Slashdot Mirror
Names That Break Computers (bbc.com)
Reader Thelasko writes: The BBC has a story about people with names that break computer databases. "When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites. The site will say she has left the surname field blank and ask her to try again."
Thelasko compares it to the XKCD comic about Bobby Tables, though it's a real problem that's also been experienced by a Hawaiian woman named Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele, whose last name exceeds the 36-character limit on state ID cards. And in 2010, programmer John Graham-Cumming complained about web sites (including Yahoo) which refused to accept hyphenated last names.
Programmer Patrick McKenzie pointed the BBC to a 2011 W3C post highlighting the key issues with names, along with his own list of common mistaken assumptions. "They don't necessarily test for the edge cases," McKenzie says, noting that even when filing his own income taxes in Japan, his last name exceeds the number of characters allowed.
Spare a thought for kids whose hippy parents thought "Anonymous McGuire" would be a good name to stick it to the man. Man.
Really, this should not be a problem for anyone who gets paid for doing this kind of work.
Users with unacceptably deviant names will be assigned GUIDs for standardized interaction with all systems. Thank you for your compliance with this exciting and mandatory efficiency initiative.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/...
Nothing to say, read it.
There is similar stuff about Dates, Time, Time Zones etc. on the internet. I should make a collection of it.
But I can't figure how to write into my /. journal nor how to use the old /. bookmark feature.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I was working the help desk at Intuit when a beautiful Indian woman employee required assistance with her laptop. Her last name was 26 characters long and ended with the word "porn". No one could pronounce her last name beyond the first few syllables. My coworkers and I referred to her as "Miss Porn" while repairing her laptop. Behind her back, of course.
It's amazing how many oriental names in Britain break UK databases! Especially if they're only two letters long.
Just pick one already.
Her name in a (web) form would be put into a database field as a string ... the word NULL is a keyword, not a string "NULL". I am not saying that this did not happen, I just find it hard to see how a string and a database keyword could possibly be confused ?
It would be: INSERT INTO Customer (Surname) VALUES ("NULL")
not:: INSERT INTO Customer (Surname) VALUES (NULL)
An asian co-worker of mine who's family name is Teh has found that his name is almost impossible to type in tools like microsoft word, which auto correct Teh to The.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I work with an intelligent and pretty good engineer who designed a REST API where he would treat query parameters such as "foo=null" as assigning null to foo and not "null". It took quite a lot to convince him that we was wrong. I'm sure this mistake is made all the time.
I get to the checkout page, hit submit and it says "Missing required field". Good thing I have my own plane!
- Cher
...by simplifying it.
Use one short first name and one short surname, or suffer for your insufferable ego.
It's unreasonable to expect the Japanese to change their systems because of a problem that only occurs for badly integrated foreigners.
My uncle experienced this problem with our last name: Blank. When filling out a form it returned with an error: Last name cannot be left blank. This is still a running joke in our family. Never experienced it myself.
The problem is stupid programmers, or script monkeys, that make really bad assumptions or restrictions.
It's not that hard to avoid these issues in the first place, unless you're working on a system that only has 256 bytes.
Yes, I learned machine language on computers that literally only had 256 bytes.
I'm definitely using the right term of byte, as in a group of 8 bits, each bit being a representation of a 1 or a 0.
I know your phone 'may' literally have a billion times more memory/storage, but it's not always that convenient.
I've had issues a few times with filters on names rejecting mine for supposedly referring to a body part...
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
I could never create his account (last name as ID). It took me some time to realize the parser was picking up on the keyword long. It was decades ago, so I expected things like that were fixed.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Your name crashed a computer while blacks in Africa are looking for some food to nibble on.
My friend Eddie Cucha Catcha Camma Toe-Sa Nara Toe-Sa Nocka Samma Camma Wacky Brown fell into the well. The 911 system couldn't handle his name and he drowned. I wanted to put his name in the comment subject, but it was too long to fit
It is high time the government refuses to register any name that is not Unicode compliant, within so many bytes with some reserved names that are not allowed. No more onefortymandaktwosixtwojamuna to you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Data cannot break computers. Data whose contents differ from the possible preconception of application programmers can cause errors in poorly designed, written, or tested applications.
Its standard practice in a lot of places to use first initial and first three letters of last name as the basis of a user ID.
This is a problem for a guy i know his last name is `Ey`
Try typing Björn into a lot of web site name fields. I'm not sure that slashdot should be too vocal on this, I don't think the umlauts would have shown up until recently.
