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My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

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Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#31

Post by Freak_NL »

tyingq wrote: post #2

I have seen apps that choke on much more common names. Like O'Brian. This post is a classic on various name issues: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

Tangentially related (rule 9); my girlfriend's surname contains an 'é'. I have yet to see a year go by without receiving mail having 'é' on the address label where the é should be.

Explanation:

    echo "é" | iconv -t utf8 -f iso8859-15
We're Dutch, and the é is part of our language, and even part of the legacy character encoding standard everyone used before Unicode's widespread adoption. This is just a matter of code that works perfect as long as all characters are part of the ASCII set, but fails on the characters that don't conveniently match between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-15.

I doubt these issues will go away within even, say, twenty years.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#32

Post by jessaustin »

stephenr wrote: post #8
intopieces wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, let me tell you about the saga of Mr Curl trying to update his billing information at a company I used to work for...

I don't understand. Are you agreeing with me or suggesting a string with the contents "curl" will somehow cause the server to execute the curl command?

Maybe this was back in the days of CGI? It's perfectly feasible that the right combination of characters might break out of an ill-advised pipe to get to the shell.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#33

Post by kijin »

charlieo88 wrote: post #22
tyingq wrote: post #2

I have seen apps that choke on much more common names. Like O'Brian. This post is a classic on various name issues: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

It's not always a computer problem. I have an O' name. There have been many college educated adults I've had to explain the difference between a quote ("), an apostrophe ('), and whatever the hell you call the character under the tilde (`). I kid, it's the grave.

The backtick and apostrophe are often used to emulate ``curly quotes,'' which makes the confusion even worse.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#34

Post by bmm6o »

charlieo88 wrote: post #22
tyingq wrote: post #2

I have seen apps that choke on much more common names. Like O'Brian. This post is a classic on various name issues: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

It's not always a computer problem. I have an O' name. There have been many college educated adults I've had to explain the difference between a quote ("), an apostrophe ('), and whatever the hell you call the character under the tilde (`). I kid, it's the grave.

For an extra challenge, you can explain what an 'okina is.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#35

Post by incongruity »

ajuc wrote: post #21
DavidWoof wrote: post #6

I've been programming for over a quarter century, and I feel pretty confident that I've never written anything that could confuse 'null' with NULL. I can't even think of a language that would let you easily do this. If web forms aren't accepting NULL, then somebody probably specifically programmed the word 'null' into a filter of disallowed entries. Probably to stop clerks from entering the word 'null' to mean empty…

In java + operator on strings works like this: Object a = null; String s = "foo bar " + a; // s == "foo bar null" So, it's possible to get "null" as a string downstream, when some variable that should be non-nulleable - was null. If you find such a bug and incompetently fix it by checking for "null" downstream instead of checking before turning variables into strings - you have the error from the article. Especially…

Sure – that's just casting a null type as a string.

So I guess if you have a comparison that somehow casts null to a string before comparing, you could run into this issue, but that's still bad programming.

I used to own null@myundergrad.edu as an email alias (with my real university, not that generic .edu, of course) and I got all sorts of interesting things... but that was very intentional on my part.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#36

Post by [deleted] »

charlieo88 wrote: post #22
tyingq wrote: post #2

I have seen apps that choke on much more common names. Like O'Brian. This post is a classic on various name issues: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

It's not always a computer problem. I have an O' name. There have been many college educated adults I've had to explain the difference between a quote ("), an apostrophe ('), and whatever the hell you call the character under the tilde (`). I kid, it's the grave.

[deleted]

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#37

Post by craigds »

tyingq wrote: post #2

I have seen apps that choke on much more common names. Like O'Brian. This post is a classic on various name issues: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

Dutch names (two or three word surnames with spaces) confuse all sorts of systems/people.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#38

Post by halfdgvfyjjuc »

charlieo88 wrote: post #22
tyingq wrote: post #2

I have seen apps that choke on much more common names. Like O'Brian. This post is a classic on various name issues: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

It's not always a computer problem. I have an O' name. There have been many college educated adults I've had to explain the difference between a quote ("), an apostrophe ('), and whatever the hell you call the character under the tilde (`). I kid, it's the grave.

That character is a backtick not a grave isn't it? Also some cultures use «» as quotes. It's a big world.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#39

Post by jmull »

I don't get what's happening at the low-level for this to be a problem.

It seems like you'd have to do something pretty stupid at the coding level to introduce a problem with "Null" by mistake. I'm sure it happens, but not more of an occasional issue.

My best guess is that there are common old databases that did not have a first class null type where it was common practice to use the string "NULL" for that purpose. And that companies that have these old systems are proactively filtering user input to prevent causing these old system to choke... It sounds like the filter is case-insensitive, though, which would be too aggressive for the case I'm thinking of. Maybe they are (mis)using a bad word filter for this, which would tend to be aggressive.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#40

Post by 0xffff2 »

halfdgvfyjjuc wrote: post #38
charlieo88 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always a computer problem. I have an O' name. There have been many college educated adults I've had to explain the difference between a quote ("), an apostrophe ('), and whatever the hell you call the character under the tilde (`). I kid, it's the grave.

That character is a backtick not a grave isn't it? Also some cultures use «» as quotes. It's a big world.

Is there a difference? I think those are both words for the same character.
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