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We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

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Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#231

Post by Dove »

anotherevan wrote: post #147
speeder wrote: post #42

Earlier 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 get's worse. A friend of mine has a hyphenated name, "Kerry-Jean". The hyphen alone often breaks things.

My best friend in elementary school had the misfortune of a hyphenated last name that was exactly sixteen characters long. The systems at the school evidently limited you to fifteen characters, because I saw her name printed in a lot of places without the final character.

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#232

Post by dgesang »

sdoowpilihp wrote: post #72
xxpor wrote: post #28

"WSDL (SOAP) from AS3 to ColdFusion web service" I know it probably wasn't this guy's choice, but whooo boy.

For all that is wrong with flash as a platform, I have always found Actionscript 3 to be a far better structured and easy to work with language, compared to something like javascript, which has a very 'organic' structure. I can't speak much to ColdFusion or WSDL though.

Also AS3 has strong static typing, a huge advantage, as we've just heard once again yesterday:

[...] the value of types is super super important. [...] Everything that is syntacticly legal, that the compiler will accept, will eventually wind up in your code base and that's why I think that static typing is so valuable because it cuts down on what can kinda make it pass down there. I'm only getting stronger in my stands on static typing, static analysis.[...] - John Carmack, qcon keynote 2013

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#233

Post by sdoowpilihp »

dgesang wrote: post #232
sdoowpilihp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all that is wrong with flash as a platform, I have always found Actionscript 3 to be a far better structured and easy to work with language, compared to something like javascript, which has a very 'organic' structure. I can't speak much to ColdFusion or WSDL though.

Also AS3 has strong static typing, a huge advantage, as we've just heard once again yesterday: [...] the value of types is super super important. [...] Everything that is syntacticly legal, that the compiler will accept, will eventually wind up in your code base and that's why I think that static typing is so valuable because it cuts down on what can kinda make it pass down there. I'm only getting stronger in my stan…

I actually feel like AS3 could go further with static typing. Due to things like promotions with arithmetic operators, you lose some performance. I always felt it would be better to either force the user to explicitly cast between floating point operators and ints, and crash if they tried to do something with an int that would lead to a float.

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#234

Post by autoreverse »

lmm wrote: post #195
autoreverse wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this have been solved by using "外人第一" as a suffix or instead of the romaji/katakana name? I once tried to apply for a Japanese credit card online about 10 years ago (certainly things have changed with some banks sine then). IIRC the form would not accept romaji and my kana name was too long for the kanji input field. This was painfully frustrating at the time but helped frame my approach to forms and DB specifi…

If you're using MySQL then to get real UTF8 you need to declare the column as some other funny name (UTF8MB4?).

Thanks for this. MySQL 5.5+ it looks like. We're on earlier MySQL versions but will keep this in mind for after we upgrade in the future.

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#235

Post by nandemo »

autoreverse wrote: post #196
nandemo wrote: post #181

Earlier 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.

Fair enough, but I'm not exactly assuming "malice", I'm just saying that such "lack of imagination" wouldn't happen if foreigners were considered an important target for the banks.

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#236

Post by anotherevan »

anotherevan wrote: post #147
speeder wrote: post #42

Earlier 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 get's worse. A friend of mine has a hyphenated name, "Kerry-Jean". The hyphen alone often breaks things.

In this case, "Kerry-Jean" is her first name. (Just to be clear.)

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#237

Post by pixelcort »

I recently moved to Japan. My name, as it appears on my passport, is 26 characters long and consists of a-z letters and spaces. This means I run into three problems:

First, many computer systems here can't fit names that long, leading to truncation, or in some cases, denial of account creation (some places have rules that whatever's on the account must match exactly what's on the passport; one was nice enough to add a new column to their database for the rest of my name).

Second, many systems don't support a-z, so we throw the name in as katakana or double-byte romaji, depending on what works. Sometimes neither will work, and we just have to give up and go somewhere else.

Finally, many computer systems can only link accounts if the names match exactly, for example inter-bank transfers and bill payments. Since my name is truncated differently in different places, and is formatted differently in different systems, in many cases it's just impossible.

For example, right now I'm charged a fee for transferring money between two bank accounts, since the free transfers only apply if the names match exactly. I just withdraw cash from one and deposit it into the other as a workaround.

Another example is my cell phone bill. To pay it by CC my name must match exactly, but all my cards have slightly different spellings.

Don't even get me started on my wife, who is ethnically Japanese but came with me as a foreigner and hence has a name written using a-z letters. It literally has set of fraud detection systems.

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#238

Post by smcl »

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #213
kimlastname wrote: post #143

Earlier 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…

Kim, like Hilary and Evelyn is a traditional boys name that has somehow become exclusively female over that last half-century or so.

In Scotland there's a fair amount of male Kellys and Lesleys which also appear to have slowly evolved into female names in the rest of the English speaking world (as far as I can see)

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#239

Post by hso9791 »

sehrope wrote: post #54
glimcat wrote: post #4

As 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)…

Regarding [1], in the favour of regexps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language

If you can't use a regexp to recognize the general case of email addresses, no finite automaton can..

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#240

Post by jdpage »

hso9791 wrote: post #239
sehrope wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Regarding [1], in the favour of regexps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language If you can't use a regexp to recognize the general case of email addresses, no finite automaton can..

Yes, but there is a point at which it's better to just hand-write some code which is equivalent to the automaton, rather than trying to use a regexp.

This is what a proper email-validation regexp looks like: http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

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