19 ms·
People with names that break computers
- mozumder 11y agoLittle Bobby Tables made some new friends.
- FroshKiller 11y agoOne of the applications I work on has a long history of problems handling data for people with the last name Null. I've given feedback on these bugs and make several recommendations for fixing them, but the folks who work on the application framework just...don't care? I don't know. They certainly don't design with exceptions in mind. That's such an alien way of thinking to me. I was taught that 80% of your work is spent handling 20% of the data. Is there something cultural that prevents other programmers from working in exceptions-first mode? Maybe it's just with boring business logic. I've heard that the most robust networking applications are written assuming constant worst-case failure states. Anyone have any insight into this phenomenon? I get that there are practical limits to what you can plan for, but if you're accepting string input, shouldn't you at least be prepared for apostrophes?
- a3n 11y agoI have a one word name. I was recently pulled over for speeding. When I called the court, the ticket had already been dismissed. Because the officer hadn't properly filled out the ticket; he had copied my (one) name from my DL. So, don't fix that particular system, thanks very much.
- thatcherclay 11y agoObligatory: https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
- leni536 11y agohttps://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
- CapitalistCartr 11y agoLittle Bobby Tables https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/ (Edited)
- StefanKarpinski 11y agoWhy does everyone seem to refer to this as "Little Johnny Tables". It's "Little Bobby Tables" – which is so much better.
- CapitalistCartr 11y agoWhoops, right you are.
- msielski 11y agoI had a strange experience where my cable company's mobile app, which streams most channels, was missing audio on a few channels. After escalating the issue to an engineer, he finally got back to us and told us that if a username contained "ts" like mine did this issue would happen. After making a second username without that combination, all worked fine. I'd still like to know what logic in their application would get stumped by these two letters.
- Freak_NL 11y agoImagine the cowboy code responsible for such an abomination of a bug.
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y agoI think I may be turning into a machine myself, because I had to google "cowboy code" thinking it's probably something from the Jargon File. Like, an apocryphal list of error codes and things, hidden in some obscure part of a posix filesystem etc.
- JorgeGT 11y agoIn the context of acoustics, "ts" almost always means time-step (inverse of frequency). But I don't have the faintest idea of how it would collide with the username string :|
- nothrabannosir 11y agoGuessing they're scanning for parameters in a JSON object by doing something like ts = parseInt(jsonstr.indexOf("ts")+2); I wish I didn't come to this guess by seeing it in real code so many times… T_T
- kpil 11y agoI just realized that our codebase is probably relatively ok...
- 11y ago
- Freak_NL 11y agoIn addition to the obligatory little Bobby Tables, this blog post describing the falsehoods programmers believe about names is informative and a must-read for anyone dealing with names in software: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
- ams6110 11y agoIt's linked in the story, too.
- jessriedel 11y agoAir Canada and several other airlines have for several years been unable to read my passport on the automated check in because I have a suffix in my name (II). I am told that "this happens with everyone who has a suffix", which just boggles my mind.
- RijilV 11y agoI have the same situation, though my suffix is less common. My strategy is to drop the suffix when purchasing a ticket, which has mixed results. Some airlines (United) remove the space between my last name and suffix when I do have to use it (International flights) which caused me some angst until I figured it out.
- caseysoftware 11y agoI've run into the same thing on trips to Toronto and Montreal recently. I'm (marginally) glad that I'm not the only one.
- mariodiana 11y agoI realize that the issue of names is complicated when you consider different practices the world over, but is there not some kind of RFC or other specification that people are supposed to follow? How can that be in 2016? The first job I took in IT, after graduating with a liberal arts degree, was in software testing for a company that made point-of-sale systems. Only a month or two out of training I was given the task to test a name and address form. Knowing that quotes were special characters in databases, I tried entering something like O'Connell as a last name. Sure enough, the system broke. I remember filing a snarky bug report about how Irish and Arab people ought to be able to use the form. My point is that testing for quotes and "Null" as a surname isn't some kind of esoteric science. What's wrong with people!