Nullius in verba
Most programmers can not even figure out how to validate a f--ing email address, let alone a persons name.
How about they fix the email problem first and stop rejecting my email address ^_^@mydomain
Yes, you can put that on my domain listed below and email me, and yes it is a valid email address as per the RFC.
Story sounds suspicious. Null as a string is not a reserved word or a name that should cause problems unless they are doing some really weird shit. You might check a string for being NULL but you would never check a string to see if it was equal to "Null" (unless you are employing retard programmers).
All the names people gave themselves when we database programmers were weak is no longer enforceable once we became strong. Now we enter the name of the baby at birth in the hospital. If the name could not be entered, tough luck, pick a new name proud parents! Not born in a hospital? Hospital does not have computer? tough luck, no social security number to your baby, no way to do anything in US of A. We are the dbase programmers, we rule the world.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My last name tripps up decency filters on websites. My wife tried to create an account on some website and it wouldnt accept our last name in the registration field saying foul language wasn't allowed.
My last name.. Dike
Stop signs are only Suggestions
It happened to me in Spain. Foreigners get IDs that start with an X, while natives' IDs start with a 0. There was this system to get the payroll ant it wouldn't accept an ID if it didn't start with a 0. The IT zombies tried to convince me once and again that I was inserting my password incorrectly as the illiterate "sudaka" I obviously was. It wasn't till I used technical jargon and told them to log on using the VNC that they took me seriously and fixed it.
Sorry, but if a last name of "Null" breaks your code, you're a shit coder.
The same for name fields- a 50 character limit should be the minimum. Database space is cheap, what exactly do people think they're saving by restricting a name field to 20 characters or so?
It pisses me off when a site insists that your last name HAS to be more than 2 characters, or that your first name can't be a single letter. Believe it or not, some people DO have names like that. If he was still alive someone like e. e. cummings wouldn't be able to sign up for jack shit these days because most sites insist that a period simply cannot be a part of your name, and a one-letter name is somehow illegal.
It makes sense to restrict some fields to some maximum value when the upper limit is known (i.e. phone numbers, zip codes, US state names, etc) but for any arbitrary data it makes no sense to enforce an unrealistic maximum. Yes, most last names are less than 30 characters, but not all are. Why would you put in some stupid hard max limit like 30 characters?
Seriously, what the fuck does it cost you to define a column as 100 chars wide instead of 30? What benefit are you supposedly gaining by restricting it to 30 chars? Are you being charged by the letter or something? Sure, a 100 character limit seems unduly generous, but the moment a customer can't create an account because of your mindless stinginess, you're the one that loses a sale, not them.
I've been coding for decades and it's both gratifying and disheartening to see so many large, well-funded companies making these idiot-level mistakes that I don't make. I have a hard time believing that I'm smarter than all the coders at some of these large companies, but the evidence seems to show I am, at least in some areas.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Your name could be Cherry Chevapravatdumrong. She's one of the producers on Family Guy.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm221...
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
The fancy-pants name for this is the semipredicate problem
I don't recall how I stumbled upon that article; but it's one of my favorite "look at me, I can use a long word for it" things now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The article neglects to mention perhaps the most famous case of all, Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff, Senior. And that's just an abbreviation -- his actual surname (or so he claimed) was 666 letters long.
My father is of Irish descent, and it's the devil's own job to keep the proper O'(Capital letter) as the start of our last name.
As long as your last name isn't a single letter. That catches my psuedonym fairly regularly.
Back when I worked in medical data, I encountered real people with single-character names. It happens for real names, too. For programmers, the rule is simple: Don't use names for anything except your application's convenience, and don't have any restrictions on them. Don't even require their existence.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I've got a phone number ending in 4 0's. LOTS of sites won't accept it as valid, including my state tax bureau. I had to create an account with a false number, then go back and change it.(and that was at the suggestion of the IT guy from the state!)
I run two e-commerce stores based on osCommerce and had this exact issue with a customer whose last name was Null. There is a common function in osCommerce (tep_not_null) trying to see if the argument is empty. One of the things it looks for is the string "null". When I discovered this, I removed that part of the test (which never made sense to me.)
As many people have pointed out the obvious, that only an idiot who doesn't know anything about programming would write an app that screws up on a name like "Null", I won't get into that.
The real problem is the assumptions such as a person have a "first name", a "last name", or a "middle name". Lots of apps mindlessly break things out this way just because they think they are supposed to. It kind of makes sense on some level, especially for form letters, but it breaks a lot. So let's think, what's the ultimate reason for doing that? So that we can use it in natural language: "Mr. Doe", "Dear John", etc.
