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I couldn't debug the code because of my name

mikolaj-kaminski.com

21–30 of 300 posts

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#21
post #6

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

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

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.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#22
post #16
post #6

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

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

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 Akihito Abe as the ASCII, which will be just as broken!

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#24
post #6

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

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

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.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#28
post #17

Oh, it’s not a common knowledge that you should not UTF-8 in Windows username? That had been the case since 95 days. Only recently it had supposedly improved after Microsoft Account login become semi mandatory.

On the contrary, the first bug happens because docker-compose tries to decode the path as UTF-8, but it is not UTF-8-encoded. ("'utf-8' codec can't decode byte")

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#29
post #6

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

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

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.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#30

Isn't this one of those "100 things Programmers don't know about People's Names" things? Like the poor, it will be with us always.

I don't know, it's just a Unicode character? Not even a newer one, it's just 2 utf8 bytes. Pretty much everything should support that in 2021. When I think of 100 things I think of stuff like "some people spell their name in all lowercase and get really funny if you change it"

Yeah so double byte characters costs extra. I don’t know, a checkbox or something default off. Always did still does. Double width costs even more.
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