- anon4 11y agoIt's a way to mitigate sql injection attacks when you don't want to pay for a rewrite of the data layer to not communicate with the database by blindly mashing strings together. And don't get me started if your name can't be written in US-ASCII, i.e. if it has weird squiggles above or below the characters or if it's written in gasp cyrillic.
- snacksthecat 11y agoMy cousins have given up and changed their name from O'Keefe to OKeefe to avoid the single quote headache that seems to plague a lot of systems.
- lostlogin 11y agoBy deed poll or just by filling in the form differently? The idea of having to fill in the "have you ever been known by another name" section on forms just looks like a world of pain.
- Symbiote 11y agoAn alternative which is truer to the original would be to use Ó. It means 'grandson of'. But perhaps the other part should also be "deanglicized", giving either Ó Caoimh or Ó Cuív. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Keeffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Keeffe
- ape4 11y agoThis should not be a problem by now. Especially in government databases. Is there a corpus of names that can be used for testing?
- tyleo 11y agoIf these services are evaluating the string in the text field such that it results in the value Null rather than the string "Null" it is concerning. The usibility my be compromised for users with these surnames but I wonder if the security is also compromised via code injection through these fields.
- cafard 11y agoIn Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley mentions the story of an application, written in APL that bombed when it got to Ecuadorean data. Somebody figured out that it read the name "Quito" and processed it as "Quit".
- cdumler 11y agoPeople do no have names that break computers. Programmers believe they have certain structures when they don't then his or her code fails. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
- teej 11y agoFor what it's worth, programmers do not have the tools to perfectly handle the complexity of human language. It's a hard problem.
- Marazan 11y agoA free text entry field would cover almost everyone.
- lostlogin 11y agoCovering almost everyone isn't the problem, it's getting everyone in that is hard. There is a good link in that story about name assumptions. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b.... A free text field doesn't catch everything in that list.
- macintux 11y agoExcept people without a single canonical name, or those with no names. Doesn't solve ordering. Or a few more problems from http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... I'm sure.
- zimpenfish 11y agoWebsites that insist on forcing me to enter a first and last name always get abuse in the latter. What I call myself on websites is my business, not yours.
- 11y ago
- bitslayer 11y agoRandall Munroe numbers his jokes, and so many threads end up with multiple links to the same strip. It will end up like the old joke: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2uuii3/a_man_goes_to_prison_joke_with_two_opposite/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2uuii3/a_man_goes_to... 327!
- dsr_ 11y agoI only recognize 386, but that's "Someone is wrong..." and now you will too.
- tzs 11y agoBreaking computers can be useful. Isaac Asimov had a series of short stories written in the form of conversations between the writer and a friend named George. George claims to have discovered how to summon a demon, and the conversations are about that demon. The demon is not allowed to directly help George, but he will do favors for George's friends. These favors invariably do not turn out good for the friend. Each story is basically George telling the author the tale of one of these favors, and the writer trying to make sure George does not ask the demon to do any favors for the writer. Anyway, in one of the stories George had a friend who wants to be able to do something to have a big positive impact on the world. George told the demon about this, and the demon said he'd help. The next time George encountered that friend, the friend told George that he had been having all kinds of problems with computers. He'd go into his bank to cash a check, and when he'd get to the teller their computer would stop working. And it wasn't just the bank...anyone he encountered who was using a computer would find that their computer crashed when the friend came near. His mere presence seemed to be enough to crash computers. This was, of course, making the friend's life miserable, and this was in the 1980s. If it kept happening it would get even worse, as computers were clearly going to become more and more common in everyday life. George found out from the demon what had happened. The demon had indeed (irreversibly) made it so that computers could not work when the friend was near, in order to grant the wish to make a big positive impact. The demon says that when the friend is an old man humanity will be enslaved by an uprising of intelligent computers, and the friend will be the weapon that humanity will use to defeat the computers and regain freedom.
- formula1 11y agoThis story is great, I want to checkout the author now! The demon seems less of an actual evil being and more as a person who gets excited about awesome stories, uses ying yang guide the vine of destiny. Maybe half expecting a smile only to see horror. I know this is now the best place for poetry, but this story was very fun to read
- lake99 11y agoThis is not Asimov's usual style. The book you should be looking for is "Azazel", later re-packaged as "Magic". It's never establishes that Azazel is a demon. The book vacillates between "demon" and "technologically advanced extraterrestrial being".
