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People with names that break computers

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Re: People with names that break computers

#111

Post by Symbiote »

Grishnakh wrote: post #91
phillc73 wrote: post #79

I 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 husba…

Ireland 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,…

> 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 (and the "Read our PAF Code of Practice (PDF)" link).

Re: People with names that break computers

#113

Post by Symbiote »

gbvb wrote: post #78
silveira wrote: post #28

I 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 driv…

if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names. - Thing One and Thing Two.. I wonder if it will fail..

Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, Octavius and Decimus — Roman names for fifth...eighth, tenth son.

Prima, Secunda, Tertia, Quarta, Quinta, Sexta, Septima, Octavia, and Decima — first to tenth daughter.

Octavia survived into modern English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_Spencer , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler

Re: People with names that break computers

#114

Post by devy »

This 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-Billi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare

Re: People with names that break computers

#115

Post by Dr_tldr »

Grishnakh wrote: post #89
ryandrake wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be an entire college course dedicated to all the various "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Xxxx" lists. I've seen so much horribly bad code that's supposed do handle times, dates, names, addresses, etc. The spec says "Store the user's name in the database" and the programmer simply allocates a string for First Name and a string for Last Name and calls it a day. What's needed is good unit tests and a…

For the database at least, I don't see why you need unit tests or any testing at all. Assuming that you're going to require at least two names (no single-name names allowed), then a string for First Name and a string for Last Name should be sufficient. If this is a decent database, where the string can have any Unicode character, including a space, and you don't set a limit on the string length (modern databases don'…

Your comment is a perfect example of the kind of incomplete and normative reasoning about names that causes systems to fail. The problem isn't that you're not careful, the problem is that your fundamental assumptions are based on incomplete knowledge.

For instance, you mentioned accommodating Cyrillic letters, but you didn't know you'd need to include a field for patronym, which is not the same thing as a middle name and can't just be included in the first name field without causing potential problems.

Re: People with names that break computers

#116

Post by twic »

mdellabitta wrote: post #104
HoopleHead wrote: post #62

It 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: "So…

Yeah, my last name has a space in it. For a while, the NY DMV's computer couldn't handle that, so my license had a hyphen in my last name. Talk about insulting.

Kind of ironic given the name of the first New Yorker to become President of the United States.

Re: People with names that break computers

#117

Post by Symbiote »

snacksthecat wrote: post #25
mariodiana wrote: post #13

I 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 tas…

My 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.

An 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

Re: People with names that break computers

#118

Post by rconti »

gricardo99 wrote: post #109
subway wrote: post #64

A 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 ti…

I just checked, NULL is not available in California, but this one is ("INVALID"): 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

I'm pretty sure "INVALID" lets you park in disabled person parking spots.

Re: People with names that break computers

#120

Post by martincmartin »

My 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.)

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