by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/10/19 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/10/19/10227349.aspx
Okay, first the joke. My dad sent it to me....
An Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, a Latvian, a Turk, a German, an Indian, several Americans (including a southerner, a New Englander, and a Californian) an Argentinean, a Dane, an Australian, a Slovakian, an Egyptian, a Japanese, a Moroccan, a Frenchman, a New Zealander, a Spaniard, a Russian, a Guatemalan, a Colombian, a Pakistani, a Malaysian, a Croatian, a Uzbek, a Cypriot, a Pole, a Lithuanian, a Chinese, a Sri Lankan, a Lebanese, a Cayman Islander, a Ugandan, a Vietnamese, a Korean, a Uruguayan, a Czech, an Icelander, a Mexican, a Finn, a Honduran, a Panamanian, an Andorran, an Israeli, a Venezuelan, a Fijian, a Peruvian, an Estonian, a Brazilian, a Portuguese, a Liechtensteiner, a Mongolian, a Hungarian, a Canadian, a Moldovan, a Haitian, a Norfolk Islander, a Macedonian, a Bolivian, a Cook Islander, a Tajikistani, a Samoan, an Armenian, a Aruban, an Albanian, a Greenlander, a Micronesian, a Virgin Islander, a Georgian, a Bahaman, a Belarusian, a Cuban, a Tongan, a Cambodian, a Qatari, an Azerbaijani, a Romanian, a Chilean, a Kyrgyzstani, a Jamaican, a Filipino, a Ukrainian, a Dutchman, a Ecuadorian, a Costa Rican, a Swede, a Bulgarian, a Serb, a Swiss, a Greek, a Belgian, a Singaporean, an Italian, a Norwegian and 47 Africans walk into a fine estaurant....
The maître d' scrutinizes the group one by one and bars their entrance saying, Sorry, you can't come in here without a Thai."
:-)
So, now that you have Thai on your mind....
I wrote it just the other day near the end of June.
An irresistible force walks into an immovable object (aka the Thai that binds us), I mean.
You know, the thing about the PUA character hidden on the Thai Pattachote keybord:
After due and careful consideration, the campaign to remove the PUA looks like it will win over the rule about changing a keyboard.
But the important question then is what to put there insead....
Like there is the link to the Oracle site (http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19253-01/817-2521/asian.supported.locales-246/index.html) that appears to be Phinthu -- U+0e3a.
Or Peter found another possibility:
This site, which sells keycap stickers, shows a Pattachote layout with basic keys plus three extras not found on all hardware. One has nikahit with nothing on its shifted state. There isn’t any phintu or lakkangyao, though both are very rarely used characters....I’d probably replace the PUA code point with lakkangyao: I think there’s more likelihood of someone typing that than phintu. E.g., you need to type it if you’re enumerating the complete alphabet, but not phintu.
Fair enough, perhaps lakkangyao sounds unreasonable.
I'll run it up the flapole and see if anyone salutes it....
Kemp on 19 Oct 2011 8:37 AM:
Is the "47 Africans" a joke within a joke? I don't get where it's coming from. For those guessing "a lazy way of having one from each country without listing them", there are 54 countries in Africa (that was my first guess so I checked).
Azarien on 19 Oct 2011 12:32 PM:
I remember a major (or should I say, CAPITAL) change in "Polish (programmers)" keyboard between Windows 3.11 and Windows 95. The 3.x version ignored Caps-Lock state for AltGr-ed characters, making typing in capitals awkward. It was clearly a bug, and the change was very good.