Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Wizard needs ninja skillz, badly.

MEMO TO ALL EMPLOYEES

Please remember that Section 4c of the $MegaCorp employment contract specifically prohibits bringing weapons or objects which could be used as a weapon onto any $MegaCorp premises at any time. For further information on $MegaCorp policies concerning weapons and employee safety please click here.


Technically I'm banned from the office because I'd be happy to beat quite a few of my cow-orkers senseless with my laptop and strangle them with a USB cable.

Some cow-orker decided to ask a specific question of a general audience rather than contacting the I18N team who actually know their asses from a hole in the ground when it comes to what characters might be included in a Chinese codepage. She's new and can be forgiven for this. The super senior PM guy who doesn't know diddly about things international or language-specific is another matter.

When asked about a Chinese system needing to also display English his response was "This sounds almost impossible! You have to find a codepage that'll have both the English and Chinese character sets in." Which is every single fucking Chinese code page in existence, from MS936 & 950 to 2312 and GB18030. ALL codepages have 7-bit ASCII as the first 128 characters, even all the Unicode translatíons.

Now his ignorance of this isn't the biggest problem (even though he should have passed on the question to the person in his department who actually works with I18N). It's that he then argued when corrected by the guy his own colleague asks such questions of: me.
I might expect this to work in a Unicode deployment, but anything else I'm fairly sure would fail.
Because he's an expert in... nothing, actually. He deals mainly with Java and scripting shit and even then, despite being Senior Director, has no actual specialisation other than spreading misinformation and pissing me the fuck off.

Which goes a long way to explaining why $MegaCorp needs to have a written, continuously publicised anti-weaponry policy.

EVERY SINGLE COMPUTER CODEPAGE IN USE TODAY -- EVEN ON MAINFRAMES AND (cr)APPLES -- INCLUDES BASIC ASCII.

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In compliance with $MegaCorp's general policies as well as my desire to
continue living under a roof and not the sky or a bus shelter, I add this:

DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed on this blog are my own and
do not necessarily reflect the views of $MegaCorp, even if every
single one of my cow-orkers who has discovered this blog agrees with me
and would also like to see the implementation of Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit.