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When your last name is Null, nothing works

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Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#91

Post by EvanAnderson »

skissane wrote: post #65
ghaff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A former employer had a first letter of given name + last name (actually first 5 letters) convention for email addresses. They did have a fallback--usually with second letter of given name. But, of course, a lot of people just automatically emailed the convention with the result that certain email "twins" got misdirected mail. A very common one at one point was that the CFO shared a first letter of name with his daug…

> A former employer had a first letter of given name + last name (actually first 5 letters) convention for email addresses I once heard a story (possibly apocryphal) about a place which used a similar “first initial and truncated surname” convention for usernames, except theirs was first three letters of surname, followed by first initial, followed by some digits. And it all worked great until they hired a guy named…

I knew a Steve Penington who broke a user id scheme.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#92

Post by WantonQuantum »

CivBase wrote: post #46
francisofascii wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which systems do this? I could see situations where reading in a text file, you have might assume the value null is not the string "null". I am struggling to think of other situations.

Bash, C strings, URL query strings, and CSVs off the top of my head.

C definitely does not represent null as a string.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#93

Post by doubled112 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #84
detourdog wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I set-up a directory system for a small school. The students logins were a combination or initials and date of birth. When I created the scheme I knew that a set of twins would break the system. Somewhere between 3 and 5 years we finally got a set of twins that needed to modify the system. I called them to my office and found out which one came out first and appended 1 their usernames and 2.

I anticipated twins with The school directory sync system I made for a small District (sub-5000 enrollment). I appended a random two digit number to first initial, last name (EAnderson96). So far none of the parents who have "weaponized"(1) the naming of their children have managed to break it since we brought it up in '99. (1) Hypothetical John Smith and his siblings Jane Smith, James Smith, Janet Smith, Jack Smith,…

I love seeing what the apostrophe in my last name breaks when I sign up for services.

Converting it to an HTML character entity is not really expected behaviour, but it was among the most amusing I’ve seen.

O'Brien was it? Bonus points if you edit the profile and those are expanded too. Hello Mr. O'Brien.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#94

Post by DidYaWipe »

zenethian wrote: post #22

The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.

And the ones that are too incompetent to strip (or add) hyphens to phone numbers.

Or handle single-digit month numbers in a date.

Or...

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#95

Post by DidYaWipe »

world2vec wrote: post #43

I have 4 names (two first names and two surnames), pretty common thing in my country. But I've had issues several times when flying because they assume it's two different people? How stupid is that?

Yeah, why aren't names quoted in these systems? It seems that this Null problem is specific example of failure to quote strings properly.

What about last names like "da Silva"?

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#96

Post by js2 »

DC-3 wrote: post #16

I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and reque…

In Severance S2E1, Mark W says to Mark S: "Would you be open to using a different first name to avoid confusion?"

Did anyone ever ask that of you or your twin?

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#97

Post by sepositus »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #70

This is hilarious: Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it,…

> A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles.

I'm not the biggest expert on databases, although I've worked with them a bit, but how does this occur in the first place? Usually, associations are done with primary/foreign keys. What database would allow null in that case?

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#99

Post by TheBozzCL »

sepositus wrote: post #97
aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #70

This is hilarious: Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it,…

> A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles. I'm not the biggest expert on databases, although I've worked with them a bit, but how does this occur in the first place? Usually, associations are done with primary/foreign keys. What database would allow null in that case?

It'd be sufficient if a system involved somewhere in the process converted null values to strings. There's innumerable ways, but here's a simple one in Java:

    final String myNullString = "" + null;
    System.out.println(myNullString);
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