111–120 of 245 posts
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If I could change one thing about human history, I'd remake the 0 and O's (# and letter) and the I, l, and 1 (letter i, letter L, and #) so you could never confuse them in hard to read CAPATCHs.
Depending on the font sometimes even 5 and S and 8 and B too.
As 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.
One thing that's annoying to me is that governments and employers increasingly believe many of these things, partly because they want to cross-reference names and match canonical forms. My given names in English are Mark Jason, and that's on my birth certificate. In Greek, they're Μάρκος Ιάσονας, which are the equivalents, and that's on my municipal birth records there (registered as a foreign birth at the time of ba…
Speaking of which, why don't all companies just move to automated support systems already? These guys are doing it right http://www.zocdoc.com/
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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…
As a Portuguese speaker, i can say i would never write Hélder correctly if i simply hear it.
The thing is Dutch...
I am Hélder because of my father.
He is Hélder, because of the priest "Dom Hélder Câmara" (my Grandma was very Catholic)
Dom Hélder Câmara was named after the city of Den Helder in the Netherlands: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_Helder
The result is kinda wonky (lots of people write it wrong, usually "Elder" that of course resulted into video game savy friends nicknaming me "Mr. Scrolls")
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Python makes a distinction between types, but it has a concept of falsyness (as do many languages, though it is often more restricted e.g. in Ruby only false and nil are falsy IIRC). Falsyness is used in boolean-ish contexts (if, while and explicit boolean conversion), by default all of None (null), False, 0, 0.0, "" (the empty string, unicode or binary) and empty collections ([], (), {}, set()) are falsy and althoug…
GForth uses 0 for 'false' but -1 for 'true'... that confuses me a lot.
SOAP is maybe the most popular example and this is really why it's lost popularity against REST. However, similar "It works with values W, X, Y, but not Z" situations are found in any stack or standard that has too much magic going on. Rails certainly comes to mind.
This is the biggest argument in favour of using many small, isolated components rather than one big all-encompasing framework, in my opinion. If every piece of third party functionality you import into your project can be easily understood, problems like these shrink in size, because there's a limit to how deep the magic can go.
I'm very fond of the Node.js ecosystem for particularly this aspect (even though I dislike the language). There's a big bucketload of tiny components there, rather than 90% of the community relying on a single humongous framework, like is common for e.g. Ruby or C#.
If my last name were Null, I'd totally call my son Dave!
I do actually know a man called Dave Null. I thought that must be very rare, but in fact, LinkedIn finds 116 hits if you search for him: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Dave/Null
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Welcome to the world of (a) standards (b) poorly implemented standards (c) poorly implemented programmers :-)
Humanity needs an update, bad. I'm expecting one within 100 and 1,000 years from now, but the chances of introducing regressions is very high.
A Japanese company once made the decision that they needed "virtual" employees in a particular system, for example to support e.g. adding a job to the org chart before that position had been filled (and another dozen use cases), so they had the clever idea "Hey, if we need to do this, we'll just input their 'name in Japanese' as one of a dozen status flags, like XX_JOB_REQUEST or XX_INCOMING_TRANSFER." One developer…
I'm actually curious now, was your (or whoever became the victim of this code) "Japanese name" not in the system in katakana or something?
Japanese systems have wide, wide variability in what they do for 漢字名 for people who, ahem, don't have one. Some repeat the カナ名. Some do so but use half-width kana (半角 vs. 全角). Some managers who believe that there is such a thing as an "official name" think that one's official name should go in 漢字名, regardless of whether it is 漢字 or not.
A related problem: what happens when you have two systems which have different behaviors on this? For example, let's say you're a Japanese bank, and your branch employees were instructed in 2012 to update any 漢字名 of foreigners to be the name written on their foreigner registration card, in double-width characters. Let's further suppose that your web tier does Javascript validations when you try to sign up for online banking, and because any engineer can see that ＤＯＵＢＬＥＷＩＤＴＨ latin characters are not 漢字, this means that it is literally impossible for the web tier to match the DB for affected customers.
Hilarity ensues.
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Growing up, my parents called me by my middle name, as I share a first name with my dad. (I'd rather be an Edward than a Ralph anyway.) When giving my name to someone, I tell them I'm Edward , as telling them I'm R. Edward just sounds pretentious. But if I'm beginning a relationship with a doctor's office or lawyer, or filling in a tax form, it's Ralph E. Lastname, because that's what's on my birth certificate and SS…
Try just answering the phone with "hello?" for unknown numbers.