11, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Why Bengali keyboards can't be found on XP 64 bit

One of the interesting benefits of reading this blog is that it can provide answers to questions that you run across later. For example, I got mail the other day that was forwarding a question from someone: A friend was happily using the Bengali language Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 10, 2008 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Whither disability discrimination?

In my blog Disabilities in the workplace , Mary suggested in the comments: I'd like to see a discussion for those of us with non-mobility disabilities. How about mild autism? Just try and get through the first 5 minutes of an interview and make a positive Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 10, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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It is okay to not be in favor of termination

No, this is not a post about abortion. I am talking about NULL termination, a way to end strings that is legal in all fifty states and that is widely used by software that is in regular use by people all over the world irregardless of their views about Read More...
Posted Friday, May 09, 2008 11:36 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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The etymology of the Homo-Sus hypothesis

Nothing technical whatsoever folks; if this bothers you then please just get over it or go away! :-) I have been in the habit lately of talking women out of the idea of having a relationship with me. I know how that sounds, and I took the time to record Read More...
Posted Friday, May 09, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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In hindsight, they may have BEST FIT these files where the sun never shines

Recently while paying attention to The Unicode List I was once again reminded why I don't pay more attention to The Unicode List . :-) Specifically it was a thread started by Andreas Prilop: I refer to http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/ISO8859/8859-1.TXT Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 08, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Support of Holi^h^h^^hDAZE, in Outlook (aka Situations when competition might help customers)

Before I forget, here is what the top of the day looks like in Outlook right now: Now I am not going to try and tell anyone that holidays are easy. Because they aren't. And anyone who tries to tell you that they are is probably trying to sell you something. Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 08, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Four exceptions to prove the rule

As a general rule, once a sort has been added to Windows, it cannot ever be removed. But you have probably heard the expression that every rule has an exception, right? Well this rule is so freaking important that it has four exceptions! They are: #1: Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 07, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

25 years at Microsoft? Amazing, I tell you!

I found 25 to be the last birthday I actually look forward to. I think that is to do with my cynical nature -- I mean at 16 you can get your license 1 , at 18 you can vote or enlist 2 , at 21 you can drink 3 . And at 25 I could finally afford my auto Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 07, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

By some accounts, the names can be changed

At the risk of repeating myself, I find that once again I quote a particular releveant bit from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams, just as I did here and here : Ford Prefect hit the ground running. The ground was about three inches farther from the ventilation Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 06, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Su-sumimasen-ssudio for the invite snafu

The title of this post is an irreverent combination of a Japanese "mea culpa" type word meant to convey respect while asking for forgiveness with a truly awful Phil Collins song that is not IMNSHO terribly deserving of respect (though one that the sentiment Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 06, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Note to Outlook: Koninginnedag isn't the reigning Queen's Birthday

The other day in Was last night Walpurgis [Night|Eve] or May Day Eve? , I showed the following picture of my Outlook calendar: and specifically mentioned how I was going to have us leave the Queen aside for the moment. Reader Bart Samwel commented on Read More...
Posted Monday, May 05, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

2004: On not being a viable test subject

Nothing technical in this one -- it is just one of those historical Multiple Sclerosis blogs.... I was recently asked if I had ever been involved in any multiple sclerosis studies. Funny someone would ask that.... A few years back I tried to get it on Read More...
Posted Monday, May 05, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Sparrows' tears? Perhaps. But never a teardrop on the fire...

Very non-technical, you should probably skip, yada yada yada.... I went out last night and actually managed to run into Claire (yes, the Claire from this blog) and her friend Trisha (who I had also met). A reunion of sorts, I suppose. :-) It was a minor Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 04, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Who bells the cat when it comes to glyph substitution?

Over in the Suggestion Box, AJB asked: I am curious about the division of labor between Uniscribe (or any other rendering\layout engine) and the OpenType font, with regards to glyph substitution. I've been poking around parsing the OpenType font data Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 04, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

The Matzoh and the Eucharist (for the gluten intolerant)

I had a regular reader ask me via the Contact link: I have a gluten intolerance and a fiancé who is Jewish (we are getting married on the end of the summer). I managed to avoid passover this year because I was traveling for work, but by next year I'll Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 03, 2008 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Please Look before you Leap a second

I am going to talk about Leap Sec