Microsoft has nice tools to implement "global" web sites. Unfortunately they overuse the technique most of the time.

I was looking for an alternative to SkypeOut calls to call my daughter cheaper while she's on vacation in Germany and I've read several nice opinions about pc-to-phone calls in Live Messenger. So I went and installed it. But I couldn't find the option to call a phone from it. I started looking around wondering WTF and then I checked this page called "Call"

Do you notice anything wrong with this picture? The URL is "threewaystocall", it says "Get big savings on phone calls around the world" and then there are TWO options: video calls and pc-to-pc calls. And where are the PC-to-Phone calls?

If you dig through the help you can find a small sentence on the "Call a contact's phone or computer with Windows Live Call" page that says "This feature is not available in some markets."

I assume that I'm part of that "some market" but wouldn't it be clearer and less awkward if they've just placed an asterisk on the "threewaystocall" page saying that "PC-to-Phone calls is not available in some markets/your market" rather than just hiding it? I know it looks cool on paper that you can report to someone that you can automatically detect user's "market" and display content accordingly and it's a nice "demo" feature but sometimes old-school remarks work better.

For the last couple of months every time I clicked a link to some band's MySpace page I was presented with site's GUI in Spanish. I thought that there was something wrong with my browser settings or something and since I don't use MySpace for anything more than described above I wasn't paying much attention.

Then one of my co-workers told me about the same issue and another one confirmed from different location. Apparently for MySpace's AI all non-US IP addresses belong to Mexicans. And there's no easy way to switch language. There's a tiny "MySpace International" link at the bottom (after gazillion of ugly banners, friends, etc.) where you can switch from United States (Latino) to United States (English).

Way to go. MySpace is officially not only the ugliest but stupidest social network out there.

It appears that there's no way to set default file encoding for new files created in Visual Studio 2005 through "Options" and it will save your files in UTF only if it encounters characters it can't save in your systems default non-unicode locale.

What does it mean? It means that if you develop a simple web site in a language of your system (Lithuanian in my case) and you hardcode some local text in your .aspx it will save in non-unicode encoding (Windows-1257 in my case) and when you move it to the server (or other computer) with other default non-unicode encoding all your localized text will be ruined.

What can be done about it? It looks like we have 3 options:

1. manually save or re-save your files using "Save with Encoding";
2. change your system language to "English" in control panel (this is kind of wrong);
3. re-save Visual Studio templates (in Common 7\IDE\ItemTemplates) in UTF-8 with signature

Only the last option somewhat solves the problem but you'll have to go through all of the templates you ever plan to use and hope that this doesn't break anything.

Hopefully this issue will be addressed in VS2008. I had no time to play with the betas yet, so I have no idea if there are any changes in this area. Can anybody confirm this?