by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/09/11 17:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/09/11/8945542.aspx
I had somebody ask me what I thought was "best in show" at this last IUC that I was at (and whether I thought it was my presentation).
No, I explained, my talk was interesting and there are several other interesting issues that could get a lot of benefit from the same approach due to the complex nature of the problems -- for example all of the following and the relationship to Unicode and internationalization (only some of which I'd be qualified to present but all of which I'd love to see):
and more. There is something about the "dense with information but slightly irreverent" look at a problem that I think can be very appealing. :-)
But I did not claim it was best in show.
For that I pointed out We're "World-Ready"… What does this really mean?, a talk given by Loïc Dufresne de Virel, Michael Manca, and Cory Whitney (all from Intel). The description of the talk:
Proper internationalization is routinely listed in most software requirement documents, but most development and validation teams are in the dark when the time comes to implementing and testing this basic requirement. Based on real software bugs investigated by Intel's localization team, this session presents the typical internationalization issues that developers encounter every day, but often struggle to properly address in a proactive fashion, prior to an actual localization attempt. Regional settings, language selection, encodings, and UI design are among the topics that will go under the microscope in a very practical way, exploring the probable causes of those issues, along with possible solutions and best known methods implemented at Intel.
Now at its heart this presentation was a bug postmortem of a handpicked set of internationalization/localizability bugs from a myriad of causes and in a large number of different technologies. I even came back with some bugs to get reported in Microsoft....
Such a simple concept, and one that anyone working in the area could imagine that they themselves could do.
They might to be as funny or as entertaining (I know I probably wouldn't be!), but the concept is one anyone can really get their heads around. And everyone was right there in this postmortem, sharing the same joys and pains that we feel ourselves as we fix or postpone the fix of the bugs.
The enthusiasm and energy in the room was undeniable, and the only real complaint I had was that it ended too soon since I wanted more of it!
Perhaps the things that I think are among the best are the things that I could possibly do but I think someone else can do better? :-)
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# John Cowan on 11 Sep 2008 6:12 PM:
Are there slides for your talk available?
# Michael S. Kaplan on 12 Sep 2008 1:43 AM:
I'll see about putting them up somewhere.
# Loïc Dufresne de Virel on 12 Sep 2008 12:09 PM:
Wow... coming from Michael Kaplan himself, recent recipient of the Bulldog Award for outstanding indidual contributions to I18N and Unicode, those comments mean a lot to all of us working in Localization @ Intel.
We had fun preparing this talk, I guess it showed when we delivered it.
One quick technical note about the Korean font issue (Johab) - we mentioned it last year (IUC 31) in our "Making the Intel Viiv Software Unicode" as an example of possible corruption that might happen despite the fact that at that point our software was supporting Unicode. Really, the issue resulted from a combination of factor (logical font defined using Johab_Charset, presence of Arial Unicode MS on the system, and KOR resource files saved as UTF-8). The conversion from "1 leading byte + 1 trailing byte" to "3 blocks of 5 bits + 1 flag bit" is obviously not a trivial one. ;-)
A bientôt.
# Michael S. Kaplan on 12 Sep 2008 5:04 PM:
Hey, the praise was deserved here, so you were the ones doing the hard work. :-)
And I'll be blogging soon about both the MAC address issue and the Johab issue, both are incredibly interesting....
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