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December 2008 - Posts

Trapped in Redmond, the iBOT won't get me to the top of Capitol Hill

A couple of days ago, I went out with the iBOT into the still uncleared snowed-over sidewalks. It was a test -- I had some Christmas day plans (a bunch of Seattle orphans sans travel plans all heading to Amy's places the top of Capitol Hill for Jumbalaya Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 25, 2008 3:16 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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The coach confirms: it was a Hail Michael pass. Judge's ruling? Incomplete...

As the end of the year approaches, I guess it is a time for reflection. Oh, I suppose resolutions for the new year. For those you can paste in mine from four years ago , as I am still striving on them. 2008 was kind of my worst year for as long as I have Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 24, 2008 2:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Internet Explorer and Windows might not be optimized for this Blog

After reading It isn't really RED versus GREEN , Cheong asked: I've searched for a while in charmap.exe and yet to find a font that'll display these characters in WinXP. That brings me to a question: Is there a font that ships with Windows (not necessarily Read More...
Posted Monday, December 22, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

From I SCOOT to IBOT, #10 of ??: The good, the bad, and the ugly (IN THAT ORDER)

YAIB -- yet another IBOT blog -- feel free to ignore if they aren't your thing... Prior blogs in the series here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here . This blog is going to be about the good, the bad, and the ugly . Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 20, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Black hole sun, Vista gadget come, don't predict China's rain?

Computerized apologies to Soundgarden, an awesome band that at a minimum deserves more intelligent puns.... Someone was having trouble getting something to work in Vista (yes, yes, alert the news media). The problem description: Hi, there, sorry for spam. Read More...
Posted Friday, December 19, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Complex class designs begat unintuitive interactions begat unexpected results begat a blog

Frank's question is one any reasonable person could have: So, why is XmlWriter producing a document with encoding = UTF16 when I specify UTF8 ? static void Main(string[] args) { XmlWriterSettings xws = new XmlWriterSettings(); xws.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8; Read More...
Posted Friday, December 19, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

How are the Danes doing it?

WARNING: This blog has nothing whatsoever ¹ do with Nordic sex. Regular reader Santhosh Pillai had a question not too long ago that I found to be rather kick ass and cool, professionally speaking. It was: Hi, I am trying to figure out how these characters Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 18, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Whither ICU.NET? I don't see it thither...

In the past 10 days I have had four people ask me the same question. Here is one if the most recent ones: Hi Michael, One of my friends was asking if there is an ICU for .NET. icu4c-4_0-Win32-msvc8.zip that he got from http://www.icu-project.org/download/4.0.html Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 18, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Call Marlett symbolic or the problems might be quite real...

Earlier today, tshirk (probably not his real name?) asked via the Contact link: Okay, I'm sorry. This is a support question. I suck. I'm just asking if you've ever heard of applications that use Marlett (super secret Windows system symbol font) being Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 17, 2008 3:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Grody to the Max[Date]!

Ben's question was a reasonable one: Hello, I am currently running into an issue on an Arabic localized box in which an ArgumentOutOfRangeException is being thrown when DateTime.ToString() is called on a DateTime object with the value set to MaxValue. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 16, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

UCS-2 to UTF-16, Part 9: The torrents of breaking CharNext/CharPrev

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 Tuesday, December 16, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Frost's The Form Not Taken

Over in the Suggestion Box, Aaron asked: Hi again - question about one of your favorite codepages - 1258 (Vietnamese) and combining diacritics in regards to Unicode character U+1EB7 (LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH BREVE AND DOT BELOW - http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1eb7/index.htm) Read More...
Posted Monday, December 15, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

From I SCOOT to IBOT, #9 of ??: You're not stoned if you see me in Seattle at a 50 degree or a 130 degree angle

YIAB -- yet another IBOT blog -- feel free to ignore if they aren't your thing... Prior blogs in the series here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here . Yesterday was an interesting day. We had a morale event, an Argosy lunch Read More...
Posted Friday, December 12, 2008 7:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

On why it's a bad thing to choose font information by name only

Looking back at the my blog Ready... set... Reboot Redux, part Deux! , in order tp get the link to help answer someone's question, I realized something very important. That blog does not give the solution, it really only states the problem. A problem Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 11, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Bunny? He's no bunny. He's a goddamn RABBIT!

