If my last name were Null, I'd totally call my son Dave!
Or Devon. Dev for short.
www.linkedin.com/pub/devon-null/73/ab3/a46
We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
121–130 of 245 posts
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#122Having observed corporate culture for quite a while, the most likely solution seems to be to fire the employee.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#123This is better than fiction.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That was imprecision because I was trying to avoid the quick discussion of Japanese orthography. Like most systems in Japan dealing with names, there are separate fields for 漢字名 and カナ名. (Some systems also have ローマ字名.) 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…
It's not quite the same, and it does't break things so much as make them rubbish, but try getting a radiology information system to talk to a scanner of some description (CT, MRI etc). GE scanners accept Surname^Name. If someone has a middle name it doesn't display or come across to the scanner, so as to save space (I assume). This is fine until you get someone who has a first name with 2 separate words. I discovered it with someone called something like Al Amen as a first name. No hyphen. So now he is called Al. To make the medical images correct we have to incorrectly spell his name and make the RIS incorrect. Since then I look out for this and I have seen lots of patient names broken in this manner. Mid name capitalization also breaks and all becomes lower case. McDonald to Mcdonald etc. Names are horrid to deal with and people (myself included) like them to be correct.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#125Reminds me of a story a police reservist told me. Guy got a license plate caled "none," and instantly had thousands of outstanding warrants. (The cop thought "none" was trying a fast one, and so deserved it.)
Second only to Mr Prawo Jazdy: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7899171.stm
Reminds me of "the Phantom of Heilbronn", and alleged female serial killer the German police used DNA to link to more than 40 crimes. It baffled the investigators for more than two years until they found out that the DNA was from pollutions in the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#126"WSDL (SOAP) from AS3 to ColdFusion web service" I know it probably wasn't this guy's choice, but whooo boy.
LOL, thanks for leaving that! I'd already thought "the poor bastard" when I'd only gotten as far as "SOAP".
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#127Earlier 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…
> 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.
Jr. is absolutely part of my official name in the USA. It is the only distinction between my and my father's name. Many forms have a specific spot for suffix.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was imprecision because I was trying to avoid the quick discussion of Japanese orthography. Like most systems in Japan dealing with names, there are separate fields for 漢字名 and カナ名. (Some systems also have ローマ字名.) 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…
It's not quite the same, and it does't break things so much as make them rubbish, but try getting a radiology information system to talk to a scanner of some description (CT, MRI etc). GE scanners accept Surname^Name. If someone has a middle name it doesn't display or come across to the scanner, so as to save space (I assume). This is fine until you get someone who has a first name with 2 separate words. I discovered…
For a few years my airplane boarding passes said I was PAULA JUNGWIRTH because A is my middle initial. I got a few questions trying to board. I've noticed the last couple years that they print with a space now.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#129As 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.
In our app we neither validate nor escape user strings for any free form text (eg. "names" and descriptions)[1]. We only validate the max length. If text is truly free form then you don't need to validate or white list anything. Just make sure it's valid UTF-8 (or whatever encoding you're using) and escape it when you display it . That combined with using prepared statements with bind variables (aka named parameters)…
> If you escape it then there's no XSS issue.
Not XSS, but you need to be careful about allowing through things like the LTR/RTL override characters.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not quite the same, and it does't break things so much as make them rubbish, but try getting a radiology information system to talk to a scanner of some description (CT, MRI etc). GE scanners accept Surname^Name. If someone has a middle name it doesn't display or come across to the scanner, so as to save space (I assume). This is fine until you get someone who has a first name with 2 separate words. I discovered…
For a few years my airplane boarding passes said I was PAULA JUNGWIRTH because A is my middle initial. I got a few questions trying to board. I've noticed the last couple years that they print with a space now.
I've never understood why people entering data into a system enter an initial. It's a partial entry. You wouldn't enter a date of birth as 3.
On further thought, actually, they do. Then dismiss all the error messages and quit the program to get past the system keeping them in the field waiting for completion. Users seem hell bent on breaking our databases.