What is the 1033 directory or the 0409 folder?
Ξ April 28th, 2006 | → | ∇ Tips, Techniques and Technologies |
Directories with one or more of these numbers probably litter your hard drive. Microsoft Office has them all over the place (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\1033). If you have installed the Plus pack, you will have a your theme files in C:\WINDOWS\Resources\1033. The .Net framework probaly installed a 1033 folder and the seach assistant has by default on my PC a C:\WINDOWS\srchasst\mui\0409. Your PC may have different numbers such as 1031 or 2057 on these directories.
For years I’ve wondered what the 1033 direcotry was. A search for that number reveals it is associated with localization settings. 1033 is a Locale ID or known more succicntly as a LCID.
So, if you look at Microsoft’s locale identification here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/882ca1eb-81b6-4a73-839d-154c6440bf70.asp
You can see that 1033 (0409 in hex) is United states English, my locale.
English has the following sub languages
us 1033
gb 2057
au 3087
ca 4105
[and many more]
There’s obviously a patter there. 1033 is fairly close to 1024. So, if we subtract out 1024, we get 9. Is 9 associated with English some how?
A Google for Language English 0×09 says it is… http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/translations/language_ids.html
which reveals sublanguages
http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/translations/language_ids.html#sec
0×01 SUBLANG_ENGLISH_US English (US)
0×02 SUBLANG_ENGLISH_UK English (UK)
0×03 SUBLANG_ENGLISH_AUS English (Australian)
0×04 SUBLANG_ENGLISH_CAN English (Canadian)
So how do we get 2057 for GB? Well, it’s pretty close to 2048 and the sublang is 2 so let’s try:
LCID := (1024 * SubLang) + MajorLanguage;
Yep! That did it!
So, my friend over at 404.de probably has something like:
(1024 * 1 (de-DE)) + 7 (German)
1031
Interesting. I’d figured it had something to do with localization but I wasn’t sure.
I also found a MSDN blog that confirms all of this…
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/06/09/151689.aspx
Well, question answered.