Not a technical issues but kind of a language one. Feel free to skip... When I was growing up in Beachwood, Ohio, I remember a children's rhyme involving a rabbit that was harassing the local field mice. After ignoring the warnings of Good Fairy (usually Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 11, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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LoadKeyboardLayout is a 00bada55 puppy dog tail wagger of a function

There are many functions in the Win32 API that really amount to little more than requests. The caller is asking for something, perhaps passing parameters to give specifics on what the caller wants. And the caller will usually get something back. It will Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 10, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Why of why would it be in WIE?

I was in triage today, and we were looking at a bug. I can't remember what the bug was. Oh yeah, I remember. The Windows Reliability Wizard, when it is done running, puts up a report. The bug was a specific scenario where the report's information was Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 10, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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UCS-2 to UTF-16, Part 8: It's the end of the string as we know it (and I feel ellipses)

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 Tuesday, December 09, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Yes, Virginia, there is a plate of shrimp

In response to yesterday's blog ( The "plate of shrimp" theory explains it ), a depressing number of people admitted via the Contact link that they did not understand the reference.... In this case, n>0 would be depressing, but it was actually more Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 09, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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The "plate of shrimp" theory explains it

There is an old expression about how when it is time to railroad, people railroad (I've mentioned this issue before ). Others think of this as the plate of shrimp theory (if they are fans of the movie Repo Man , that is -- if so, they are cool). Anyway, Read More...
Posted Monday, December 08, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Lt is TC (and TC is Title Case, or Total Crap -- take your pick!)

Jason's question was: The Unicode "Lt" character category -- this is the "title case" character category. It looks like the .Net BCL exposes this but the Win32 API doesn't. Am I correct in this? Thanks. Yes, Jason is spot on here. Like much of the Unicode Read More...
Posted Monday, December 08, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Sorting "Collate" all out

It was recently suggested to me that the terms COLLATION and COLLATE are confusing to people. Not people over here, I'd guess. And probably not so much the people who work in SQL Server or Access or really any database program -- anyone who places so Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 06, 2008 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

"If you haven't had sex is six months..." the IM read

The mail I got the other day from Brett was pretty amusing (reposted uncensored with his permission, with no hint as to whether he was Anonymous1 or Anonymous2: Regards this conversation … anonymized for obvious reasons … Anonymous 1 [10:09 AM]: If you Read More...
Posted Friday, December 05, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

It isn't really RED versus GREEN

So the other day a bunch of people were talking about stuff that was GREEN and stuff that was (RED)™ . The (RED)™ thing you can read about here . They are working to solve big problems -- getting antiretroviral medicine to the people dying of AIDS in Read More...
Posted Friday, December 05, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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UCS-2 to UTF-16, Part 7: If it makes the SQL Server columns too small then it made the Oracle columns either too smallER or too smallEST

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 Thursday, December 04, 2008 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

ImmGetDescription: another casualty of the IMM to TSF migration

VB expert and long time compatriot/comrade Bill McCarthy asked over in the Suggestion Box: Hey Michka, Can you tell us why ImmGetDescription seems to return zero length on Vista ? Is it broken ? Thanks. It's funny how many people still know me as Michka Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 04, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

From I SCOOT to IBOT, #8 of ?? (On redefining the ideal kissing height)

Yet another IBOT blog -- feel free to ignore if they aren't your thing... Prior blogs in the series here and here and here and here and here and here and here . I have given many reasons that that I feel the iBOT has really changed not just my life but Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 03, 2008 6:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Want to hear about a cool new typographic convention? Khmer, and I'll tell you about it...

Now lots of people have already been talking about cool changes to fonts in Windows 7, such as blogs like Long Zheng's Improvements to fonts in Windows 7 , which talk about some of the long-awaited updates to the Fonts folder that will make so much of Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 03, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

From I SCOOT to IBOT, #7 of ?? (Unintended movement of the joystick will result in unintended movement of the product)

Prior blogs in the series here and here and here and here and here and here . There has been a question about the steering of the IBOT that I have been trying to explain. I have kind of given up. Though I do notice some information in the instruction Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 02, 2008 2:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

IsCrAndLfComplex or what?

The question from the other day from Patrick was: I have a class defined as public class Foo { private string name = "a\r\nb\r\nc"; public string Name { get { return this.name; } set { this.name = value; } } } When I push object foo:Foo into a property Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 02, 2008 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
 
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