61–70 of 245 posts
Offer him a substantial bonus to change his name. You could Kickstarter the money with donations from database admins around the world.
A Japanese company once made the decision that they needed "virtual" employees in a particular system, for example to support e.g. adding a job to the org chart before that position had been filled (and another dozen use cases), so they had the clever idea "Hey, if we need to do this, we'll just input their 'name in Japanese' as one of a dozen status flags, like XX_JOB_REQUEST or XX_INCOMING_TRANSFER." One developer…
InternalStringUtils.isAllLatinCharacters("Patrick McKenzie") == trueAs 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.
My given names in English are Mark Jason, and that's on my birth certificate. In Greek, they're Μάρκος Ιάσονας, which are the equivalents, and that's on my municipal birth records there (registered as a foreign birth at the time of baptism). There seems to be a move towards wanting to use "accurate" transliterations, though, rather than the more traditional method of translating names to equivalents (MarkMarkos, GeorgeGeorgios, PaulPavlos, etc.). Sometimes people desire that: maybe someone named Михаил in Russian really doesn't want to be turned into Michael, but wants to go by Mikhail. That's fine, if they prefer. But in my case, I consider each of these translated forms to be my name in the respective languages, and do not consider the transliterated forms to be my name.
But in trying to sort out some paperwork, it appears that what I am supposed to do is one of these two things: 1) change my name in English from Mark Jason to Markos Iasonas, the transliteration of my Greek name; or 2) change my name in Greek from Μάρκος Ιάσονας to Μαρκ Τζέισον, the transliteration of my English name. But I don't want to do either of those things. #2 in particular is ridiculous, because it doesn't decline properly, and is trying to approximate a 'j' sound with 'tz'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I blame c. Those mothers should learn how to implement their programmers.
Funny, I read this as "I blame C [the language]". I was taken aback because obviously "null" in C is a 5 byte character array and would never be confused for NULL.
Reminds me of a story a police reservist told me. Guy got a license plate caled "none," and instantly had thousands of outstanding warrants. (The cop thought "none" was trying a fast one, and so deserved it.)
What do you know, there's an xkcd for that too: http://xkcd.com/1105/
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)…
Unicode lets you represent lots of abstract characters, from different languages and societies, in one character set. That doesn't quite tell you how to render the characters. For that, you need to know what language the text is in. Unicode wants you to provide that information out-of-band, e.g. in an HTML "lang" attribute, which the renderer can use to paint the proper glyphs.
For example, the Arabic digits 4 through 7 (۴ U+06F4 .. ۷ U+06F7) have different glyphs in Persian, Sindhi, and Urdu. And a character like 直 (U+76F4) has Chinese and Japanese glyphs that may not be mutually recognizable.
Bottom line: if you want an internationalized system that can store and render multilingual text, storing the text in Unicode is a good start, but you will need to store additional info (like the language) to be able to properly render the text.