Font of Knowledge

There are many levels of stupidity. Drinking too much on a work night is just plain stupid. Drinking until 3:00a.m., then coming home, turning on all the lights, having another beer while playing computer games with the volume turned up to 11, waking up the guy who drank too much and has to go to work in the morning to pay the bills is really incredibly stupid. But there's a level of stupidity so mind-bogglingly high, so gobsmackingly, migraine-causing, teeth-gnashingly extreme that it makes Steve Martin's character in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels look like the Oracle of Delhi in comparison. I shall let Harish explain it for me in a ticket copied verbatim with only identifying bits munged.

Harish works for $BigBank. $BigBank decided that it would probably be a good idea if the Japanese customers could type in their native language. $BigBank got all Unicodified with the help of our guys on the scene. Huzzah! But then they left $BigBank to their own devices, said devices being sniveling, drooling incompetents who probably type with a pointer stick attached to their safety caps.

We're rolling out $YourBigApp to multiple countries (including Asian countries) and hence, there is a need to enable capability to enter and retrieve multi-lingual characters. To do so, we've made the required changes in all templates by mentioning 'Arial Unicode MS', wherever 'Arial' was specified as the font. It works and we're at UAT stage now.

However, we've observed a strange behavior wherein a few testers reported that they are not able to view the special language characters and instead viewed junk characters (Screen shot 1 attached).

On further investigation, we found that there is a font (Arial Unicode MS), which should be installed on tester's machines. It was installed on their machines, but we copied this font from other tester's machine, where language characters were appearing correctly. On doing so, testers, who reported the problem, were able to view the expected characters (Screen shot 2 attached).

However, to determine the root cause, now when we replace fonts to old fonts, the problem does not persist. We don't know that what has fixed the issue? Is it that when we copied the fonts first time, issue was fixed permanently? Now those testers see junk characters only when we 'Remove' the font altogether from their respective machines. What are your thoughts and what should we take into account while rolling out the application?

Please note that on a Windows 2000 machine, we're navigating to Start->Settings->Control Panel->Fonts to perform the font copy-paste operations.

I was too stunned to smash my head into my desk to relieve the pain. All I could think of was this bash quote. Why is this guy alive? How the fuck does this man remember to take the fork out of his mouth before chewing? How does he remember to breathe in?

If you missed it for all the words in there, let me highlight the important bit:
Is it that when we copied the fonts first time, issue was fixed permanently? Now those testers see junk characters only when we 'Remove' the font altogether from their respective machines.

He installed the font and everything worked. Then he deleted the font and it stopped working. And this surprises him, the "system administrator".

Perhaps this will stop the J'accuse comments about my intolerance. Enough's enough! Give me my fucking Root Cause: 17-Fuckwit already!

Screenshots, Part Duh

My attempts to sleep last night were constantly interrupted by the sound of V1 attacks caused by the almost futile attempts of someone who shares the bed with me to continue being able to breathe. I'm feeling some effects but it's not quite the hell I'd expected.

The building is taking care of that, though. It's getting too hot to think in here in $MegaCorp's giant greenhouse, and being on the sunny side doesn't help. Why don't I move to the dark wing? Ripa sits there.

ATTENTION HELP-SEEKING INFIDELS:
When I send you an explicit command to be run, follow my directions.

"Open a command window (Start: Run: cmd) and execute the following statement:
dir c:\windows\fonts >> fonts.txt

How difficult is that?

Quite, apparently. I knew there was a problem yesterday when I saw the size of the file they sent back. We all know how bloated Microsoft Word files can be, but the text listing of a couple hundred fonts can hardly bulk up a doc file to 2MB.















Screenshots. Of the fonts directory. With icons displayed rather than details.

This one's both not quite as bad as the last time and at the same time worse. The pictures were at least somewhat legible and certainly a more managable size, but they give me absolutely no information whatsoever about the fonts. Nothing. Names are cut off and there's no indication of file sizes.

I managed to convince them that I actually needed a text listing and asked them again to please run the command as I'd asked before. What was waiting for me when I got in today? Another doc file, but at 30K, it's possible they did what I'd asked.











The font I need information on is Batang which sounds remarkably similar to the noise my head makes as I thump it repeatedly into that spot in front of my keyboard.

x-posted from HuSi, where there's an important beef poll

No Narrow Escape

There are a few benefits to not being single, physical comforts ranking rather high among them. There are also the downsides, and her shitty immune system is one of them. At this time tomorrow I expect to be laying there feeling like death and unable to breathe, much like she was this morning when I left for the office. This is not the sort of time off work I look forward to, and almost as bad as feeling sick as a dog is knowing that within the next 12 hours that's how I'm going to feel.

