by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2009/08/12 12:41 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2009/08/12/9866743.aspx
The other day I was looking for something.
On the Internet.
You know how that goes, I'm sure.
I didn't find it, though I know it is out there.
You probably know how that goes too.
I tried with both Google and Bing.
Now I'm not a religious nut about either of them like some are; the first search of the day i try both of them and whoever is best in terms of results is my search engine for the rest of the day.
But on this day, neither one found what I was looking for.
They found something else, though.
It was a very old bug.
KB article 115431 (Turkish Character in Directory Name Hangs Windows NT).
This bug was not entirely unique, mind you.
Julie Bennett, the developer at the time whose change (inspired by an attempt to better support Turkish) combined with someone else's use of a CompareString call, was behund it.
It was fixed with the next service pack.
And when I say not unique, I mean it.
The developer directly (in trying to fix this bug even earlier) helped this bug to happen, and at that point the system couldn't fully boot with Turkish settings (some failure trying to open SYSTEM.INI since it was trying to open system.ini, if memory serves).
That one was fixed without ever being released in beta. Before my time either way (just like the one in the KB article).
Then there was another one around the Windows XP timeframe. The Turkish casing results were added to collation and Internet Explorer was broken in some horrendous way.
Well, not horrendous as compared with being unable to boot Windows. But bad.
I was around for that one; while not the one who checked in the fix, I was one of the people who agreed it was time to try and fix the bug, finally.
We were wrong, obviously.
I mean, i was wrong.
Since Internet Explorer is fairly important to a couple of people here. And maybe also in Turkey.
That one was caught during beta too.
And then finally the bug was fixed, in Vista. By adding a new flag so it was opt-in.
NORM_LINGUISTIC_CASING
That one was done in beta and actually did manage to ship.
An nothing hung or crashed or attacked any users.
At least as far as I know, of course. Perhaps the attack was stealth or something. :-)
Anyway, back to that one in the KB article.
What was cool (in the way that a fight at a hockey game is cool), what was different, was that it actually shipped.
International test was not so big back then as it later became.
It reminded me of Not so small as to be internationally stupid, actually.We were even smaller then -- Mini would have loved Microsoft back then we were so small.
It was a much simpler time. Unless you live in Turkey.
I guess we once were small enough to be internationally stupid....
Yuhong Bao on 4 Apr 2013 5:02 PM:
Also, more importantly, Unicode was still relatively new and most software was still using codepages.
referenced by