A website I was building, which depended on a ColdFusion service, started breaking for Norway users. Why? Norway's country code was "NO" - http://stacktoheap.com/blog/2012/12/19/why-a-feature-of-our-...
We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
81–90 of 245 posts
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#82We have an engineer whose name is "john; drop table users." Man does he wreak havoc.
Without the apostrophe to escape the string, it just doesn't have the same magic.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "having non ASCII characters" Accented vowels are ASCII characters but in the extended set which people sometimes don't take account.
Or they account wrongly ;) (ie: from the wrong set) I love how sometimes even on the same company, each place account ASCII differently. I remember registering for a IM, and in one info screen my name was Maur&cio and in the site info screen Maur€cio and in the search screen was Maur£cio and so on...
ASCII is Obviously meant to use CP437 for character codes 128-254, duh...
Seriously though, most other code pages are pretty transparent to/from unicode... IBM PC-DOS extended ascii (classic ANSI-BBS) isn't so transparent.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#84As long as we're playing the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" game again, here's the relevant patio11 article: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... If you try to validate names, or if you don't safely escape names along with your other user-input strings, you're gonna have a bad time.
My name fail to register surprisingly often, even here in Brazil. It is Hélder Maurício Gomes Ferreira Filho Common reasons for failure is being too long and having non ASCII characters, but sometimes it fails for other reasons, for example do not allow me to register without a middle name ( I don't haven't one actually... ), me confused and not knowing how to register Filho ( it is not a family name, neither a surna…
> It means Son, my father has the same name as me, without the Filho part
Interesting, that's similar to Junior in the US, but there it generally isn't part of the "official" name, only informal.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
My name fail to register surprisingly often, even here in Brazil. It is Hélder Maurício Gomes Ferreira Filho Common reasons for failure is being too long and having non ASCII characters, but sometimes it fails for other reasons, for example do not allow me to register without a middle name ( I don't haven't one actually... ), me confused and not knowing how to register Filho ( it is not a family name, neither a surna…
> "having non ASCII characters" Accented vowels are ASCII characters but in the extended set which people sometimes don't take account.
There are a number of different "extended set" (IBM code pages and ISO/IEC 8859 parts for instance), and they're "extended" because they're not ASCII but supersets of it (as is UTF-8).
ASCII is the 7-bit encoding ANSI_X3.4-1968, composed of 95 printable and 33 control characters.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a SOAP request going from a flash client to a coldfusion server. Yeah.
I still didn't get that. In SOAP request empty value should be clearly distinct from the string with "Null" value, as well as from the nil case. For example: Null - element equal to "Null" - empty element (can also have a nil attribute set to true).
All I meant was that all three of those technologies are famous for their unreliability. OK perhaps the flash runtime not so much, it's disliked for different reasons. It's definitely true of the other two. I've had to talk soap to a coldfusion service before and it's not an environment conducive to safe programming.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
For all that is wrong with flash as a platform, I have always found Actionscript 3 to be a far better structured and easy to work with language, compared to something like javascript, which has a very 'organic' structure. I can't speak much to ColdFusion or WSDL though.
I think in this case, and the comments seem to confirm, that it's an issue with the SOAP/XML encoder's handling of null values. That aside, AS3 doesn't bug me too much, my biggest issue with Flash/Flex was how it handled programmatic audio elements so differently from video/clip elements, that is/was annoying. Of course since Adobe has all but abandoned the platform, it probably won't be much of an issue in the futur…
There was a point where Adobe had a chance to evolve flash into a platform for creating HTML sites and applications (much like coffeescript, LESS, or any other intermediate might be). It certainly would have involved open sourcing large components of the platform, which they seemed to be against.
It's a real shame, since the closed source aspect of Flash really led to a brain drain within the community. Flash for many years was the superior platform for making complex web applications, but sadly, it did not have the community and brain trust that more open standards did, like HTML and javascript did. In the long run, this led to serious stagnation with the platform.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#88"WSDL (SOAP) from AS3 to ColdFusion web service" I know it probably wasn't this guy's choice, but whooo boy.
For all that is wrong with flash as a platform, I have always found Actionscript 3 to be a far better structured and easy to work with language, compared to something like javascript, which has a very 'organic' structure. I can't speak much to ColdFusion or WSDL though.
Irrelevant tangent:
ActionScript 2 was a lot more like Javascript than ActionScript 3 is.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to be a bit pedantic, unfortunately you don't get "proper i18n support" just by putting everything in UTF-8. Unicode lets you represent lots of abstract characters, from different languages and societies, in one character set. That doesn't quite tell you how to render the characters. For that, you need to know what language the text is in. Unicode wants you to provide that information out-of-band, e.g. in an HTM…
I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals which shows examples of the differences in those numerals, but it looks like the different representations have different Unicode codepoint. So, there's no need for the lang attribute. (The page uses them, but if you take them off there's no difference in the display.) You probably need to know the language to do things like sorting, comparison, regex, etc.…
Not quite. The Wikipedia article shows the difference between U+0660 .. U+0669 (Arabic-Indic digits) on the top row and U+06F0 .. U+06F9 (Eastern Arabic-Indic digits) on the bottom row.
But what I'm talking about are the different glyphs used to represent the bottom row (U+06F0 .. U+06F9) depending on whether the text is in Persian, Sindhi, or Urdu. See http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/ch08.pdf, table 8-2.
There is also the issue I mentioned about Chinese vs. Japanese glyphs for the same coded character, which is at least as important in practice.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#90We had a customer with the last name "Echo" who couldn't make a credit card payment. Turns out that the card processor was looking for strings which were common Unix commands and not allowing them.
Security procedures for vendors hosting websites for Members of Congress apparently require them to look for sql injection attacks and redirect to 404 if they think one was found. The result appears to be that many just keep a list of keywords and characters and fail if found. Is your first name "Walter"? Oh, you tried to run the "alter" command in your message to your Congressman... we will take you to a 404 page. O…
The system that prints our shipment labels stripped "var" from customer and street names. Sorry Halvar, you're now known as Hal. Customer names wheren't so bad, the mail service got the right people anyway, but reducing streetnames like "Vardegade" to "degade" is a bit more troublesome.
They never told me what the bug was, only that they fixed it. I have some idea though.