Sometimes I don't get it. Why must programmers pretend like it's 1980 and that they don't have to care about things like character sets? People around the world use programs today, it's true! And they don't all speak the same language you do. They might not even use the same characters!

Yet today, so many apps just screw up when you try to use Unicode with them. I'm used to seeing English apps act like this. For instance, every file sharing program I've ever seen. Type in characters that aren't in the default codepage, and it doesn't know what to do with them: zero results.

Today's lame award goes to Filebada, over at www.soribada.com. I downloaded and ran it and it tries to install to C:\program files\<garbage here>\. Come on! What happens is that it has it's name encoded in codepage 949, but when those same bytes are displayed in Latin-1, you get all sorts of fun stuff like the 3/4 sign, the degree sign, etc. Is it that hard to use Unicode these days?

The only way that I know how to get around this problem is to change my Regional Settings to use the codepage desired for all non-Unicode apps. But then half of my other apps stop working correctly (and the fonts get screwed up as well). Does anyone know of a way to tell Windows to use a certain codepage for a specific application?