7 ms·

What’s wrong with just writing it as Mikolaj? It’s not like it’s a kanji or something.

by xwdv 5y ago

needle0 5y ago
Then there are the people whose names ARE in Kanji, thankyouverymuch. Ah, no big deal, there's only around 1.6 billion of us.
sophacles 5y ago
Because that's not their name?
wbsss4412 5y ago
So the solution is for the user to change their entire windows account name, rather than handling common characters in your code?
- toast0 5y ago
  For a user, changing their account (probably creating a new user, since rename apparently doesn't change the directory), is something they can do. Changing all software to respect their perfectly valid name isn't something they can do. They shouldn't need to change their name, but if they do, they can ignore all the broken software and go about their day. This particular user is more capable than most, and found a workaround for this particular problem, which is good... But this is not likely to be the last of the problems.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Of course it would be better if all code was bug free. But that's impossible. As a user, avoiding unicode is a pretty easy way to avoid bugs like this - its the rational thing to do.
- Jensson 5y ago
  When you have non-standard characters in your name you quickly learn to never use them in computers since even though most systems works fine, some don't. And you can't fix all the thousands of systems your name has to interact with. I even had trouble booking flight tickets since their security system couldn't parse my name, and then had to go through some special security check due to it returning errors. After that, never again. Not sure how they managed to do it but they had some basic rules that they used to say "no real name can look like this, this is a fake person!" and just kicked it out.
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    I totally understand what you’re saying, but it’s also a sad state of affairs when we can’t handle “non standard characters”. Standard characters (ie english) are only used by a small subset (maybe 5-10%) of the global population.
  - yuliyp 5y ago
    They're not non-standard characters. They're just as much a part of the Polish alphabet as 'a' and 'b' are.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      That is exactly what I meant. My name doesn't have non-standard characters either from the perspective of my home country, it is just normal letters in the alphabet, but not in the English alphabet.
  - q3k 5y ago
    > When you have non-standard characters in your name 'standard' by what measure? Ł is more standard than X or Q in the polish alphabet. ~ Sincerely, a person whose name contains „ń” and therefore had to deal with this bullshit his entire life.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      From a programmers perspective. The characters in my name are standard where I come from, but they are not standard to the international air travel security systems likely developed by Americans. Edit: You know how aircraft travel security always transforms your name into letters from the English alphabet to parse? Yeah, it transformed my name and then the resulting string looked so bad that the system rejected that. The original name doesn't look bad, but after transformations it did...
miloignis 5y ago
From the article: The first idea was to change the username to one that does not contain Polish characters. It turned out that Windows does not rename the user’s folder when changing the username. Manually renaming the folder was not an option. This way I could corrupt my profile in the system. The end of the article is about how to change the directory where the temporary files go to one not under the user folder.
dahfizz 5y ago
Their URL is even mikolaj-kaminski.com . I get its annoying, but I would never use non-ascii chars in a username / file path.
- jerf 5y ago
  So, what does 阿部明仁 do in this case? Polish may be close enough that an approximation is available in English, but there's an awful lot of languages that don't have a large overlap with English characters. In the Asian case above, if someone with that name did try to "convert to English" they are ironically just as likely to end up with ＡｋｉｈｉｔｏＡｂｅ as the ASCII, which will be just as broken!
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    They could use a different name as their windows name (Do people use their real names as their usernames? I never do). Or, they would have to go through the pain of finding a real solution, like the author did. Considering JetBrains seems unwilling to fix this bug, maybe the best solution of all is to switch to an IDE that works.
  - numpad0 5y ago