But wait... if that's our goal, we are doing it wrong for another reason, gender pronouns. There's the assumption that there is exactly 2, or sometimes the assumption of a 3rd set in the case of marriage. We have this with pronouns, titles, AND names. Are you a Doctor? Do you have a professional Title of some kind? Are you the 10th generation with the same name?
So what's the solution? Well probably most apps can get away with storing the name in UTF-8 as is, with only a single "name" field. If your app needs to customize or include a name in natural language, perhaps you can auto-conjugate all of the possible forms you'll need and ask the user to edit them for accuracy? That way they can select their own pronouns, etc. Then just store all of the strings verbatim instead of just the string-parts. Probably not the best solution but probably better than most.
Good thing I named my kid "Drop Database"!
What keeps the Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele's of the world from not dreaming up even longer last names?
Table-ized A.I.
"Now and again, system administrators have to try and fix the problem for people who are actually named “Null” – but the issue is rare and sometimes surprisingly difficult to solve."
Not really difficult at all, as “Null” is a text string and NULL is a datatype usually encoded as Ø, that is the numeric value of zero and not "0". Any database that read a string and converts it to a datatype isn't worth the bits it's written in.
The name Mackenzie would be normally rendered in Japanese as three sounds, Ma Ken Ji. Normally these would be phonetic kana characters, and I have never heard of a Jaoanese database (I used to implement these) which didn't support kana. But if you rule out kana names, a foreigner can still choose kanji, or Chinese, characters to represent his name.
I tried registering a product on-line, but their software would delete any words found in HTML, including e-mail addresses. My address became something like "user@-word.com" because it had the word "table" in it. Both prompts for it were so filtered. It was also to be my login at the site. I couldn't receive the confirmation e-mail because they'd borked it. I got them on the phone and they made the correction in their database (their system was unfiltered) resulting in me still being locked out because the login prompt also stripped out "table"!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I mean most of the examples quoted are relatively trivial programming errors or database limitations. All of which need to be fixed forthwith.
And then we come to Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele. Holy Haleakala! That's one mighty Hawaiian last name! Can we just call you Janice Keihana informally?
When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites.
Most websites? Really? That's a lot of badly written websites. I mean, wouldn't you have to almost go out of your way to make it crap enough to fall over when giving the string "Null"?
This is because the word “null” is often inserted into database fields to indicate that there is no data there.
If you're literally entering the word "null" to indicate no data then you're a really shitty database programmer.
I can't help wondering if Ms Null had this happen to her once - maybe twice - and enjoyed the attention her little story got her so much that she's started embellishing it each time she tells it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Harry S Truman
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
1. There are 5 ways to write names which are all used/required depending on situation: Kanji+Kana ; Hiragana ; Full-width Katakana ; Half-width Katakana ; and Roman alphabet. Even Japanese people are fed up with this (cryptic use of half-width katakana is a major cause of bank transfer failures).
2. A lot of systems make unnecessary strong assumption on names, especially foreigner names: e.g.
- that there should be no spaces in full name written in full-width characters (OK for Japanese nationals and a handful other countries ; NOK everywhere else)
- that there should be 1 distinct last name and 1 distinct first name and nothing else (some people have a single word as their only name)
- that foreigners should have 1 middle name (assuming every foreigners are US citizen and the handful other nationalities which have the concept of "middle" name ; this particular one has led to some of the most infuriating arguments with certain vendors in Japan where it made it impossible for me to register with certain vendors)
- that there should be 1 first name only (usual practice in some countries is to have multiple first names as distinguishers)
- restrictions on which characters can be used inside fields (e.g. no hyphens, no space in a given subfield such as last name, typically no support of non ASCII characters)
- restrictions on field lengths (a classic one everywhere in the world it seems)
So a name like Yakamoto would be too long in Japan?
I would have thought the problem would be something else, not the fact that it was hypenated.
I have a friend whose surname is "O" (without quotes). He often is on the verge of a mental breakdown dealing with a web registration form.
One of the most common first names in the English-speaking world, if not THE most common, doesn't fit on a lot of forms...
It's pretty easy to imagine that several airlines copied their null test from a crappy stack overflow response using implicit string casting like:
function isNull(obj) { return obj == "Null" }
Or maybe that's how the test is coded in some poorly-thought-out JavaScript-on-the-server library that everyone uses.
I was stumped working on a website on a shared ColdFusion server, where the webhost decided to install a SQL injection filter. Random form posts and URLs that used various SQL reserved words like, well, LIKE, or SELECT, or whatever started failing. That wasn't fun.
