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August 2008 - Posts

The crackpots and those women

The title of this blog is an allusion to a first season episode of The West Wing. The crackpots reference is to the record amount of spam aimed at the Blog today, none of which was successfully posted. You're welcome! :-) So I was watching this episode Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 31, 2008 2:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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UCS-2 --> UTF-16, Part 0: The intro, sans content

Okay, this blog is going to serve as a warning that a whole bunch of blogs in this Blog are about to happen about a particular topic. The topic is one I have kind of talked about before. The difference in software between UCS-2 and UTF-16, and what is Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 30, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

The Unicode web site gets a facelift

Yes, that is right -- press release info along the lines of: The Unicode Consortium is redesigning its home page to be more accessible to both new and frequent visitors, and to make it easier to see recent events and public review items. Please try it Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 30, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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A blog on getting a Blog on the blogs.msdn.com Blogapalooza

Idan asks (via the Contact link): Hello Michael, I am reading your blog and wondering, can I start a blog on MSDN blogs too? Who is the address for this request? Thank you, Idan. I looked at the information about setting up blogs, and ran across the following Read More...
Posted Friday, August 29, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Facebook says Happy Birthday, ±13.5 hours

I have the 'Birthday Alert" application on Facebook. One of those small non-descript applications , it relies on the fact that most of your friends probably enter the month and day (if not the year) in their profile. I know of one friend who actually Read More...
Posted Friday, August 29, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

A technology is worth: $0; A sample showing how to use it: $0; A debug-able sample: Priceless!

Any time someone from Microsoft talks about some exciting technology that is easy to use, there is often a good faith basis for you, the customer, to assume they might be blowing smoke up your ass. In fact, in most cases, you have a built-in affirmative Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 28, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Collation backstory?

Clearing out some of the mailed-to-me questions that have come in through the Contact link.... Peter O. asks: Hi Michael, I read your stuff ... and learn lots. I have been wanting to learn background stuff on collations as a general subject. Can you point Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 28, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Keyboard Layouts, everywhere!

I have been pointing to the website that has Windows keyboard layouts: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/keyboards.mspx on it for some time. Now this is a great site, you may have seen it before: Though it is not perfect. One big problem is Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 27, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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Uniqueness of the Name and Description...

Jason Timms, in response to Not the coolest , in a comment , asked: I do have a question. How can I reuse a name / description of a keyboard layout that I have already built? It seems that the name is copied in several places in the registry and won't Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 27, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Making SQL Server operations slower (without explicitly trying)

So I was chatting with Kim and Paul after that .NET DA meeting I mentioned the other day. The one where Kim kind of laid out the way that SQL Server did its searches, whether unindexed, indexed via a clustered key, and indexed without one. Probably the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 26, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

The sheer Shear of it all

Nothing much technical, or interesting, or useful -- just the blather, the whole blather, and nothing but the blather... It was a Twitter tweet, a Facebook status and also a Windows Live Messenger quote: I cannot be the only one in the world who was disappointed Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 26, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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The Bidi Algorithm's own SEP Field

There are many nice things that I can (and sometimes do) say about Unicode Standard Annex #9 ( Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm ), which I will call for the rest of this blog the UBA in order to avoid the repetitive and tiresome nature of " Unicode Bidirectional Read More...
Posted Monday, August 25, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

In the name of God, St Michael, and St. George, I dub thee the SUBOptimus keyboard

A quick follow-up blog after Optimus: from science fiction to fiction to frustration to geek porn, in just 24 months ... One of my regular readers, a colleage of mine, suggested someone at Microsoft who had one of these Optimus keyboards, he thought perhaps Read More...
Posted Monday, August 25, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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What good is irony if it can't provide symmetry?

Long time readers may recall blogs from the past like Is Excel CSV misusing NLS functionality? and Excel to Led Zeppelin -- No 'in through the out door' . Yet another CSV weirdness that I thought might be of interest to SiaO readers came up the other Read More...
Posted Friday, August 22, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Its the End[UpdateResource] of the world we know it

It was late last week when Maksim asked a very interesting question via email to one of those large aliases at Microsoft: SUBJECT: EndUpdateResource failing after adding cirtain number of items with UpdateResource Hi, It appears that there is a bug (or Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 21, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

A&P of Sort Keys, part 14: The Hangul is really getting OLD

Previous posts in this series before the long unexplained hiatus: 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 Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

The super-cool panel about Windows, .NET, and SQL Server -- now live!