I wouldn't have come in today but for a couple conf calls which are simply easier to do when I have three work computers in front of me and I don't have to access virtual servers through a VPN. Connecting through the VPN at home on my personal boxen would kill some of those torrents as well as my FTP server. $MegaCorp blocks everything.

Everything except fuckwits.

we are currently use version 3.4.g, we have installed new server where are 9 languages, we have an issue with JPN. JPN server comes up , but all the screen Names are showing up as ??? marks however the data in the data bse shows up in Japaneese language

we checked all the components and check files and it shows all the latest pacthes has been applied as below

please adivce on this issue

A glance at the screenshots tells me all I need to know. Where characters should be are boxes. Incompatible, non-compliant font. They never modified the templates to use "Arial Unicode MS". I sent him easy-to-follow instructions. It's nothing but search and replace in a few text files.

We see your answer and making changes to all template file but see screenshot we are still have problem. We need solution because this is wrong with not seeing the texts.

That's unpossible. There's only one thing that causes boxes to be displayed instead of characters: the wrong font. Either they don't have a font which can display the character (also unpossible since they're using a native Japanese OS) or they specified the wrong font. That's it. There are no other possibilities. If you see boxes instead of characters, you have one of these two simple font problems. Clearly search for 'Arial' and replace ALL with 'Arial Unicode MS' wasn't complicated enough for them and therefore couldn't possibly be the solution, and I'm betting they got clever.

All I need is the font directory listing and templates. Nothing else unless they did something seriously fucknutted like changing the font substitution list in the registry. Still, they've already shown themselves to be thoroughly incapable of following simple instructions so it's time to put them to work and add eggs and milk. Along with what I actually needed I got server logs, screenshots, a registry export (just in case), a database extract... all in all about 600MB, of which I actually needed less than 14KB.

And it was right there.

{ font-family: ‚l‚r ‚oƒSƒVƒbƒN, Arial Narrow,Helvetica,Sans-Serif; font-size: 8pt; }

Mangled thanks to their editing it in fucking Notepad and saving it as an ANSI text file rather than Unicode. I recognised the mangled bit quickly: a Japanese font. Still, I had to unmangle it before I could properly chew them out.

Step 1: Open the file with a hex editor:
0000008bh: 2D 66 61 6D 69 6C 79 3A 20 82 6C 82 72 20 82 6F ; -family: ‚l‚r ‚o
0000009bh: 83 53 83 56 83 62 83 4E 2C ; ƒSƒVƒbƒN,

Step 2: Remove familiar and unnecessary crap which served to delimit the mangled garbage:
82 6C 82 72 20 82 6F = ‚l‚r ‚o
83 53 83 56 83 62 83 4E = ƒSƒVƒbƒN

Step 3: String the useful hex together:
82 6C 82 72 20 82 6F 83 53 83 56 83 62 83 4E

Step 4: Guess which encoding they're using
For Japanese, it's usually going to be Shift-JIS or Unicode. If it was the latter you'd see high bytes in the $30s, $40s, $50. These are all in the $80s which screams "Microsoft codepage 932: Shift-JIS"

Step 5: String bytes pairs together and hope your endianness is correct:
826C 8272 20 826F 8353 8356 8362 834E

Hmm... there's a space in there. I'm thinking this will be "MS Mincho" or "MS Gothic", typed by some halfwit in half-width.

Step 5: Character look-up:
At least Microsoft is helpful with I18N issues. They have a neat chart for codepage 932. First byte takes me to plane 82, position 6C: an "M", but not a standard ASCII "M". That would've made sense. No, this is a Japanese "Fullwidth Latin capital letter M" which has little in common with a normal 0x4D ASCII M. An "S" comes six positions later and I can count well enough in hex that I don't need to look up the second byte.

Then there's that "20", a space. Which fucktard out there decided computer font names should have spaces?

Working through it all I ended up with "MS Pゴシック", the "Gothic" font I expected. And right behind it, "Arial Narrow". Why? Because, well... maybe because Japanese people have some weird halfwidth font fetish.

I thought about the time I'd spent on this ticket so far and how much more time I was likely to have to waste in explaining to them what they needed to do, namely, use the right fucking font, stop adding wrong ones, and save text files in the correct code page.

Dear Sparky-san,

Please zip up and send me ALL of the HTML and CSS files from $Our$Big$App for analysis.

Love,
REC

"For analysis" prevents questions.

Two days later they sent what I'd asked for. I fixed the dozen or so files which specified fonts inside 10 minutes. And as I finish writing this I'm confronted with the fuckwitted subject of tomorrow's entry if I manage to get out of bed. ファクヰト everywhere. ルウトコズ:十七
x-posted from HuSi, where there's a pointless poll.