    Assuming that hypothetical guy is an average Japanese male(somewhat leaning right), he'd just turn IME off. Japanese input on desktop is consist of three following states: - IME On state. IME capture and interpret keypresses as engraved and generate corresponding Kana-Kanji texts. - IME Off state. IME passes through keypresses as engraved on keytops. - Direct Input state. IME becomes dormant. In IME Off state, the keyboard behaves as a plain jp106(or ANSI if it is) keyboard, like I'm doing right now. The cases where you would use conversion with IME on for an English word is when you have reasons for the word to be in "full width"(usually for typesetting reasons).
    - jerf 5y ago
      I don't think it's something that people should 'just know' that when Windows asks them their name during install time, they ought to use 7-bit clean ASCII for everything, no matter where they are in the world or how much they know about other languages. When Windows says "What is your name?", they ought to be able to use their name without things breaking. I'm sure a computer savvy speaker of a fully-non-Latin language may still guess this is a good idea, but "computer savvy" doesn't cover everyone... and they shouldn't have to. "Just use 7-bit-clean ASCII English" is not a solution to this problem.
ludamad 5y ago
For the record, it's a stark pronunciation difference as ł has drifted to a very different "w" sound
- MadeThisToReply 5y ago
  Yep. For example, the name of the third-largest city in Poland is "Łódź", which might look like it's pronounced "lods", but is actually pronounced more like "wootch".
  - garaetjjte 5y ago
    Sometimes you end up with parcel addressed to city "??d?". Shipping systems cannot cope with non-ASCII chars more often than I would expect...
    - greenshackle2 5y ago
      I've seen shipping labels with HTML encoded characters, like é and è. I'm not sure if that's better or worse: &Lstrok;ód&zacute;
      - qwerty456127 5y ago
        This is a pretty frequent thing to encounter actually. Just some years ago many websites actually preferred to use ISO/Windows codepages to save space on multibyte Unicode symbols adding HTML entities to represent everything which is not in it the basic ASCII and their primary language alphabet. Fun fact: I was looking for an e-mail solution for a small company about a decade ago and found Zarafa. It seemed nice and I deployed it happily. Just to find out it only supports the Western European ISO codepage which was hardcoded. I hope they have switched to UTF-8 since then.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      Always omit diacritics when giving your address/name to foreign parties which are going to have to ship you anything or issue any documents for you.
ssivark 5y ago
That’s about as aggravating as asking Ryan to change name to Pyan — because the encoding doesn’t support “R” and “P” looks very similar.
- ufo 5y ago
  Interestingly, this particular change would work in cyrillic :)
  - ordu 5y ago
    Руап? No, "Яуап" is better, I think.
no_time 5y ago
Because it's not his name. Imagine you are John but you had to make do with Yohn because the people designing you software didn't need the letter J...
- zanderwohl 5y ago
  It's not strange to localize your name. In ASL for example, you could sign your English name letter-by-letter, but it's much more common to have a totally new sign for your name - usually a word combined with the first letter of your name. Taking part in a different system often means taking on another name.
  - pndy 5y ago
    > It's not strange to localize your name. That reminds me that I was talking once to the guy who turn Mikołaj name into Mikowhy pseudonym
  - q3k 5y ago
    It seems that you're implying computers are universally american and therefore people are expected to speak/use/adapt to american.
    - thereddaikon 5y ago
      That's the harsh way to put it. A more diplomatic way is that computing is not unique in having deeply ingrained artifacts of the language and culture that birthed it and developed many of the paradigms. Take anything having to do with seamanship. There are many terms that date back to early modern English that simply don't make sense anymore yet are accepted and universal because the British Empire had a large and enduring influence on maritime matters and happened to be at the forefront of most modern developments until about 70 years ago. In some cases this is actually built into laws and industry practice. Pilots speak English. That's the rules. Don't like it? Invent the time machine and beat Wilbur and Orville. For much the same reason, science speaks Latin. This technical debt is difficult if not impossible to overcome, especially in regards to computers because we still haven't cracked general purpose AI. Software will only accommodate what it was written to accommodate. Recognizing the problem and working to fix it is all well and good. But its wise to understand that this wont be solved any time soon so in the meantime it is pragmatic to operate in such a way to maximize compatibility. After all, I still have to call it a Foc'sle even if I think that's dumb or isn't inclusive of my culture.

