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October 2008 - Posts

Je suis prêt

Happy Halloween, everybody! Over on Suzanne Vega's Blog yesterday, in her blog je suis pret! , she describes an interesting phenomenon about language: One thing that has been a growing phenomenon on this tour is that at some point in the show, usually Read More...
Posted Friday, October 31, 2008 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

From I SCOOT to IBOT, #2 of ??

Another post about moving to the IBOT ! :-) After I blogged From I SCOOT to IBOT, #1 of ?? , I did leave some people hanging, wondering how the evening went. How the IBOT was going. You know, what lessons I learned, etc. And more on the differences between Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 30, 2008 7:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

From ____ to ____ to MUI to ELS -- World Ready @ the PDC!

If you are the PDC in Los Angeles, you may have seen Yaniv Feinberg from the Globalization Services team and Erik Fortune from the Multilingual User Interface team, who did a 75-minute presentation entitled Windows 7: Writing World-Ready Applications Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 30, 2008 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

How the @#%&*! does CBS_SORT choose to sort it all out?

The question was an interesting one: My customer has a tree control with nodes sorted using CString::Compare(). In another part of the application he has the same list of names in a combo box that has the CBS_SORT style set. He wants names to appear in Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 29, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Wonder why something is not in the Compact Framework? The answer is in the question!

Regular reader Jan Kučera, in response to Stripping is an interesting job (aka On the meaning of meaningless, aka All Mn characters are non-spacing, but some are more non-spacing than others) , asked in a comment : Any way for the .NET Compact Framework Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 29, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

Ready... set... Reboot Redux, part Deux!

Now it all started with Ready... set... Reboot! back in February of 2005, where the issues of reboot and the default system locale were first discussed. And then the follow-up ( Ready... set... Reboot Redux ), which talks about how sometimes you might Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2008 9:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

From I SCOOT to IBOT, #1 of ??

I thought regular and semi-regular readers might like an update on life with the IBOT, after I blogged about getting one in Cogito ergo cathedra... (I think, therefore IBOT...) a few days ago. If you're not interested, then you can leave now. :-) This Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

Not only going BACK, but changing how to do it

Late last week, Jan Kučera asked over in the Suggestion Box (which I am thinking of renaming to Jan's Place , soon!): Hello.. I have a short one today: Could I use the MSKLC to make for example the B key to act as backspace key (and if so, how :))? Thanks! Read More...
Posted Monday, October 27, 2008 5:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Silverlight as Esau: selling its implementation for a pot of interface

Apologies for the biblical metaphor in the title... Now I mentioned last week in Shine a Little [Silver]Light that Sometime soon I'll talk about the next big question that is likely to be on many people's minds after they look at the slides. and with Read More...
Posted Friday, October 24, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Consoling oneself about being unable to set the console font

The other day, Marjan Venema asked over in the Suggestion Box: For Vista we can use the SetCurrentConsoleFontEx API to switch a console window to use Lucida or another font that supports Unicode symbols. Unfortunately there is no similar API for XP (or Read More...
Posted Friday, October 24, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Does MS just make up these punctuation-challenged keyboards to piss people off?

Regular reader Jan Kučera asks over in the Suggestion Box: Who does create the keyboard layouts? I'm using the Tamil one, which is nice to play with, yes, but... do people really need to install another layout (and constantly switch between them) just Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Cogito ergo cathedra... (I think, therefore IBOT...)

Now ordinarily I would apologize to René Descartes for appropriating and re-purposing his quote, but he was not, in the end, all that fond of the particular phrasing of the idea, so.... I have talked about Dean Kamen's IBOT several times in the past, Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

See? The MSKLC support story is as easy as 1 2 3 4...

Over in the Suggestion Box, Gene Sorensen asked: Dear Michael, Thank you for an incredibly helpful tool in the MSKLC, and for your helpful blog. I have two questions related to the MSKLC: 1. Will the MSKLC install into 64-bit Vista? We are using it in Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 22, 2008 6:06 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Behond the Table Driven Text Service, Part 14 (Don't expect too much from numbers)

Prior posts in the series: 0 (You have to start somewhere) 1 (Starting with a dictionary simple in every way) 2 (Three ways to convert!) 3 (Where do keystrokes come in?) 4 (Specifying when to modify, if not how) 5 (All about the language, baby!) 6 (it Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 21, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Getting farther from ASCII (on a scale of yellow to Atlantis)

Mail from Simon is as always (a) funny, (b) important, (c) interesting, or (d) all of the above. Hi latest mail was technically in category "C" and it ended up being a little bit of category "A", albeit unintentionally.... He forwarded me this link, with Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 21, 2008 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Epitomizing the indubitably ephemeral nature of the conceptual link

It was last last week when colleague, comrade, and regular reader Jonas Barklund sent me some mail: Subject: All links on page http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/05/30/610605.aspx appear dead A victim of one of MSDN’s total reshuffles? Well I Read More...
Posted Monday, October 20, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Limonata is getting lots harder to find, dammit! What, do I have to @#%&*! move to Italy?

