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When your last name is Null, nothing works

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Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#181

Post by halper »

zenethian wrote: post #22

The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.

It drives me mad when various forms sternly requires me to enter my name "as it is spelled in the passport" only to tell me that my name is "invalid" or "incorrect" or "not allowed". Then we have the systems that have non-standard transliteration rules …

I have never been known by more than one name, but the spelling sure differs.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#182

Post by zeroonetwothree »

detourdog wrote: post #71
DC-3 wrote: post #16

I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and reque…

I set-up a directory system for a small school. The students logins were a combination or initials and date of birth. When I created the scheme I knew that a set of twins would break the system. Somewhere between 3 and 5 years we finally got a set of twins that needed to modify the system. I called them to my office and found out which one came out first and appended 1 their usernames and 2.

I’m a twin and my parents never told us who was ‘first’.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#183

Post by wodenokoto »

DC-3 wrote: post #16

I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and reque…

My university was [initial][lastname][year][letter][letter]@school.com, allowing for 26^2 people to have the same initials and last name every year.

Despite having a rare last name and no twins, I was "AC".

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#184

Post by buitreVirtual »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #182
detourdog wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I set-up a directory system for a small school. The students logins were a combination or initials and date of birth. When I created the scheme I knew that a set of twins would break the system. Somewhere between 3 and 5 years we finally got a set of twins that needed to modify the system. I called them to my office and found out which one came out first and appended 1 their usernames and 2.

I’m a twin and my parents never told us who was ‘first’.

You posted first, so you are 1 here

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#186

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

mrunkel wrote: post #165
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a few condescending answers here. You will find this more common in weakly typed languages like PHP and VB and maaaaaybe JavaScript, where null == “null” will probably evaluate to true.

I can confirm that PHP doesn't have this problem. if ("null" == null) { echo "true"; } else { echo "false"; } prints "false"

Is this php5 or a more recent version? That is hugely relevant when it comes to pho and something I should have mentioned in my original post (no idea if this specific thing would work in pho5, but there are other weird things)

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#187

Post by whycome »

boxed wrote: post #32
great_wubwub wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be an interesting backstory here. Did her parents deliberately not name her? Did they forget?

I mean.. there are tons of people without last names in the world. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Well if you have one name, that's your last name.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#188

Post by AndrewDavis »

rco8786 wrote: post #104

My last name is a popular Irish name with an apostrophe in it. I have tons of issues with my name in forms. I'm basically a walking SQL injection detector. But also I've started to drop the apostrophe in most of my online profiles and things. So I think we're starting to see the end of apostrophes in people's names, thanks to some fun oddities of the internet and common database technologies.

Reminds me of the story of the French politician with a forward slash in their name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeline_K%2FBidi?wprov=sfla1

I can't find a reference anywhere, but I remember reading that when their child was born they couldn't process a birth certificate with the name containing a slash, so it was changed to a dash for the kid.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#189

Post by froindt »

js2 wrote: post #96
DC-3 wrote: post #16

I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and reque…

In Severance S2E1, Mark W says to Mark S: "Would you be open to using a different first name to avoid confusion?" Did anyone ever ask that of you or your twin?

A coworker used to work in a meatpacking plant. There were two people who had the exact same name, first middle and last. They worked in the same department and in fact on the same machine.

They were both named Jose. One went by, pronounced, Hose-A, and the other Hose-B.

Apparently the Jose's, coworkers, and HR were all fine with this because it was simply too confusing otherwise.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#190

Post by whycome »

beeflet wrote: post #137
y33t wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the court told him the only way that he'd be able to stop getting other people's tickets in the mail would be to get a new plate. Otherwise he'd have to keep coming back to court to get them thrown out.

I wonder how many times you could come to court with bogus cases until they patch the software

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