- stygiansonic 11y agoMy favourite "real world fails to fit the model we've come up with" is Carmel-by-the-Sea, which has many streets that have no addresses: "To this day, there are still no addresses, parking meters or street lights, and no sidewalks outside of Carmel's downtown commercial area. Those seeking directions receive hints such as “fifth house on the east side of Torres Street, green trim, driftwood fence” or by the legendary names adorning most houses, such as “Hansel” or “Sea Urchin.”" http://www.carmelcalifornia.com/fun-facts-about-carmel.htm http://www.carmelcalifornia.com/fun-facts-about-carmel.htm
- parennoob 11y ago> My favourite "real world fails to fit the model we've come up with" is Carmel-by-the-Sea, which has many streets that have no addresses You might be surprised to learn that in India, all addresses are more or less like this. This is due to the fact that we never ended up with the standardised street numbers and names that a lot of other countries have, and road naming is a highly political thing in India, so a lot of people call roads by colloquial names. A typical address in India goes - House / Building Name (a lot of bungalows in India have names) - Locality - Near [Landmark] - Possibly another Landmark - Road Name - City Name - Post Code - State Name - India
- twic 11y agoQuite a bit of the Arab world is like this too. Some colleagues of mine were working with a Middle Eastern courier firm recently, and it's quite a headache.
- david-given 11y agoI grew up in rural Scotland with an address which was: - House name - Community name - County - SCOTLAND Just the other day I found myself explaining this to a cow orker some ten years younger than me, and they couldn't believe it. "But how did the postman know where the house was without a number?" "They just knew." "What, all of them?" "Yup. Each postman knew their own area." "But how did the post get to that postman? There's no postcode!" "People in the sorting office read the addresses..." We also had a three-digit phone number. (One of the outer isles used to have one-digit phone numbers.)
- silveira 11y agoI have a first name composed of two names, and one of them with an acute accent. This is enough to cause some of my credit cards to be printed with a repeated name because they assume my "second first name" to be a middle name too. The acute accent results in encoding problems once in a while. But nothing compares the problems that people with names longer than 30 characters have to face. Creating a SSN card, or driver license, or pretty much any official document can be very painful. The name does fit in their systems and the attendants just don't know what to do and most of them are very reluctant in using abbreviations. Every programmer should at least read Patrick's article that is cited in the story: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... And if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names.
- isxek 11y agoAnd if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names. I think it depends. Sometimes it's helpful to give them names that are just long enough to make their identities unique, so when they apply for police clearances, for example, they are not mistaken for similarly-named people with criminal records, or even nasty reputations.
- ghaff 11y agoI suspect the worst case is when you have a name that is neither common nor unique that you share with someone who is notorious in some manner. I used to know someone who lived in the same city and shared a name with someone who was in the news for some unsavory activity related to a local sports team. He literally had death threat voicemails left on his phone.
- jonnathanson 11y agoA family member of mine shares a name with a fairly notorious con artist in the SoCal area, who has been convicted multiple times for a series of increasingly big, elaborate, and bizarre frauds. Their names are just unique enough that many people assume my family member is the criminal. Fortunately, the felon was put away for 30+ years recently, so we hope he won't continue to make local headlines.
- Zikes 11y agoI have a coworker whose last name is Corp. He was unable to create a Google+ account for a couple years and had a bit of difficulty with his Facebook account because they assumed he was a business.
- linuxlizard 11y agoHad a friend with last name of "Root". She worked as a UNIX admin back in the day. Had trouble off and on with her name.
- shogun21 11y ago> whoami
- klue07 11y agoHow is Null as a name a problem? Null value and null string are different.
- maccard 11y agoDid you look at the stack overflow link? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-do-i-correctly-pass-the-string-null-an-employees-proper-surname-to-a-so http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-do-i-correctl...
- sevensor 11y agoI received a Dutch surname as a second middle name. I can never use it -- the "Van" alone is enough to break things. But even without "Van", having two middle names usually does not compute. I've seen people who lack middle names entirely have the opposite problem and insert the middle initial "X" just to satisfy the system.
