Jennifer Null's husband had warned her before they got married that taking his name could lead to occasional frustrations in everyday life. She knew the sort of thing to expect – his family joked about it now and again, after all. And sure enough, right after the wedding, problems began.
"We moved almost immediately after we got married so it came up practically as soon as I changed my name, buying plane tickets," she says. 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.
Instead, she has to call the airline company by phone to book a ticket – but that's not the end of the process.
"I've been asked why I'm calling and when I try to explain the situation, I've been told, 'there's no way that's true'," she says.
But to any programmer, it's painfully easy to see why "Null" could cause problems for software interacting with a database. This is because the word 'null' can be produced by a system to indicate an empty name field. 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.
[...] "Null" isn't the only example of a name that is troublesome for computers to process. There are many others. In a world that relies increasingly on databases to function, the issues for people with problematic names only get more severe.
Some individuals only have a single name, not a forename and surname. Others have surnames that are just one letter. Problems with such names have been reported before. Consider also the experiences of Janice Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele, a Hawaiian woman who complained that state ID cards should allow citizens to display surnames even as long as hers – which is 36 characters in total. In the end, government computer systems were updated to have greater flexibility in this area.
Source: BBC.
What other names have you run into that have been problematic for computers?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday January 02 2017, @08:44AM
have experinced several instances of "special characters" breaking databases - supposedly, these expensive "off the shelf " solutions" were UTF-8, but even a humble hyphen broke them.
It isn't always the programmer's fault - sometimes the crappy system they are expected to implement is just crap.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday January 02 2017, @09:25AM
Then it's still the fault of the programmer — namely of the one who wrote the relevant code in the off-the-shelf solution.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday January 02 2017, @11:21AM
If they built the system to spec, then no.
The marketing dick who lied when they sold it, and the management types who don't agree it is a priority.
I expect many people have been asked to stop before the job is done properly.
Is that still their fault? I don't see it.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @01:53PM
YES
They did not write good code. It is up to developers to teach *ALL*, else get the f*** out of the way and leet real developers to do the work.