Last night, at the .NET Developer's Association meeting, I got to see Kimberly Tripp and her husband do a pretty awesome talk about SQL Server index internals and fragmentation. In the conversation after I was reminded of a whole pile of SQL Server blogs Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 19, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

'-yet someone is clearly doing their job horribly wrong...'

There is an uncomfortable amount of truth in a somewhat offensive metaphor the recent XKCD comic: I won't claim the analogy shouldn't get panned (as the tooltip kind of hints it will be and I might agree perhaps ought). Though it does help underscore Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 19, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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The reach should exceed the grasp

There were some interesting posts recently on the Microsoft VOLT Users Community, such as Aref3, who at the end of a thread about Kashida support options (after realizing that there was not really a specific solution built in): I too think that it is Read More...
Posted Monday, August 18, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Not the best kind of line item to have

From Ben Kuchera's A crumbling tower: Sony lays siege to the 360's weak spots : Find a home in the world We tend to focus on US sales, because we live in the US. But gaming is an international business, and Microsoft has seen almost all of its success Read More...
Posted Monday, August 18, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

On being water soluble

I probably stopped liking milk by itself around the time that I was 10, and stopped liking it even in cereal and Kraft Mac & Cheese by the time I was 20. It just never seemed cold enough -- so it tasted like it was going bad or something. Hard to Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 17, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Optimus: from science fiction to fiction to frustration to geek porn, in just 24 months

At first it was exciting though there was fear it was science fiction (ref: The so-called Ultimate Keyboard ). Then later reports suggested it was perhaps just fictional (ref: Is the Optimus keyboard just a myth? ). I did a lot of hinting about how complicated Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 16, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Yet another time that UTF-8 can't be the ACP

Glenn asks: Regarding MKLC Codepages: Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator - In the Properties, I set the Language to "English (United States)" which sets the code page to (1252). The "Validate Layout" tool generates warnings that some of the characters Read More...
Posted Friday, August 15, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

E7 language stuff

So there is a cool new blog out there, the Engineering Windows 7 blog. Coming principally from Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan , it has a stated goal that is fairly impressive, put in the Welcome blog: Beginning with this post together we are going to Read More...
Posted Friday, August 15, 2008 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

SYSTEM_FONT hasn't been the system font since Reagan's first term in the White House

When you call the WM_GETFONT message to get the font from a control, the documentation says: The return value is a handle to the font used by the control, or NULL if the control is using the system font. And then when you look at the GetStockObject function, Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 14, 2008 1:25 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Reference to a Decalogue

Regular reader John Cowan, in response to References Available on Request , asked in a comment : Mmm, couldn't you at least post the commandments for us? It hadn't actually occurred to me. :-) The non-commandment version can be found here , but the Decalogic Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 13, 2008 2:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Migrating docs forward vs. moving 'em forward

The mail from the contact list: "Though ultimately the funniest part being the requirements for both functions: Client Requires Windows Vista, Windows XP, or Windows 2000 Professional. Server Requires Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 13, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

References Available on Request

For those in or near Redmond.... I am doing a repeat and update of my References Available on Request talk, with new info for Access 2007. I blogged about this previously in The Ten Commandments of MS Access references but there has been a new version Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 12, 2008 3:41 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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The Southeast Asian population in WA must be getting bigger all the time....

So I went up to http://vote.wa.gov/ the other day after seeing a commercial about it. I was in a very suggestive frame of mind, having just been trying to get to the exact part of the recording of the Conan O'Brien show where I could see the B-52s play. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 12, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Unbloggableable: an inconceivableable term that makes me a little uncomfortableable

The issue was something I was aware of before Doron mentioned the word in Once not disableable, forever not disableable and then talked a bit about the word itself in Inconceivableable . In its own way, inconceivableable is probably a better model for Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 12, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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The fault is ~60% functionality, ~40% documentation

The question in the email was: Hi, I am trying to debug an issue... and was wondering if you could explain or elaborate on the behavior I am seeing from GetLcidFromRfc1766() with the string “ja-JP” it is returning S_false, indicating that only the primary Read More...
Posted Monday, August 11, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

What's in a name?