- phillc73 11y agoMy wife and son have no middle name. An ex-girlfriend also had no middle name. I would have thought it's pretty common.
- 5555624 11y agoI commonly see "NMI" for "No Middle Initial."
- rconti 11y agoSounds like NMI actually is TMI. Perhaps you meant NMN?
- scholia 11y agoMight be a factor of certain systems. I was registered with NMI (not having a middle name) on IBM computers in the early 1970s. Not seen it since.... We were still using punch cards back then.
- StephanTLavavej 11y agoStar Trek memorably listed LT CDR NFN/NMI DATA, see the screenshot at http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Data http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Data (third from the top, on the right).
- scholia 11y agoAh, thanks!
- cmdrfred 11y agoIsn't this problem mostly solved by type casting? I've never encountered a problem where 'Null' and Null were the same thing. Is it just shoddy code that runs everything through an eval or lambda?
- rcthompson 11y agoRead the StackOverflow link in the article for an example of how it can happen.
- uremog 11y agoFor anyone wondering about the Hawaiian name: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/31/258673819/hawaiian-woman-gets-ids-that-fit-her-36-character-last-name http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/31/258673819/... Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele, pronounced as: KAY'-ee-hah-nah-EE'-coo-COW'-ah-KAH'-hee-HOO'-lee-heh-eh-KAH'-how-NAH-eh-leh Rough meaning: 'When there is chaos and confusion, you are one that will stand up and get people to focus in one direction and come out of the chaos.' It also references the origins of her and her husband's family."
- mwcampbell 11y agoAlso on the subject of being reckless with strings, I recommend this blog post by Glyph Lefkowitz: https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/data-in-garbage-out.html https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/data-in-garbage-out....
- wodenokoto 11y agoThe official way to transcribe the Danish letter ø into English is OE,and if you scan my passport the ø part of my name will show up as OE, but nobody knows this and the transcription is not clearly visible when looking at the passport. So what should I write when I order a plane ticket? Write an O that the agents looking at my passport expects or the OE that matches what the computer reads?
- HoopleHead 11y agoIt doesn't even have to be an "edge case", as stated in the article. My first name has a single accented vowel and breaks tons of online forms. What annoys me is not so much having to re-enter my name with the unaccented version of the vowel, it's when the form throws up an error message saying "Enter a Valid Name" [or suchlike]. I find that insulting. At least make your error text put the blame where it belongs: "Sorry. This form can only handle ASCII Text". Don't insult your users by telling them their name isn't real.
- apozem 11y agoThese kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States? Anecdotally, I also heard of a female games journalist who had trouble using a VR headset because she wore mascara. It threw off the eye tracking because the system wasn't designed to handle that. Any designer must test his or her product on many groups of people to find these problems.
- ryandrake 11y ago> These kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States? My guess would be on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands? It's 2016. There are very few good reasons left to assume text == ASCII anymore.
- 794CD01 11y agoHaving one good reason is enough, and the "it's easier" reason won't be going away anytime soon.
- Klathmon 11y agoWasn't there a thing that happened a while back where a fitness tracker was found to not work with darker skinned individuals?
- subway 11y agoA few years ago I ordered a custom license plate 'NULL'. What should have been a 2-3 week process lasted 8 months, with the order being canceled multiple times, and at one point a blank plate being shipped to the county clerk's office. More recently I've gotten out of a parking ticket in a certain municipality when a frustrated meter maid told me they saw my plates were valid, but the handheld device used to issue tickets would crash any time they tried to issue the ticket.
- johnward 11y agoWhen it backfires: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/02/16/10425167-mans-vanity-plates-attract-20000-in-tickets http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/02/16/10425167-mans-van...
- emmelaich 11y agoThese guys need the Maybe monad on their forms.
- uremog 11y agoBest life hack.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gricardo99 11y agoI just checked, NULL is not available in California, but this one is ("INVALID"): http://imgur.com/1KhRws2 http://imgur.com/1KhRws2 But, I wonder how much more frequently you'd get pulled over with a plate like that. the CA DMV lets you check for custom plates online: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/ipp2/initPers.do https://www.dmv.ca.gov/ipp2/initPers.do
- rconti 11y agoI'm pretty sure "INVALID" lets you park in disabled person parking spots.
