by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/09/23 23:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/09/23/5086819.aspx
Last week I was talking with Cathy about my post from late last month -- Every character has a story #29: U+1000^H^H^H^H0f40, (TIBETAN or MYANMAR LETTER KA, depending on when you ask) -- and she pointed out that although I did not specifically name her that people would know she did the deed and added the old Tibetan that was never taken out, since she did a lot of that original work.
It gave me pause for a minute -- I admit at first I hadn't really been thinking about it in those terms. Was it her?
Okay, I guess it was. Though I think more people know now that she has pointed out than ever would have realized from my little story....
Of course I had to point out some important truths if we were really going to get the whole story out.
Like the fact that she was an intern at the time.
And it was after she left as an intern yet before she came back as a contractor that the whole "Tibetan Switcheroo" exercise happened, so it wasn't like there was a whole lot she could do when she wasn't even here.
It's also hard to pin the whole Unicode side of the mess on her, since it was really much more an ISO/Unicode issue as part of the merge.
Does anyone ever think that an intern project will stay in the source and be used almost a decade later? That's actually fairly impressive, and the work held up remarkably well over that time (a tribute to both her and Julie, though I daresay few people really noticed that either!).
Anyway, in the end it is one of those embarrassing warts that a complex software project working to implement pieces of a complex (and at the time massively changing) standard, which is kind of funny in retrospect (plus a little funny that Jet and SQL Server still do the old broken thing right now.
But as a project it has held up rather well!
Of course last night I had lot of family members pounce on me about problems with Vista; I should probably talk about those issue too at some point?
It appears to mainly be some appcompat issues, plus the issue mentioned in the MS Knowledge Base article 929734 (You may experience problems after you resume a Windows Vista-based computer from sleep or from hibernation) though even after being given hot fixes for the problem and troubleshooting with people from HP and Dell (for different machines with the same problem) they are still finding the fix elusive.
I guess I am mentally distancing myself from the problems a little since (a) I have never hit them in my own dogfooding on various machines, and (b) it does not appear to be in any code I own or have owned.
But I still want to help them so I am going to see if I can find out what is going on, whether anyone is tracking potential problems with any hot fixes that are out there now. Just because it isn't my fault doesn't mean it isn't my problem, right? :-)
(Warning -- geeking out on Yom Kippur minutia for a moment!)
I also was talking with my father about this tendency that many synagogues seem to be doing where they hold off the final blowing of the Shofar that is supposed to happen during Ne'ilah is delayed until Ma'ariv, mainly to keep people from leaving after Ne'ilah. It just seems kind of shoddy to me, I am sure thy would still have a ten men, and if not then they had already said the Amidah four times that day! Plus the fact that they do not blow the Shofar even in Ne'ilah even though it is after sundown and if they can make an exception to Sabbath rules to say Avinu Malkainu in Ne'ilah to emphasize the repentance, then blowing the Shofar that last time would make a great bit of punctuation on the argument! But I doubt I have the strength in me to convince anyone about that argument so I guess it is just me grouching off. :-)
By the way, the spell checking software does not recognize Shofar but has an alternate suggestion of Shiva for the word. I don't know quite what to do with that!
Okay, there will be some additional technical posts going up soon, this one turned non-technical awful fast!
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