M
Michael Kaplan
archives.miloush.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2016
Archive of Michael Kaplan's blog on Windows internationalization, Unicode, and text handling, kept after he died in 2015.
What HN saysCommenters call his blog great and useful, and link the archive for Unicode and collation details after Microsoft removed the original.
17HN people shared it
16linked it in comments
1stories submitted
2story points
1 year agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Archive4 people · first shared 2019
- 217 4699412 people · first shared 2019
- 329 3632082 people · first shared 2020
- 4What do you get when you combine a base character with a buttload of diacritics?1 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 521 99827321 people · first shared 2020
- 625 83347961 people · first shared 2021
- 730 7783451 people · first shared 2017
- 804 87706688562671971901 people · first shared 2020
- 921 64566091 people · first shared 2018
- 1006 3680811 people · first shared 2019
- 1112 70624581 people · first shared 2016
- 1231 3447391 people · first shared 2025
- 1314 6657141 people · first shared 2019
- 1413 12752921 people · first shared 2023
- 1504 6560511 people · first shared 2019
What HN people wrote when they linked it
int_19h · 2022-06-19
Many of the people were no longer at Microsoft when the migration happened, but their blogs were no less useful for that.
And some weren't even alive. Michael Kaplan and his amazing blog about internationalization and Unicode comes to mind - thankfully, other people have archived it: http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/
juped · 2019-08-04
Michael Kaplan's blog was indeed great; Microsoft took it down, then he started blogging elsewhere, then he unfortunately died in 2015, taking his second blog with him. Happily, archives are available at http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/
yuhong · 2018-08-01
I know about that one where the source was taken down. My favorite is Skype however where they used to use SYSENTER directly and read your BIOS using NTVDM: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=27
Not a bug in Skype, but still interesting: http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2007/11/21/6456609.html
bawolff · 2025-05-19
Here is a blog post talking about it https://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2004/12/31/344739.html
Or a more technical version at https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Backward
Another case that is kind of weird is thai https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Rearrangement
lifthrasiir · 2024-01-12
Note that Michael Kaplan's original blog ceased to exist after he died and MS "renewed" MSDN blogs, but the archive is still available [1].
[1] https://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/
Arainach · 2023-09-24
Decades of binaries are in use doing something like
```
wchar_t filename[MAX_PATH];
CreateFileW(...)
```
in both first part and third party Windows code, often in deep callstacks passing file names around. Changing the length requires fixing them all.
See comments in https://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/12/13/1275292.html
mananaysiempre · 2022-07-25
There is a more-or-less comprehensive archive[1] up to 2019 (which should probably be scraped and hoarded). The article in question is there, comments included[2].
Side note: Michael Kaplan’s blog, which Microsoft took down in a remarkably shameful manner, has also been archived[3], while Eric Lippert reposted (most of?) his old articles on his personal WordPress instance[4].
[1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/index.htm
[2] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20110921_226_why_do_win…
[3] http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/
[4] https://ericlippert.com/
jmiskovic · 2021-05-15
I appreciate the responsibility for maintaining backward compatibility, but I got a different vibe from that blog post.
http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2008/03/25/8334796.html
djur · 2020-10-31
There are swastikas facing both directions as religious symbols, but not angled Hakenkreuz like the Nazis tended to use. There also isn't a fasces or anything like that, although I feel like that's a less widely recognized symbol (and of course it is used in non-fascist contexts as well).
Probably the most interesting political symbol in Unicode is the Emblem of Iran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblem_of_Iran
It's referred to officially as "FARSI SYMBOL", which apparently was a euphemism chosen because during ISO standardization of Unicode the original name "SYMBOL OF IRAN" was deemed unacceptable. As a logo, it wouldn't make it into the standard today, but nobody knows how it originally got in there:
http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/29/363208.html
jjjjoe · 2020-06-28
The "infamous art" was a red screen of death from a beta copy of Windows Longhorn. Apparently the blog post was in the middle of the negative news cycle about Longhorn and his posting the RSOD didn't help.
That blog article is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20170623173912/http://archives.miloush.net…
He blogged about it ten years later at http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2015/09/04/877066885626719…
nl · 2020-06-28
Seems unlikely since he only joined if they would cover it.
http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2010/03/21/9982732.html
gus_massa · 2020-06-28
IIUC the original was moved (aka erased) in a big reorganization of the blogs of Microsoft. I think this is the new version hosted by the author http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/10/349769.html
andyjohnson0 · 2020-05-20
A quick search brought me to [1] which says:
<quote>
As noted by Roozbeh Pournader:
Neither Farsi, nor a symbol. In real life, it is the official emblem of the goverment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Technically that would make it a logo and thus not a suitable candidate for encoding. But Roozbeh also noted:
Exactly. The funny fact is that it has been in Unicode since 1.0...
</quote>
How reliable this is I don't know, but it sounds plausible.
[1] http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/29/363208.html
cesarb · 2019-08-04
Yes, that was it, thanks! It's at http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/14/665714.html (Can the CP_ACP be UTF-8?) which links to http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/02/06/368081.html (Can a codepage be changed? How about which codepage a locale points to?) and http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/04/656051.html (Behind Norman's 'Who needs Unicode?' post).
"It is not possible given both the current architecture (which must work in both user and kernel mode) and also the inherent assumption in several subsystems (like USER) that the ACPs maximum number of bytes per character is 2."
And the #define would have been MB_LEN_MAX.
jodrellblank · 2019-05-30
On Windows the path separator is U+005c, it's only a backslash in most codepages, but not all: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051014-20/?p=33753 which links to a dead link; copy here http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.html
That doesn't change just because Unicode renders individual codepages obsolete, it's now special-cased into Windows that Japanese and Korean situations display U+005c as a currency symbol instead of a backslash.
There's also [System.IO.Path]::AltDirectorySeparatorChar which is `/` because Windows is often fine with / as a path separator as well.
j_s · 2017-07-02
Raymond Chen's Old New Thing covered a similar issue, contrasting NTFS vs. Windows Explorer:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050617-10/?p=35293
He referenced Michael Kaplan's MSDN blog about how Windows Explorer sorts, which took me a while to find:
http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/09/30/778345.html
And there is a KB article about differences between Windows versions:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/319827/the-sort-order-for-fil…
The function is available for use, StrCmpLogicalW:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb759947.aspx