- balls187 11y agoGrowing up, the class roster printout did not have characters to show my full name. As a result, it would truncate the last letter of my first name, showing "Ala" instead of "Alan." Inevitably, on the first day of a new class, the teacher would call out attendance, and would briefly pause with a puzzled look on their face, and attempt call me "Ala"? "Allah?" while my friends snickered in the background. I'd sigh, and say "No it's Alan" and the teacher would correct the attendance sheet and we'd be done with that, for that semester at least. Until there was a substitute, and we'd start the whole process over. These days, I don't mind people butchering my last name, and when I have to spell it out over the phone, I endure the occasional comment about it. I take it in stride, as I myself struggle with ethnic asian names. However, I get very testy when someone butchers my first name (it happens more than you would expect).
- dirkdk 11y agoI have had a decent number of forms that would not allow me to enter my last name because it contains a space: De Kok. Apparently over the centuries americans coming from Europe would drop spaces. For instance Vanderbilt is a Dutch name, that stems from the original Van der Bilt (means from the Bilt, which is a Dutch city) So now American programmers assume a space in a last name (or a dash for that matter) never happens so is an illegal condition that should cause validation to fail. I don't agree
- mabbo 11y agoA friend in university had the last name "des Trois Maisons", or "Of the three houses" (if I'm remembering it correctly). I can only imagine the number of computer systems that just die on that. Not one space, but two! Come to think of it, I bet he reads this comments. Hi [name withheld]! Seriously, what a great last name.
- rcthompson 11y agoYou might want to edit your comment to avoid giving out your friend's first and last names.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoAnd then there are people who have two last names separated by a space, but which cannot be considered a single last name. Their last name goes <paternal figure's paternal last name> <maternal figure's paternal last name>. Those who keep this naming standard for their children will pass on only their paternal figure's paternal name, which they consider their last name. A few I know had such issues they had to drop their maternal figure's paternal last name so that they would be called by their paternal figure's paternal last name, which was their preferred name when using only one last name (using both was similar to when someone uses a full middle name calling on a person).
- sjclemmy 11y agoHa ha, the first response; "There's no way that's true". How right they are.
- uremog 11y agoYet it may or may not be false.
- phillc73 11y agoI have a close friend who lives in rural Ireland. That's not in a town, but on a small farm in a general area of about 15-20 other small farms. His address is just the name of the general area and the county. The Irish postal system is clever enough to know that the person with this name, in that general area lives in that house. In fact, he probably still isn't even really classified by his name, rather as the husband of his wife, whose family has been in the general area for generations. This article made me think about how he deals with online forms. His response was that it's been a godsend that finally this year Ireland has introduced postcodes. Previously, and if the form still insists on a house number and street name, he just "bashes his head against the wall."
- Grishnakh 11y agoIreland is like that throughout the whole country, except maybe Dublin. It's worked for them for ages; there's been articles written about wackily-addressed mail being sent to people in Ireland and arriving to the correct destination. (I remember one that was just a long description going something like "the lad who..."). The problem is if someone in Ireland tries to order something from a company in another country, where the computer system isn't set up to handle totally arbitrary addresses. Even UK addresses look pretty anarchic to someone in America, where every address has a street name, a house number, a city, a state, and a zip code. UK addresses will have a postal code, and a city name, but after that there's no telling; it'll frequently list smaller and smaller towns and then some hamlet, and not have any kind of street or house number. If you design your address-storage system to just handle two arbitrarily-long "street" lines, plus a city and postal code, that should handle everything in the UK. For Ireland, just don't require a postal code. The problem is when programmers try to place restrictions on the address to ensure it has "correct formatting". Don't do that; if you need to verify the address, there's APIs you can subscribe to in different countries to check address correctness. Doing it yourself is how these problems happen.
