Reminds me the "NO PLATE" license plate story: http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/noplate.asp
Why didn't they just null the field?
My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)
91–100 of 140 posts
Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)
#92I 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.…
I believe the problem might be more common when exporting data from one system to another. I've written code to migrate (and merge) large datasets from old legacy systems. I needed quite a lot of heuristics and "best-effort" transformations in order to deal with data inconsistencies... mostly string manipulations where it's not hard to imagine bugs like this happening.
Ah, so it's your fault. Got it!
;-)
Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)
#93I'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…
I imagine there's many special cases where a compiler's type coercion creates an issue.
Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)
#94I'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…
That's insane.
I've known Java to be a bit verbose, but I thought it was mostly a reasonable language aside from that. I might have expected something like that from Javascript or PHP. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that boring old Java would interpret a null cast to a string as a literal string "null" when combining strings. Even Ruby and Python don't do that - they throw type mismatch errors instead. C# treats it as empty string.
Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't have to. null.toString() throws NPE as it should. I would expect "foo" + null to throw NPE as well. BTW there's another "fun" gotcha, when you interface java code and oracle database which consider empty string and null to be the same thing. Depending on how you handle data from database you end up with null, "", or "null" :)
String.valueOf(null) returns "null" though, and that is what "foo" + null uses. I can understand why it would be surprising if you thought it used .toString, but it's clearly listed in the standard.
Sure, but .toString() can be used to change how your class stringifies, so clearly it is being called at some point (perhaps by String.valueOf()).
And indeed,
public static String valueOf(Object obj) {
return (obj == null) ? "null" : obj.toString();
}
Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)
#96I'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…
One place where that can easily happen is loading comma-separated value files into a database. Some CSV files are formatted with the convention that fields only appear in quotes if they contain special characters. Thus, a data value of NULL is not quoted. This loses the distinction made in SQL databases between NULL, the null value, and "NULL", the string.
(I just received some files like this. One is a file that has names. If someone had a name of NULL, it would go into the database as a null.)
Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm French and I see this all the time, even Outlook, given the right conditions, will gives you this in the default folders, Inbox in French is "Boite de réception".
Don't get me started on Outlook folders. The actual names are of the folders are localised, not just the way it's presented to the user. The folders are created when you first start Outlook (and not when your account is created). If you happen to be using Windows configured in a foreign language the first time you start Outlook, your inbox, sent mail, etc, folders are named according to that language, and will never…
You can change the folder names after the fact. It is annoying, though.
Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hyphens too. Source: have a hyphenated last name. "No special characters in this field".
I get that with periods in a street name. Like when I write "123 Main St.", and the web site checks against the USPS's database, it will either reject it outright for having "special" characters, or will say, "We didn't find that, but we found this similar address - '123 Main St', which should we use?" It's so fucking dumb.
I had a fun issue signing up for a bank here in Japan.
Japanese people can't have middle names (the citizen registry doesn't allow it), but foreigners can, so many systems will reject spaces in the name field. Meanwhile they're meticulous about making sure your name matches your ID exactly, leading to the situation I had.
The bank's web signup form disallowed spaces in your name, so I wrote my name FIRSTMIDDLE. Then when they processed my application they sent me an email "Your name doesn't match your ID card! Please approve the change to 'FIRST MIDDLE'."
Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)
#99Does someone maintain a comprehensive list of names you should validate against?
Not only names per-se, but for testing string handling in general I remember this was posted to HN a while back https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings
Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)
#100Earlier 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.
If you really want some fun, try explaining to people the difference between modern Greek tonos (e.g. ή, Unicode 03ae) and ancient Greek oxia (e.g. ή, Unicode 1f75). Or in UTF-8: paul@tal:~$ od --format=x1z tmp/tonos-oxia 0000000 74 6f 6e 6f 73 3a 20 ce ae 0a 6f 78 69 61 3a 20 >tonos: ...oxia: .... It's super fun when you are the only tech person in a Classics grad program and everyone else is turning in papers that…
My kingdom for a good monospaced font and supporting editor to handle these and RTL languages. I've found Setups that work with one or the other, but none seems to do it all just yet.