There's a town in China called Nan...
We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
201–210 of 245 posts
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I flew Lufthansa, I was granted an honorary Ph.D. My official name is "Aleksandr Feinberg" -- it's transliterated from Cyrillics (hence the "ks") and Russian version of "Alexander" does not put an e between the d and r -- which Lufthansa decided to print on my boarding pass as Dr. Aleksan Feinberg
I recently moved to a house on a street named "Martin Luther King Junior Way East". The service rep must have bumped the tab key while I was signing up for DSL, because I now get mail addressed to "Mars Saxman Junior Way East". The funny part is that the street name is still filled out in all of its glorious detail - but the capitalization is different, which tells me they did some kind of zip code based address sani…
so i'm reading this hilarious thread about names,
and i come across a comment from _mars_saxman_...
my word, it's been long-time-no-see, mr. saxman!
-bowerbird intelligentleman
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
The name of someone if a delicate problem, but all of these are straightforward questions. There is an "official name" and it's on your registration certificate. That's the one that goes in the 漢字名 field and that's the one that the bank will accept (my registration had both the double with latin character and the katakana in parenthesis: no questions asked, they both go, parenthesis included). The validation of the k…
They're not straightforward. There is an "official name" and it's on your registration certificate. The thing about official names is that I have so many to choose from! Alien registration certificate? MCKENZIE PATRICK JOHNATHAN. No kana because town hall called up the local immigration authorities and heard "'Nicknames' are not required for the administration of Japanese immigration law and accordingly should not be…
some genius at the US Passport Control Center thinks Irish people get an extra space in their last names
Just as a point, some people with "Mc" surnames, do put a space after the X. Varies from person to person.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Some people have surnames that are only one letter.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem you ran into wasn't so much a user interface problem, but a "gaijin aren't our target clientele" thing. 10 years ago a lot of Japanese banks regarded "gaijin without permanent residence" as riskier than a 20-year-old Japanese student; this included gaijin with good credit records and income above average. Things have been changing, though.
I think it better to paraphrase Hanlon "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by lack of imagination." or something similar. 1) I suspect Chinese(!) names would have been validated. 2) I successfully applied for the same card via paper form 18 months later with guidance by a sales rep.
As a Norwegian in the UK without any problematic things about my name, I think you don't need to assume malice or lack of imagination, simply that they did not want to handle anything but the braindead "safe" situations online.
I similarly often prefer to apply offline or in person about things, because despite more than a decade here, and great credit history, I occasionally get hit by UK banks assuming that not being on the electoral roll means increased risks (it can mean you're trying to keep your real address out of official registers). They have no problems dealing with me in person, when someone manually reviews the situation, but either they've decided it's not worth the hassle to try to deal with this online, or that it's safer to just point me to a branch or call for extra verification.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a SOAP request going from a flash client to a coldfusion server. Yeah.
I still didn't get that. In SOAP request empty value should be clearly distinct from the string with "Null" value, as well as from the nil case. For example: Null - element equal to "Null" - empty element (can also have a nil attribute set to true).
Yes, this looks to be ColdFusion doing very weird things by randomly interpreting strings.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a SOAP request going from a flash client to a coldfusion server. Yeah.
I still didn't get that. In SOAP request empty value should be clearly distinct from the string with "Null" value, as well as from the nil case. For example: Null - element equal to "Null" - empty element (can also have a nil attribute set to true).
All it takes is one piece of code in the chain deciding to "helpfully" "fix" cases where people have stringified null values in a system that stringifies null to "null" by "translating them back" to null, and voila, you have a broken system.
A lot of problems like these are down to programmers that try to fix bugs by fixing the symptoms.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
The name of someone if a delicate problem, but all of these are straightforward questions. There is an "official name" and it's on your registration certificate. That's the one that goes in the 漢字名 field and that's the one that the bank will accept (my registration had both the double with latin character and the katakana in parenthesis: no questions asked, they both go, parenthesis included). The validation of the k…
They're not straightforward. There is an "official name" and it's on your registration certificate. The thing about official names is that I have so many to choose from! Alien registration certificate? MCKENZIE PATRICK JOHNATHAN. No kana because town hall called up the local immigration authorities and heard "'Nicknames' are not required for the administration of Japanese immigration law and accordingly should not be…
The decision not to manage "nicknames" (通称名) under the new immigration law because they aren't necessary from an administrative standpoint is illustrative of the disconnect between the people making these laws in Japan and the people that are subject to them. I realize that this is inevitable because foreign residents can't vote, but it's frustrating that the government doesn't seek input from them when formulating new policy that will have large effects on them.
Because of the difficulties in using foreign names with Japanese computer systems and paperwork that you mentioned, 通称名 ("nicknames") are essential for many foreign residents. Some groups have been using them for decades now, so even a cursory attempt to get feedback on the new laws would have identified this problem.
Still, some groups of special permanent residents have organized and successfully overturned some of the more odious aspects of the immigration law, like the fingerprinting requirement for alien registration. In particular, the Korean special permanent resident community has some degree of influence on policy because of their size and organization.
Given the general ignorance of the central government (and the immigration bureaucracy as a whole) towards the real needs of foreign residents, I see this decision as ignorance on the importance of 通称名 rather than an attempt to quash the rights of foreign residents. In my experience the local governments tend to be more sympathetic towards the actual needs of foreign residents, perhaps because they have more prolonged interaction with them. (Though as with every government organ in Japan, the interpretation of the law varies wildly depending on which clerk you interact with.)
Troubles like the ones you describe are a large part of why I registered 長瀬ダニエル as a 通称名 and use it for everything I possibly can.
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#209As 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.
This list is useless, because trying to follow it is impossibly ambitious. Which of these do I need to support for my system to work for X% of users with X+Y % being able to work around the limitations?
Logical fallacy (bifurcation): either you correctly implement all of the requirements, or it makes no sense trying at all. Note that the article even explicitly says "try to make _fewer_ of these assumptions," not "you MUST explicitly support all this."
Similar example: Do you lock your door, or does that make no sense to you? (Because if there's no absolute, perfect, 100% protection, there's apparently no difference at all between locked, closed and wide open; right?)
Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
My name is Kim and I'm a male. Try convincing Americans (and other English speaking countries) about that... One example: Many years ago I subscribed to TIME and filled out a form where I checked "Mr." Apparently the person who typed in my name decided to "correct" this error and I became a "Mrs."... and I wasn't even married :-) The company I work at has offices in different cities, so most of the communication are…
I went to school with a male Kim in Aus. Never even realised it could be a girls name until the 80s when there were several female singers called Kim. Lots of male names seem to become girls names. Ashley is another that seems to have been lost in living memory. Apparently Shirley was once a male name and I am not joking. Between that and boys once wearing dresses until breaching along with pink clothes and long hair…
All the Ashley's I went to school with in the 70s were boys. I often wonder if it's an issue for them these days...