- Symbiote 11y ago> UK addresses will have a postal code, and a city name, but after that there's no telling; it'll frequently list smaller and smaller towns and then some hamlet, and not have any kind of street or house number. Royal Mail don't recommend these long addresses; there's a form on their website to produce a canonical address, something like [Building name] [Number] Street [Hamlet/village/town] TOWN PO57 C0DE However, good luck telling anyone who's proud of their tiny hamlet this... http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode (and the "Read our PAF Code of Practice (PDF)" link).
- fallenshell 11y agoClose to relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
- kstrauser 11y agoI wasn't able to buy tickets once because "your name cannot include numbers, special characters, or the words 'select', 'drop', or 'user'". I (don't really) apologize for having a name containing one of the magic words your programmers aren't competent enough not to care about. -- In the 90s, I worked for an ISP. Our very first customer was "Joe Test". We had well-meaning customer service people delete his account a few times because our billing system didn't have fancy features like a notes section. -- I've been bitten many times by "People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by." I have the same first name as my son, my dad, my grandpa, and back 6 further generations. We've all gone by nicknames or middle names. My middle name is my legal name, in the sense that it's what I do all business as (and have for my entire life). My signature is my middle name. My credit cards have my middle name. My family, friends, teachers, students, and employers know me by my middle name. And yet, so many institutions are incapable of handling the situation and insist on calling me by my first name, which is not who I am. If my doctor, lawyer, and banker call all use my middle name, your system can deal with it or I'll find an alternative.
- talmand 11y agoThe troubles I have caused my poor kid Se7en.
- chiph 11y ago> insist on calling me by my first name, which is not who I am. As someone who goes by a nickname, I find this to be a feature. If I get a phone call or email addressing me by my legal first name, it's almost certainly a sales call, and I can take appropriate action.
- kstrauser 11y ago> As someone who goes by a nickname, I find this to be a feature. Oh, that's definitely a perk. "Hi, um, may I speak to... Firstname?" "No, but I can take a message." As a bonus, my first name is ridiculously pronounceable but cold callers act like they've never seen that arrangement of letters before. Imagine being Robert Joe Smith and they ask, "is... Row... Bort... there?" If you can't even say my first name, I have no prior business with you (and almost certainly no future dealings).
- alkonaut 11y agoI can see how having a non-representable name can lead to problems (e.g a non-unicode character), but I fail to see how a system can end up with a bug that converts the string "null" into a null or blank string? Even throughform posts and sql there is a difference between "null" the string and null the literal? Edit: ah saw the SO link now. Shoddy roundtrips to xml/soap/json can do it.
- unitfloat 11y agoFrom an online form: Location (City, Country): Singapore Nope. Singapore, Singapore. >:(
- twic 11y agoUK forms which ask for a city and a county present the same problem for residents of London. US forms which ask for a city and a state present a similar problem for residents of New York. You're part of a select club!
- thisone 11y agoNot sure I understand. The city of London is in the county of Greater London. New York City is in the state of New York. But Singapore is a city-state.
- twic 11y agoDo you really not understand, or are you being oblique? In any case, there is no county of Greater London. Greater London is an 'administrative area' - have a read of the London Government Act 1963, which created it, and abolished the county of London which had existed before. That's why we have a Greater London Authority (and before that a Greater London Council), rather than the London County Council we had when London was a county. Of course, everyone treats it as a county because it would be maddening not to, but that's a bit like how everyone treats Washington DC as a state of the US (oh, we should add Washington DC to that list). Legally, there is no 'London' which is a proper subset of Greater London (other than the City of London, which is a red herring in this case). So putting "London, London" is directly analogous to putting "Singapore, Singapore". The New York case is different, but it still involves writing the name of your city twice. If anything, it's even sillier, because the whole state is named after one city. EDIT: clarify about the GLA, GLC, and LCC (i hope)
- takno 11y agoLondon, along with most county towns in the UK shouldn't have a county appended to them. This isn't the case for New York.
- Kenji 11y agoPeople who cannot properly separate database contents from metadata and control words in 2016 are incompetent.
- gumby 11y agoThough I wholeheartedly agree, 2016 may not be a big problem. Theres still a lot of code from the 1970s in routine use today.