What’s wrong with just writing it as Mikolaj? It’s not like it’s a kanji or something.

by xwdv 5y ago

What’s wrong with just writing it as Mikolaj? It’s not like it’s a kanji or something.

Then there are the people whose names ARE in Kanji, thankyouverymuch. Ah, no big deal, there's only around 1.6 billion of us.

sophacles 5y ago

Because that's not their name?

wbsss4412 5y ago

So the solution is for the user to change their entire windows account name, rather than handling common characters in your code?

toast0 5y ago
For a user, changing their account (probably creating a new user, since rename apparently doesn't change the directory), is something they can do. Changing all software to respect their perfectly valid name isn't something they can do. They shouldn't need to change their name, but if they do, they can ignore all the broken software and go about their day. This particular user is more capable than most, and found a workaround for this particular problem, which is good... But this is not likely to be the last of the problems.
dahfizz 5y ago
Of course it would be better if all code was bug free. But that's impossible. As a user, avoiding unicode is a pretty easy way to avoid bugs like this - its the rational thing to do.
Jensson 5y ago
When you have non-standard characters in your name you quickly learn to never use them in computers since even though most systems works fine, some don't. And you can't fix all the thousands of systems your name has to interact with. I even had trouble booking flight tickets since their security system couldn't parse my name, and then had to go through some special security check due to it returning errors. After that, never again. Not sure how they managed to do it but they had some basic rules that they used to say "no real name can look like this, this is a fake person!" and just kicked it out.
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  I totally understand what you’re saying, but it’s also a sad state of affairs when we can’t handle “non standard characters”. Standard characters (ie english) are only used by a small subset (maybe 5-10%) of the global population.
- yuliyp 5y ago
  They're not non-standard characters. They're just as much a part of the Polish alphabet as 'a' and 'b' are.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    That is exactly what I meant. My name doesn't have non-standard characters either from the perspective of my home country, it is just normal letters in the alphabet, but not in the English alphabet.
- q3k 5y ago
  > When you have non-standard characters in your name 'standard' by what measure? Ł is more standard than X or Q in the polish alphabet. ~ Sincerely, a person whose name contains „ń” and therefore had to deal with this bullshit his entire life.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    From a programmers perspective. The characters in my name are standard where I come from, but they are not standard to the international air travel security systems likely developed by Americans. Edit: You know how aircraft travel security always transforms your name into letters from the English alphabet to parse? Yeah, it transformed my name and then the resulting string looked so bad that the system rejected that. The original name doesn't look bad, but after transformations it did...

miloignis 5y ago

From the article: The first idea was to change the username to one that does not contain Polish characters. It turned out that Windows does not rename the user’s folder when changing the username. Manually renaming the folder was not an option. This way I could corrupt my profile in the system. The end of the article is about how to change the directory where the temporary files go to one not under the user folder.

dahfizz 5y ago

Their URL is even mikolaj-kaminski.com . I get its annoying, but I would never use non-ascii chars in a username / file path.

jerf 5y ago
So, what does 阿部明仁 do in this case? Polish may be close enough that an approximation is available in English, but there's an awful lot of languages that don't have a large overlap with English characters. In the Asian case above, if someone with that name did try to "convert to English" they are ironically just as likely to end up with ＡｋｉｈｉｔｏＡｂｅ as the ASCII, which will be just as broken!
- dahfizz 5y ago
  They could use a different name as their windows name (Do people use their real names as their usernames? I never do). Or, they would have to go through the pain of finding a real solution, like the author did. Considering JetBrains seems unwilling to fix this bug, maybe the best solution of all is to switch to an IDE that works.
- numpad0 5y ago
  Assuming that hypothetical guy is an average Japanese male(somewhat leaning right), he'd just turn IME off. Japanese input on desktop is consist of three following states: - IME On state. IME capture and interpret keypresses as engraved and generate corresponding Kana-Kanji texts. - IME Off state. IME passes through keypresses as engraved on keytops. - Direct Input state. IME becomes dormant. In IME Off state, the keyboard behaves as a plain jp106(or ANSI if it is) keyboard, like I'm doing right now. The cases where you would use conversion with IME on for an English word is when you have reasons for the word to be in "full width"(usually for typesetting reasons).
  - jerf 5y ago
    I don't think it's something that people should 'just know' that when Windows asks them their name during install time, they ought to use 7-bit clean ASCII for everything, no matter where they are in the world or how much they know about other languages. When Windows says "What is your name?", they ought to be able to use their name without things breaking. I'm sure a computer savvy speaker of a fully-non-Latin language may still guess this is a good idea, but "computer savvy" doesn't cover everyone... and they shouldn't have to. "Just use 7-bit-clean ASCII English" is not a solution to this problem.

