Earlier quoted context omitted.
Die on? But how - he can challenge the fines in a court of law. Since it's a vanity plate, adding an extra notoriety won't hurt.
On top of that, if anything, forcing the government to fix it's bad code ( insert snarky ambiguity between software code and legal code ) can't be a bad thing. I'd buy the guy a beer.
NULL license plate not such a bright idea
61–70 of 484 posts
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#62I love when people double down out of principle, when the only person getting hurt is themselves. He refuses to change it because he did nothing wrong...sure, but you are also the only one being hurt by it. Is this really the hill to die on?
Die on? But how - he can challenge the fines in a court of law. Since it's a vanity plate, adding an extra notoriety won't hurt.
If he sees spending time and effort expunging his record every few weeks as worth the trade-off for the 'extra notoriety', then power to him. I wouldn't do that.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#63Is this actually possible? Aren't strings at least surrounded by quotation marks ('NULL') while NULL isn't?
> Apparently, when they didn't have the right data for a vehicle, a privately operated citation processing center used the word NULL in the license plate field for many tickets.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#64Is this actually possible? Aren't strings at least surrounded by quotation marks ('NULL') while NULL isn't?
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#65If they had to use a string (and I doubt they had to), they could at least have used the empty string.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Die on? But how - he can challenge the fines in a court of law. Since it's a vanity plate, adding an extra notoriety won't hurt.
On top of that, if anything, forcing the government to fix it's bad code ( insert snarky ambiguity between software code and legal code ) can't be a bad thing. I'd buy the guy a beer.
I'm don't really see an incentive for the govt agency to do anything about it. It's no skin off their nose. They'll just keep sending the tickets.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#67That's a bit curious though. If the code relies on a magic value, you'd think it's in order to skip trying to get data it doesn't have, like the address of the unidentifiable cars. Even if NULL then does have this address attached, why does it take the branch where it looks for the data? I suppose it would be in a relational DB, perhaps there's a join that drops missing entries, but if they aren't missing they show u…
The problem is that the employees with access to the system are required to enter a 'valid' value. But in some cases there is no value. So the 'valid' value they've come up with is the string "NULL" - they can't use "~~NULL~~" because ~ isn't allowed on a license plate. So because A) anyone can request a valid value on a plate, and B) nonce values must also be "valid" within the system, the tax payer is capable of ordering a nonce value on a plate.
Re: NULL license plate not such a bright idea
#68There’s a lot of interesting options. How about NaN NaN?