(This is a post about Limonata) or, to use the newer can style in my art: In the middle of last year when I mentioned There is no more Limonata at Trader Joe's and the fact that Trader Joe's had chosen to stop carrying San Pellegrino Limonata. Anyway, Read More...
Posted Monday, October 20, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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I see LONG TIME and SHORT TIME; where are SHORTER TIME and SHORTEST TIME?

The question was deceptively simple: Hi, How can convert a DateTime to culture specific ShortDateTime string format without minutes? e.g: To represent 6 PM in different cultures: en-US --> 6 PM de-DE--> 18 Regards Regular readers will know why I Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 19, 2008 9:59 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Shine a Little [Silver]Light

Not a blog about VanVelzen, sorry to disappint any fans of his! Just in case you have been too busy following the presidential race in the USA to notice, Microsoft did just release Silverlight 2.0 . Which is pretty cool in most respects. One piece of Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 16, 2008 8:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Insufficient to push itself plus 160 pounds of me

Long time readers may remember back in April of 2005 when in Getting enough exercise? I talked about my adventures with a scooter that broke on the way back from Typhoon! in Redmond to my apartment, and the long walk I did pushing a scooter for a not-so-insignificant Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 16, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

What is the freaking point of LOCALE_USE_CP_ACP?

The question I got the other day was a "slightly less suitable for families" version of this blog's title. It came out of It used to be right, dammit! , and reader Jon was kind of confused as to why this flag and so many other *_USE_CP_ACP flags are used Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 15, 2008 8:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

UCS-2 to UTF-16, Part 5: What's on the Next Level?

Previous blogs in this series of blogs on this Blog: Part 0: The intro, sans content Part 1: Getting the obvious out of the way Part 2: A&P of a 'linguistic character' Part 3: It starts with cursor movement (where MS simultaneously gets better and Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 15, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Let my tombstone read: 'Generally thought to be bad attrition'

Off-topic, irreverent, but with a kernel of truth in it for people who care about such things.... I don't think that a blog has the force of law or anything, but hopefully when I die those charged with deciding how to dispose of my body will respect wishes Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 14, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Tamil language support in Windows? You can't SHRII-k yet, but it's getting better

So back in Unicode 4.1, Unicode added ஶ ( U+0bb6 , aka TAMIL LETTER SHA). Then there was a {ahem} brief delay, after which Vista shipped. For the record, the Latha font was updated prior to ship. . Two points for Microsoft Typography! Originally I thought Read More...
Posted Monday, October 13, 2008 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Another death in the family

Well, not really. Unless you extend the definition of family to include things that are not really alive. My 1995 Saab 900 died. She was kind of a person to me, though I do not share her name with anyone. That's something private, sorry! Yes, this is Read More...
Posted Monday, October 13, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

I'm not Arial, I'm HEL-𝔉𝔲𝔠𝔨𝔦𝔫𝔤-VETICA, baby!

This blog pays homage to Who would win in a fight between Helevetica and Arial? of course... In the spirit of other typographical t-shirt blogs of the past like İ şéè đêäđ ķéÿš The Company Meeting, the interesting science of Forensic Typography, and what Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 12, 2008 10:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Keeping myself up at night figuring out how to delight someone by making that special part of my package smaller

Conventional wisdom tells us that size matters, and unconventional (or more accurately, inappropriate?) wisdom tends to concur. Most of the time it refers to the idea that bigger is better . But there are some times that it matters in the opposite way Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 11, 2008 11:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Exile in SIAOville, aka A Mike in Alaska

This blog is entirely off-topic and carries the same parental warning that Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville album already has, since that is where quoted lyrics are from.... There are friends of mine who think I am a huge fan of Aimee Mann, following her Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 11, 2008 5:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Feeling the cold vs. feeling [un]comfortably numb

About as off-topic as a blog can be! One of the interesting things about going out to bars is the opportunity to have somewhat undirected conversations with random people. I say undirected because I don't have any specific intent in mind, no particular Read More...
Posted Friday, October 10, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

About the Fonts folder in Windows, Part 5 (Nothing personal!)

