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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: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday January 02 2017, @10:14AM
In my experience, there are three related issues here:
- Programmers who never see any language other than English (typically in the US or UK), because everyone else knows about international characters. These are the people who cannot be bothered to configure their database tables to expect UTF-8; who assume that Microsoft's Latin CP-1252 character encoding is all anyone should ever need. Actually, they never even thought that far, because they learned in kindergarten that the alphabet only has 26 characters. Just as a typical example: the US postal service assumes 1 byte = 1 character [usps.com].
- Programmers whose programs are wide open to SQL injection, because they append user input directly to their SQL code. They - and whoever taught them to program - should never be allowed anywhere near a computer again. Avoiding this error is so easy that there is simply no excuse - despite which we see it in newly programmed systems all the time. Insane...
- Validation. I've seen programs reject the last name "Ng" as too short. Some parts of the US government will give you the middle name "nmi" (no middle initial) or "nmn" (no middle name), if you don't have one of your own. There are also physical limitations, such as the size of the window on a standard envelope combined with a required minimum font size. Validation has a purpose, and making it tight enough to be useful means that some edge cases will be problematic. This is unavoidable; in extreme cases, the affected person ought to give in and adapt their name.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Monday January 02 2017, @10:24AM
Why would you invalidate a name as too short? That sounds like a symptom for a whole bucket of other deeply-rooted problems.
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(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday January 02 2017, @11:36AM
What criteria to you impose on incoming data? The goal is to catch and prevent data-entry errors.
So: why would you invalidate a name as too short? Perhaps because you don't want people just entering their initials. If you've never in your life seen a name consisting of fewer than three characters, then you might naively require a minimum length of three. If you think ahead, and just want to eliminate the danger of initials, then you might drop this to two characters. Then you mean Mr. O and you have a problem.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @09:06PM
Comedian Henry Cho[1] tells about his friend who was given the name BJ.
Some paperwork specified "No abbreviations" and someone trying to be helpful altered BJ's form to read B(only) J(only) and, when the paperwork went through, he was registered as Bonly Jonly Stewart. [google.com]
[1] Henry is of Korean heritage (and looks it).
He was raised in The American South and speaks with a drawl.
The combination freaks out some folks.
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(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday January 03 2017, @03:55AM
There's also J Cash, who upon entering the army, had his name forcefully changed to Johnny Cash (maybe it was John Cash).
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Wednesday January 04 2017, @02:23AM
Good ol' Ronly Bonly Jones [snopes.com], 1958.
No idea how Google can screw the pooch so bad when searching for Bonly Jonly Stewart. Snopes isn't even on the first page for that phrase...
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday January 02 2017, @10:23PM
Catching people typing their initials should be handled with a warning, not a ban. For example, when submitting you get a prompt "Don't enter initials, is this your full name?". There's a very big difference between possible errors and invalid input which a programmer should be aware of.
Shortsightedness isn't a good trait in an engineer.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @01:59PM
Actually, during WWII, it was not "nmi" it is "None". That was my fathers middle name on his "dog tags".
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday January 02 2017, @02:05PM
This is a non-issue. People with such names, which include names that cannot be written in any language or form, and names way to long to fit in any non-digital form, will have a standardized form of their name if they want to exist in society. The problem is names like Null and Drop tables, which are easily fixed by simply not using the default, bare bones, retarded, SQL interface and instead use any of a hundred libraries that does the job correctly.