141–150 of 288 posts
From an online form: Location (City, Country): Singapore Nope. Singapore, Singapore. >:(
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…
These kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States? Anecdotally, I also heard of a female games journalist who had trouble using a VR headset because she wore mascara. It threw off the eye tracking…
Here in Brazil, names with accents on vowels are common. Yet some banking file formats still use positional (fixed-length fields) uppercase-only ASCII files.
The format I'm thinking of also has a field in the header to specify whether the tape is formatted as 1600 BPI or 6250 BPI, so I'm inclined to think the cause is more technological than cultural.
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It could also be a cost benefit analysis. How much business lost vs. the cost of supporting. Especially when many such users have encountered the problem often enough to already have a work around. There are definitely some cases where it is a testing issue, but especially with accepting all possible valid names, sometimes the cost is too high to convince the one in control of funding.
It's just really annoying when it's a government system and it's use is required. This is slightly off topic, but I recently came across a lawsuit involving German passport and their having a person's name printed IN ALL CAPS. The plaintiff was suing for his right to use lower case characters as that was how his name was spelled correctly vis-a-vis how other families who use the same letters in the same order but wit…
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. Hilgerde…
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> False, you may not consider that your first name but it IS your legal name and at the end of the day that's really the only thing that matters. See, this is one of the misunderstandings from the article. Don't feel bad: many people make this mistake. But it is a mistake. Your legal name is the one you conduct business with. In my case, I conduct all business using my middle name. The fact that I was born with it do…
Legal Name = Name on your birth certificate, pure and simple. Something isn't so just because you say it is. I can say my SSN is 123-45-6789 but that doesn't make it so.
Wrong, at least in the US. Common law precedent allows you to use whatever name you like, regardless of what's on official documents, as long as you're not doing it for fraudulent purposes.
If you decide one day that you want to be "John Pfeffenheimer Gramblekins", you can go ahead and use that name in legal agreements and on your bills, as long as you're not trying to trick anyone into thinking that "John Pfeffenheimer Gramblekins" is a different person than your previous name.
The same principle stands behind common-law name changes after marriage.
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
*Actually long enough ago I can no longer recall whether this was something that happened while I was there or just a tall tale that was doing the rounds in the department.
I have a coworker whose last name is Corp. He was unable to create a Google+ account for a couple years and had a bit of difficulty with his Facebook account because they assumed he was a business.
Had a friend with last name of "Root". She worked as a UNIX admin back in the day. Had trouble off and on with her name.
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> False, you may not consider that your first name but it IS your legal name and at the end of the day that's really the only thing that matters. See, this is one of the misunderstandings from the article. Don't feel bad: many people make this mistake. But it is a mistake. Your legal name is the one you conduct business with. In my case, I conduct all business using my middle name. The fact that I was born with it do…
Legal Name = Name on your birth certificate, pure and simple. Something isn't so just because you say it is. I can say my SSN is 123-45-6789 but that doesn't make it so.
As a counterexample, my wife's current name is not on her birth certificate.
> Something isn't so just because you say it is.
Indeed. So we find ourselves in a teachable moment: you are wrong, but in a way that many other well-meaning people have been. I presume you find this subject interesting, so consider checking out http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... which is a list of things commonly thought to be true about human names but that actually aren't.
I personally love these sorts of things. For instance, I was pretty sure I knew all about how calendars work until I attended a talk buy a guy who maintains a date library. He started throwing out edge case after edge case until I gave up any pretense that I had an inkling about the subject.