...are sometimes a problem too. And these aren't even that uncommon.
My New Jersey driver's license still has me named CHRISTOPHE because back in 1993 or so when I got my license -- go ahead, count the number of characters. Ten. The idiot programmers who put together New Jersey's database allocated TEN CHARACTERS for the first name. Fucking morons. First of all, it's standard procedure, when inventing a completely arbitrary length limit in a computer program, to make it a power of 2, just so it looks like you did it for some computer-related reason. A limit of 10 is obviously bullshit because no computer in the world has a limit of 10 for anything. Only humans use 10 as a round number. Second, if you're programming a database of names and you need to set limits on length, the least you should do is check the most common names and make sure the limit is larger than the largest one. And CHRISTOPHER has been in the top twenty of American male first names for a long, long time. Citation: http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...
The reality is that a lot of systems access databases formatted when that wasn't the case, so are incapable of dealing with larger field sizes because they were set up decades ago. So if the underlying COBOL system won't allow more than 30 characters, it would be foolish to allow a front end that did...
I read once about an Indian guy who changed his name to the equivalent of "John Smith (deceased)". Evidently this was in protest to some threats by a local official along the lines of " if you don't sell me your land you're dead ". The computers were fine with it, but an operator at his bank read the name and flagged the account as deceased, freezing all his money.
Having a Jr suffix on my name... breaks most web sites. Amtrak being the worst. On one page, it is required, but the on the next page it breaks. Its now impossible with their most recent update for me to purchase tickets using my account. Without the suffix, it says my name doesn't match, but with the suffix, it says there are invalid characters.
For programmers, the rule is simple: Don't use names for anything except your application's convenience, and don't have any restrictions on them
An unreasonable expectation. You will inevitably run afoul of the biggest problem all programmers face - other programmers. And then there are banking systems, state laws and other nonsense you have to deal with on regular basis when working in web development.
catchpa: shackle
So many web forms ask for First Name, Middle Initial, Last Name. Where the hell is the suffix option????
Some let me get away with adding " Jr" to the last name, while others bitch fit over the space in the last name. The worst are forms that ask for the name on your credit card by asking "First Name" "Last Name". Uhhh, the name on my card also includes my middle initial and the Jr....
B.S. It's not names that break computers, it's idiot coders who couldn't care less. I mean seriously, a "Null" as a name to break a name input? Maybe they should write an article about the most idiotic programmers who somehow got to work on real life systems for real money and got away with it.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Couple of years ago I registered a bug in Mediawiki where the code was sending the string "null" as a null integer. Works perfectly fine in MySQL but presents a type error in Postgresql.
There is a lot of bad code to be found everywhere.
Have 2 high school friends that have terrible problems with names: one pronounces his surname "Azz We Pay," but spells it "Asswipe." Other named Harry Fagina.
The Autocorrect options are very adjustable.
But how will the adjustments follow the person from one computer to another, even if the person doesn't have a user account on each computer on which he uses Word? Does it support storing a user's roaming settings in a Microsoft account or something? If not, one reason to stick with the defaults and argue for better defaults is to make it easier to use someone else's computer.
I've been dealing with this issue for ... quite a long time, and incompetent programmers have perpetrated code that does some of the weirdest things with my name. Most recently, The Phone Company put my name into Caller-ID as "Pelt Van".
My last name is two words. Worse, my cousins have a name which has a punctuation mark (D'Hondt). Either totally screw up a lot of computers.
Have some pity on Belgians this week, will you? Bedankt.
Of Ulm?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I live in China where my generic American name frequently makes it impossible for me to use computer forms. It is common for forms here to not allow anything other than Chinese names, meaning that names with white space or more than five characters are rejected. I remember when I first moved to China I was told at the bank that they could not enter my name into the computer, since their keyboard does not support latin characters (like A or F). After about ten minutes of arguing, I managed to get them to find a way to enter my name. Unicode is not match for ignorance and inappropriate assumptions.
We have to use AMEX Travel at work and they can never get the suffixes over to the Airlines so that it matches the Frequent Flier Account name.
Ulysses S Grant
It's not just the maxima. I have a one-letter (like x@yyy.zzz) email address that quite a few sites refuse to accept just because it's only one letter long.
A dismaying preponderance of software can't handle an apostrophe in a name, because nobody has ever heard of, eg. Europe. So one sees: o An airline FFM system that accepts it, but a reservation system that doesn't, preventing linkage o Snail mail with ' interpolated into one's name o Web forms that won't submit