A series is never so dead that it can't be revived for another run! Previous blogs in the series: Part 1 - What are we talking about? Part 2 - Adding fonts Part 3 - What changes in Vista? Part 4 - Eto Akta Gamat, aka Magical Protection? And why was this Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 09, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Making a point without explaining the whole point of the point? *That* is the point!

The alternate title of this blog: The chasm between what is done and what is said is not unlike the one between what is described and what is documented There is kind of a subtle difference between documented and described . For example, this Blog you Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 09, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Is it mean to hope that the next one to talk about working on the aisle spontaneously loses his voice?

The title has nothing to do with the blog! In this crucial time where we need to reduce, renew, reuse, recycle, and in general preserve our precious natural resources, blogs like this one: Dead Celebrities Made Out Of Fonts Isn't it great in these trying Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 08, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

How many electoral votes does the state of implementation have?

Regular readers, as you might imagine, tend to come and go. Sometimes, like in the case of people like Suzanne E. McCarthy , they seem to drop off the face of the planet and you never hear from them again. Even their Blogs are inactive. Since indeed Suzanne's Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 07, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Even the prisoners of the motherland use cp1252 (though they escaped 037)

This blog dedicated to six weeks I almost got to spend in Australia nearly 15 years ago, and a Kinks song named Long Distance that still reminds of me of the late night phone conversations I had with the girl who was able to make the trip... In response Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 07, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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UCS-2 to UTF-16, Part 4: Talking about the ask

Previous blogs in this series of blogs on this Blog: Part 0: The intro, sans content Part 1: Getting the obvious out of the way Part 2: A&P of a 'linguistic character' Part 3: It starts with cursor movement (where MS simultaneously gets better and Read More...
Posted Monday, October 06, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Voting & Registration, aka I am hoping EVERYONE who can BREATHE is Alive!

So it was yesterday morning 1 when Rae Dawn Chong 2,3 put in her facebook status: Of course there are some interesting language problems here that occurred to me, despite the fact that I knew what she meant, some of which are caused by the underlying Read More...
Posted Monday, October 06, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Can I get your [font]signature on this, please?

Now regular readers know I have talked about the FONTSIGNATURE structure and the LOCALESIGNATURE structure in the past, starting way back in 2005 in blogs like Parameter confusion #2a and It isn't a FONTSIGNATURE, darn it! , both of which refer to the Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 05, 2008 9:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

My personal commitments

This is a 100% personal blog in this personal Blog-o-mine.... So this last month is the time of year that all of the Microsoft employees put in their commitments. This is an exercise I won't comment on other than to say I enjoyed it more when it was a Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 05, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Language ambiguity and unintended irony

In Perhaps we can call them live keys? :-) earlier today, there was an interesting bit of ambiguity I did not mention but probably should have. Looking at the art again: Whether you look at as I wish the English language had more interesting characters. Read More...
Posted Friday, October 03, 2008 1:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Perhaps we can call them live keys? :-)

It hearkens back to one of my favorite shirts that I talked about in İ şéè đêäđ ķéÿš : I was very pleased by a somewhat unforgettable picture from Michael Ciancio that Sergey pointed me to. :-) (Click on the picture to get it full size) The letters are Read More...
Posted Friday, October 03, 2008 5:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Not the monks... or The Monks... or The Monks... or The Mumps...

Offtopic and non-technical, and shows a huge bias against country music. You have been warned! I may not have mentioned this before, but going by Erik's office can often be distracting. Oh wait, I have mentioned it before. This time he was talking about Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 02, 2008 1:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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When swimming in a sea of CONTEXT, applications can drown (and there is no lifeguard)

Now I have talked about the good, the bad, the ugly, the pretty, the ins, and the outs of digit substitution many times over the past few years: 01 December 2004 -- Crossing the DIGITal divide... 24 April 2005 -- Is Whidbey's international support finished? Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 02, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Parents, to be perfectly blunt, suck at names, sometimes

The epiphany started with a comment. A comment to that blog Tavultesoft is one of the company names mispronounced more often than Trigeminal . It was after Andrew Durdin gave the suggested pronunciation here and his brother Marc said more about it here Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 01, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

What do you get when you put a Hebrew on top of a Russian? (aka What lies beneath can bite you on the ass)

So it was actually a couple of days ago (in the blog titled What a tangled web we weave when a KLID from an HKL we must receive ) that I painted a picture that would cause any normal, sane developer charged with working with keyboard layouts to either Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 01, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
 
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