by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/02/06 09:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/02/06/7490841.aspx
Once you get a reputation among your readers, you can find them emailing you as they run into items of interest on the web, or just the opportunity to talk about your own oddities....
Like when fellow MSFTie Kim Hamilton will claim in Facebook that I'm the most likely to have the answer to my obscure glob loc question in his blog or to have a unicode character of the day in his blog.
Or when an xkcd comic comes out that has a Unicode joke in it and you get six emails about it within five hours (Tobi, you were actually first!).
Here it is:
(Click on the comic to go the site, and as with all xkcd comics, the ToolTip is critical to the joke!)
Within NameList.txt, there is a nice explanation of them:
@ Noncharacters
@+ These codes are intended for process-internal uses, but are not permitted for interchange.
FDD0 <not a character>
FDD1 <not a character>
FDD2 <not a character>
FDD3 <not a character>
FDD4 <not a character>
FDD5 <not a character>
FDD6 <not a character>
FDD7 <not a character>
FDD8 <not a character>
FDD9 <not a character>
FDDA <not a character>
FDDB <not a character>
FDDC <not a character>
FDDD <not a character>
FDDE <not a character>
FDDF <not a character>
FDE0 <not a character>
FDE1 <not a character>
FDE2 <not a character>
FDE3 <not a character>
FDE4 <not a character>
FDE5 <not a character>
FDE6 <not a character>
FDE7 <not a character>
FDE8 <not a character>
FDE9 <not a character>
FDEA <not a character>
FDEB <not a character>
FDEC <not a character>
FDED <not a character>
FDEE <not a character>
FDEF <not a character>
Kind of puts it all in perspective, trying to describe the need to capture text that explains a joke in a comic strip that contains the non-characters in order describe them, in plain text, huh? :-)
Sponsorship of blogs by non-characters within Unicode is still a very controversial issue here
Kim Hamilton on 8 Mar 2008 5:07 AM:
now _that's_ obscure...
Michael S. Kaplan on 8 Mar 2008 8:08 AM:
Goodness you are up late, dear!
And a very low key way to point out you have your blog up now, by the way (what normal person clicks on random links?). Welcome to the blogosphere....