It's not my fault!

Well, I sorta blew Blog month... but not on purpose. I was attempting to update my blog last night over the wireless while watching Penny get punted... but I could not maintain a wireless signal. I really need to snake some CAT5 upstairs and put the access point up there, since that is where I use the laptop the most. I have a couple of dead areas by the fireplace and on the third floor.

Anyways, work is starting to get frustrating. I am doing this i18n stuff and finding that we opened up a whole new can of worms with unicode fonts for things like chinese. It is easy to write intelligent routines to check and recheck values in the utilities package... but it totally SUCKS when you use a different character set. Let me give you an example. Passwords are in 7bit universal ascii. Of course, UI components in Java are in unicode. So a password of "foo" is something like \u4e00\u4e00\u4e00 (not the real conversion but you get the idea), and when crypted will have a TOTALLY different key combo then actually hitting f, o, and o again. *sigh* VPN tunnels need 7bit ascii as tunnels can only support letters and an _. So guess what.. not supported in the chinese character set. So now what? Well thats the frustration. Try finding good articles on this. I don't actually SPEAK chinese or READ it.. so I need to have someone translate everything. Including any correspondance with Sun China. Not fun.

So I can support normal keystrokes AND chinese characters on the UI... but I have no idea what a chinese keyboard types out. Are numers the same? Extended characters? And of course, no one is willing to buy me a chinese computer with a Chinese version of XP to let me find out. *sigh*