ZunE ??????? ??? ??????? ???? (aka SIAO to Zune: Web sites can support Unicode now)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/01/10 10:16 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/01/10/7002533.aspx

I don't actually get a whole lot of music from the online store, but I do get some (mostly the random stuff Erik has me listen to when I scoot by his office -- most of which is so awful that I would be ashamed to buy a CD and the online Zune store gives me the same sense of empowerment as someone trying to buy porn gets from web sites so they don't have to be caught in a neighborhood store?).

Anyway, after I got the Russian song via wireless from Sergey the other day, apparently a message was sent that I found when I looked to the online site, the screen shot is provided below (presumably the message is to help me get more songs from the album if I wanted to):

the time of the message is exactly when the wireless transfer happened and the character counts in the words are identical, so I am pretty sure they are related (and my fluency in the nature of reading the dialect of question mark is assured)....

The actual title in Russian? Well there was the screenshot before. The text on the screen is something like this:

Of course, none of these words find any hits in the Zune Marketplace, either alone or all together:

Though it is rather amusing to note that it normalied the case as part of the search.

So perhaps the message was just trying to tell me that it could not find the song?

Luckily the web was able to help here -- 55 hits on Google looking for "" and 77 hits on Live Search, with Live having the Victor Berovsky Wikipedia article at #2 so I think they won this one.

Tjhough the Zune Marketplace couldn't find his name either. I think I am sensing a pattern here....

I have resisted installing the iTunes app that the Apple Updates application keeps trying to get me to install, but maybe I should install it to see if the song or album could be found there. The Zune folks should hurry up if they want to keep me resisting the temptation, as it is starting to feel like the Apple updater is mocking me.

Now, looking back to the web site issue, this is a great example of the kind of problem you can hit when you not design your software/product to support Unicode and be properly internationalized from the beginning.

In a world where the first version calls a feature out of scope and everyone is so busy trying to ship that the undone list equals at best the postponed list and at worst the uninvestigated one, it is way too easy have a ton of these kinds of bugs lurking around when you end up starting to support more

The name of Zune contains a secret code. Spelled backwards and deciphered it says:

ENUZ = Enter Non-Unicode Zone

Michael,

unfortunately the 'internationalisation/localisation comes later' mindset seems to be very typical for countries where English is the primary language.

Of course, by then it is even more work to shove in the framework and supporting code.

Well, it may be typical in some parts of Microsoft; but it is decidedly atypical in others...

i just want to see if there is any good aka here that can run things together with me

Not sure what you mean, Mike?

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