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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

#191

Post by tommica »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #84
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 anticipated twins with The school directory sync system I made for a small District (sub-5000 enrollment). I appended a random two digit number to first initial, last name (EAnderson96). So far none of the parents who have "weaponized"(1) the naming of their children have managed to break it since we brought it up in '99. (1) Hypothetical John Smith and his siblings Jane Smith, James Smith, Janet Smith, Jack Smith,…

I wonder if developers have a different naming convention for their children... Even on a subconscious level

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#192

Post by paulmooreparks »

decimalenough wrote: post #153
kccqzy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Singapore given names can have more than one space and may not be a substring of the full name. The first prime minister has the full name "Harry Lee Kuan Yew" where Lee is his family name and "Harry Kuan Yew" is his given name. (Later in life he dropped "Harry" from his name.)

To be more precise, many Singaporean Chinese names are formatted as WESTERN_NAME SURNAME CHINESE_FIRSTNAME_1 CHINESE_FIRSTNAME_PART2. The WESTERN_NAME may or may not be a legal name (AFAIK for Lee Kuan Yew it never was), and to further complicate things it's not unknown for the Chinese name to be duplicated in its dialect and Mandarin readings, leading to "Harry, Lee Kuan Yew (Li Guangyao)". Combine this with Angloce…

I get this in reverse. My surname is Parks, and my given names are Paul Moore. Since moving to Singapore I've become accustomed to answering to "Parks Paul Moore" in person or on the phone.

Surprisingly, local systems outside of the SG government can still take a maddeningly Western approach to names (First name/last name, assumption that last name is a family name a not a patronymic, etc.). My wife is Singaporean Tamil, so her "last name" is actually her father's given name, and even when travelling around Southeast Asia she encounters issues with this.

Fortunately, the SG government does an admirable job of handling Chinese names (across a number of languages and cultures), Malay names, Indian names of various cultures (mostly Tamil, but also Punjabi, Malayalam, and several others) and of course many Western names. I wish the Western world would catch up.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#193

Post by wodenokoto »

halper wrote: post #181
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.

It's annoying that airlines writes "as spelled in passport", when what they really need is an upper case alpha-only version of your name.

But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name.

We've had Airlines for way over half a century, and visas for about as long as we have had passports and people still walk around with international identification documents that cannot be understood by travel and immigration agencies internationally.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#195

Post by protocolture »

cvwright wrote: post #103

I had a relative named Null, who worked in tech in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Apparently it caused him so many issues that he finally gave up and changed his name to the name of the town where our family came from. I think he was a Java guy too. I’m sure that just made it worse.

>changed his name to the name of the town where our family came from.

Was he from DROP TABLE?

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#196

Post by protocolture »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #14

For many years, my mother's proper legal name on her birth certificate was the empty string. This wasn't usually a problem before computers as she'd go by a given name instead, even on government paperwork. She started having issues with systems being unable to process her information in the late 90s and early 2000s. Background checks would fail, passports couldn't be issued, and so on. She eventually had it changed,…

I have known 2 people with names so long they have the same issues.

One russian, one spanish. Both had like 20 individual names.

The problem is well meaning parents used all of them on early paperwork, and as things digitised, name fields gained field limits etc.

I believe one had his name changed formally, and the other had to register an alias, and had to dig out the OG paperwork regularly.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#198

Post by lmz »

wodenokoto wrote: post #193
halper wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's annoying that airlines writes "as spelled in passport", when what they really need is an upper case alpha-only version of your name. But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name. We've had Airlines for way over half a century, and visas for about as long as we have had passports and people still walk around with international…

> But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name.

They do in the machine readable area. Maybe not "clearly".

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#199

Post by Loic »

doubled112 wrote: post #93
EvanAnderson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anticipated twins with The school directory sync system I made for a small District (sub-5000 enrollment). I appended a random two digit number to first initial, last name (EAnderson96). So far none of the parents who have "weaponized"(1) the naming of their children have managed to break it since we brought it up in '99. (1) Hypothetical John Smith and his siblings Jane Smith, James Smith, Janet Smith, Jack Smith,…

I love seeing what the apostrophe in my last name breaks when I sign up for services. Converting it to an HTML character entity is not really expected behaviour, but it was among the most amusing I’ve seen. O'Brien was it? Bonus points if you edit the profile and those are expanded too. Hello Mr. O'Brien.

I have an apostrophe too and it broke many websites. It was also a natural source of SQL injection detection.

About 20 years ago, I was able to see a bit more than what I supposed to from the Ikea website. Nowadays, I see mostly encoding issues, especially in notification pop-ups.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#200

Post by azinman2 »

sepositus wrote: post #97
aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #70

This is hilarious: Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it,…

> A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles. I'm not the biggest expert on databases, although I've worked with them a bit, but how does this occur in the first place? Usually, associations are done with primary/foreign keys. What database would allow null in that case?

The real question is why anything in the STRING is getting interpreted at all. In databases ‘null’ is not the same thing as NULL.
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