- devy 11y agoThis article reminds me of Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (aka Tony Hoare)'s InfoQ presentation [1]. What the article described are part of that $1 billion damages. For people who don't know Tony, he's is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development in 1960, at age 26, of Quicksort. He also developed Hoare logic, the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), and inspired the Occam programming language. [1][2] [1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare
- mds 11y agoAnother fun edge case -- people with just one name. Teller (of Penn and Teller) legally changed his name to just "Teller". Apparently his drivers license reads Teller NLN for No Last Name.
- martincmartin 11y agoMy legal name is Martin C. Martin. This has only been a problem for computer systems 2 or 3 times. Once or twice on some no-name web site, which rejected names where first and last were the same. The other time was when the company I was working at was bought by Oracle. Oracle's internal email system simply refused to create a user with the same first name as last name. (For the curious, I was born Martin C. Hilgerdenaar and changed my name in college.)
- shogun21 11y agoWere you aware of the problems or potential confusion when changing it?
- tgb 11y agoWhy did you change your name?
- randallsquared 11y agoHeh. My name is Randall R. Randall. I have had quite a lot of pushback from humans ("No, sorry, I need your LAST name..."), but I can only remember two systems that ever really caused me issues: Facebook and Google+.
- mikeash 11y agoI have to ask. Does the R also stand for Randall?
- randallsquared 11y agoNo, it's Reginald. You are in good company in wondering, though. :)
- mikeash 11y agoOh well. I was secretly hoping it stood for Randall R. Randall.
- Zenst 11y agoWHen I started programing (mainframes) in the early 80's I came across an odd instance in which my name messed things up. All printouts had 3 letter as a banner that were used to identify who to hand them too once burst up from the line printer. Popped onto a trolley in which they would be shipped up to us programmers. Now alas I only had a first and surname and in part due to bureaucracy had to add a middle letter as PG was not acceptable for some unknown reason of standards that was in play. SO I added an X for PXG and then spent several years explaining to anybody new that my middle name was not Xavior. Equally during my training we were coding a script upon a GCOS 8 machine and had to copy current edit file to a new file and on the system (asterix)SRC was used to reference that file. Now one person doing the exercise thought they would cheat, looked at mine, then another chap and concluded I'd copied his and he would be clever and not make the same mistake. Turns out the other chap he was checked was with the initials SRC and whilst neither of us had copied anybodies this cunning chap ended up with (asterix)MTW. Sadly this chap went on to the systems division and too this day, still bewildered how and who he sucked up too for that position with such talents. So names are and always will be amusing at times, in more ways than breaking a system as well.
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- hvo 11y agoI am convinced that the programmer interviewed in this article by BBC is the same Patrick McKenzie(patio11).
- harryh 11y agoIt must be right? How many Patrick McKenzies that live in Japan and can talk to a reporter about tech issues can there be?
- hvo 11y agoYes.I am.
- patio11 11y agoYep.
- hvo 11y agoHaha.I got it right.You did a good job in that interview.BBC should be interviewing you more often. And keep up the good work.
- cpeterso 11y agoHas anyone created a public data set for testing names? People publish lists of exceptions (e.g. [1] and [2]), but it would be great to have actual examples in a simple format that can be used for automated testing. The first (and most difficult) step would be to create a universal name schema. [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... [2] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
- Someone 11y agoI guess that you need to hire Portuguese or Brazilian programmers to write programs handling names. They have both accents and long names. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_name https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_name: "It is not uncommon in Portugal that a married woman has two given names and six surnames, two from her mother's family, two from her father's family, and the last two coming from her husband. In addition, some of these names may be made of more than one word, so that a full feminine name can have more than 12 words. [...] For the sake of simplicity, most Portuguese people have two surnames" Those Portuguese/Brazilian programmers will not forget to accept short names they may use a nickname. Examples from football are Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé), and the various Ronaldo's and Ronaldinho's. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/brazil/7810561/World-Cup-2010-Brazilian-players-nicknames-explained.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/brazil/78105...: "Back when Ronaldo, he of the record for most goals scored in the World Cup, joined the Brazilian team, the squad already had a Ronaldo, a defender. So Ronaldo became Ronaldinho. Then another Ronaldinho came along, and they called him Ronaldinho Gaucho, for the area in Brazil where he was from. When the first Ronaldo was done playing, Ronaldinho became Ronaldo again and Ronaldinho Gaucho lost the Gaucho. (For everyday use, that is. He's often listed as Ronaldinho Gaucho in squads, and his official website is www.ronaldinhogaucho.com.)"