One of the core tenets of globalization and localizability of software is that making assumptions in formatting information will lead to bugs and limitations that will keep people in other cultures from properly using the software. There are two sides Read More...
Posted Friday, August 08, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Let go of your Type1 and Use the Force, Luke!

Christopher's question to me was not my favorite kind of inquiry: Hi Michael. A simple question, I hope: It appears to me that the MSKLC (v1.4) doesn't see any installed Type 1/CFF-flavor fonts. Is this true? Makes it difficult to test keyboard layouts Read More...
Posted Friday, August 08, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

To some, the name might be the WRONG SINGLE QUOTATION MARK

In the last item in the Suggestion Box as of the time I wrote this blog, Gé van Gasteren asked in comments to A more usable Dutch keyboard that works properly? , over here and here : Thanks, Michael, for giving me the full treatment! Interestingly, the Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 07, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Quite a shock, being hit by 1.3 VOLT like that

My ever-cool colleague Sergey had a great announcement a few days ago in the Microsoft VOLT users community: Hello everybody, Today we are releasing new version of Microsoft VOLT 1.3. There are lots of new features and improvements in this version, here Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 07, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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How bad does data have to before it is wrong? And how long does it have to be wrong before it is right?

There are not very many times that a feature within NLS can make a person psychotic. Though of course by making such a claim one implies that there are in fact such cases, no matter how rare they may be. This post will be about one of them.... It is about Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 06, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Providing an answer when one can't clearly anunciate what it is?

You may have seen the movie Class Action a few years back. It had Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in it. The movie isn't very important to this blog, other than to note the whole concept of "dumping" a ton of documents during the discovery Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 06, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

If you can find an unsigned copy, it's worth an absolute fortune

I was pondering the other day. You see, Ed Ye is leaving our team, and heading back to family and homeland in China. We have worked together many times over the last many years so I'll definitely miss him being in an office not far from mine (he has always Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 05, 2008 1:46 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

On describing poorly (and on not listening)

You may recall blogs like How do I feel about lstrcmpi? I think it blows.... where I pointed out a case where an entire division full of developers have essentially been doing something wrong for over a decade. I have even put out the straw man argument Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 05, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Tap your heels together three times and the problem is solved?

People who are regular followers of my words may recall my recent blogs Somehow I just get a Visual of the Logical Song (as sung by Supertramp) and So logical that even Mr. Spock (and my fiancée?) would approve . Those blogs were actually in response Read More...
Posted Monday, August 04, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

How to keep it up (or at least how to get it back up after it has gone down)

The question is actually one that has come from a few different people, most recently from a developer named Jeff: How can I keep the Language Bar up for my C# application? Or if that isn't possible, how can I make it come back up after it has been minimized Read More...
Posted Sunday, August 03, 2008 9:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Perhaps the commonest (if not the leastest) of the least common denominators

We were at a meeting yesterday. A 4:00 meeting. Yes, a 4pm on a Friday meeting. When the sun was out. I probably would have left work early that day and tried to enjoy the sun, were this meeting not on the schedule. The organizer of the meeting, self-consciously Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 02, 2008 11:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

A serious lack of overlap with 64

So it started over on the Vista Windows Experience Blog's blog Watch NBC’s coverage of the Beijing Olympics in Windows Media Center . Some eager folks who downloaded the client were dismayed to see it was 32-bit only. Brandon (the blog's author) mentioned Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 02, 2008 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

How do you key your num pad without going blind?

Presumed regular reader and extraregular (ref: ordinary vs. extraordinary to understand extraregular here!) human Doug Ewell asks: Sorry, couldn't find this anywhere in SiaO, though I may not have looked hard enough. Is there any way to define the keys Read More...
Posted Friday, August 01, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

My Gut[tman] instinct is...

Within the last few weeks, Amy asked (via the Contact link): hello i'm searching for a downloadable (preferred) hebrew font for an invitation and saw your website came up in my search: specifically the link to these fonts: http://www.trigeminal.com/images/hebrew.png Read More...
Posted Friday, August 01, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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