ludamad 5y ago

For the record, it's a stark pronunciation difference as ł has drifted to a very different "w" sound

MadeThisToReply 5y ago
Yep. For example, the name of the third-largest city in Poland is "Łódź", which might look like it's pronounced "lods", but is actually pronounced more like "wootch".
- garaetjjte 5y ago
  Sometimes you end up with parcel addressed to city "??d?". Shipping systems cannot cope with non-ASCII chars more often than I would expect...
  - greenshackle2 5y ago
    I've seen shipping labels with HTML encoded characters, like é and è. I'm not sure if that's better or worse: &Lstrok;ód&zacute;
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      This is a pretty frequent thing to encounter actually. Just some years ago many websites actually preferred to use ISO/Windows codepages to save space on multibyte Unicode symbols adding HTML entities to represent everything which is not in it the basic ASCII and their primary language alphabet. Fun fact: I was looking for an e-mail solution for a small company about a decade ago and found Zarafa. It seemed nice and I deployed it happily. Just to find out it only supports the Western European ISO codepage which was hardcoded. I hope they have switched to UTF-8 since then.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    Always omit diacritics when giving your address/name to foreign parties which are going to have to ship you anything or issue any documents for you.

ssivark 5y ago

That’s about as aggravating as asking Ryan to change name to Pyan — because the encoding doesn’t support “R” and “P” looks very similar.

ufo 5y ago
Interestingly, this particular change would work in cyrillic :)
- ordu 5y ago
  Руап? No, "Яуап" is better, I think.

no_time 5y ago

Because it's not his name. Imagine you are John but you had to make do with Yohn because the people designing you software didn't need the letter J...

zanderwohl 5y ago
It's not strange to localize your name. In ASL for example, you could sign your English name letter-by-letter, but it's much more common to have a totally new sign for your name - usually a word combined with the first letter of your name. Taking part in a different system often means taking on another name.
- pndy 5y ago
  > It's not strange to localize your name. That reminds me that I was talking once to the guy who turn Mikołaj name into Mikowhy pseudonym
- q3k 5y ago
  It seems that you're implying computers are universally american and therefore people are expected to speak/use/adapt to american.
  - thereddaikon 5y ago
    That's the harsh way to put it. A more diplomatic way is that computing is not unique in having deeply ingrained artifacts of the language and culture that birthed it and developed many of the paradigms. Take anything having to do with seamanship. There are many terms that date back to early modern English that simply don't make sense anymore yet are accepted and universal because the British Empire had a large and enduring influence on maritime matters and happened to be at the forefront of most modern developments until about 70 years ago. In some cases this is actually built into laws and industry practice. Pilots speak English. That's the rules. Don't like it? Invent the time machine and beat Wilbur and Orville. For much the same reason, science speaks Latin. This technical debt is difficult if not impossible to overcome, especially in regards to computers because we still haven't cracked general purpose AI. Software will only accommodate what it was written to accommodate. Recognizing the problem and working to fix it is all well and good. But its wise to understand that this wont be solved any time soon so in the meantime it is pragmatic to operate in such a way to maximize compatibility. After all, I still have to call it a Foc'sle even if I think that's dumb or isn't inclusive of my culture.