- biot 11y agoThere's an amusing short story from the 1960s called "Computers Don't Argue" which this reminds me of: http://atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133 http://atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133
- srwx 11y agoA large global company I worked at hired someone who chose the username 'lib' and this user was based in a remote location (China as I recall), I don't remember exactly but I think it was their first name. Some of the developer tools recursively searched parent directories for a 'lib' when running builds, this in turn caused a massive mysterious increase in build times when users in the USA were suddenly sending NFS requests to China looking in /home/lib for libraries.
- m-i-l 11y agoI know someone who had no idea why their surname was being removed from posts to the internal social media system. It was because their surname was on the list of blocked words, but I don't know how far this was explained to them. We were also unable to post anything about welly wanging or Numberwang.
- gumby 11y agoI am glad the Null family doesn't give in. I was quite sad when the Spaniards changed the collation of the "ll" and "ch" digraphs in the mid 1990s simply because it made life hard for programmers.
- jboles 11y agoThere have been a few British tourists over the years that have tried to visit Sydney NSW (New South Wales) and ended up in Sydney NS (Nova Scotia), perhaps because some computer system incorrectly truncated the state abbreviation to US/Canadian 2 letters.
- sargas 11y agoEdge cases like the ones mentioned on this article will keep happening more often with the increased access to the internet worldwide. Either programs deal with these cases more intelligently or some family names will stop existing, virtually speaking. I have lost count of how many different versions of my last name I have since I moved to the United States. My health insurance, car insurance, apartment contract, driver's license, passport (this one has the correct name) are all spelled differently because some systems here don't accept white spaces on last names, so they add dashes. They length constraint is a short number, so they concatenate my 3 last names into a humongous word. Etc. I always find it funny, except when I need to, say, take an official certificate test and the name I put on the registration doesn't match to one on the IDs I bring, therefore I can't get admitted into the testing center. Of course I learned how to work with the system by now.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoThis is why you avoid in-band signalling if you can. If you must do it, at least have escape sequences which are consistently applied.
- ErikAugust 11y agoBut 'NULL' !== NULL. Well, in a more perfect world ;)
- elchief 11y agoHeck, even NULL !== NULL
- elchief 11y agoA friend of mine, last name O'Neil, legally changed it to ONeil so he could fill out more forms online.
- danso 11y agoI'm thinking I should either name my child "Define", or change my surname to "Define"...should make Google searching for personal information somewhat frustrating.
- intopieces 11y agoA company I used to work for ran into some trouble when a customer attempted to change their payment information on the company's website. All attempts resulted in a rather frightening (to the user) "Access Denied" screen. The customer's last name was "Curl."
- pjdorrell 11y agoThere is a story within the story here: this article was not "fact-checked" by any person who has ever actually used SQL while developing software. To quote: 'This is because the word “null” is often inserted into database fields to indicate that there is no data there.' The story is that companies can't be bothered to hire programmers who are clever enough to know that null and "null" are not the same thing. The story within the story is that news websites can't be bothered to get their technical stories proof-read by people who actually know the technicalities.
- ommunist 11y agowell, computers do not stop a microsecond upon any name. They consider them in digits anyway. What fails in certain cases is logic of the executed programme, and by no means its a program failure. It was management failure to ensure edge cases have proper workarounds. I still suffer when LLOYDS online bank cannot accept my long name in certain forms, stripping the last 3 chars. During my US time, I met no systems capable of storing and displaying Eastern European diakritical chars.
- cha5m 11y agoThis is just terrible programming. Everything should get escaped and quoted before interacting with any code.
- llf 11y agoSpeaking of web form, I always think it's more 'universal' to use 'Given Name' and 'Surname' instead of 'First Name' and 'Last Name'. Many languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc) put surname in front of given name. Your thought?