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posted by
mrpg
on Saturday May 12 2018, @01:32AM
from the sorry-surnames-must-have-between-8-and-10-letters dept.
from the sorry-surnames-must-have-between-8-and-10-letters dept.
"A Thai Airways passenger said he was charged a $94 fee at the airport for a name change because the online booking system would not let him type his full name.
The passenger, whose name was not shared, said when he went to purchase his ticket on the Thai Airways website, his full last name would not fit in the name field. The name field only allows 25 characters for surname. The passenger tried shortening his name on the website and was finally able to buy tickets for himself and his family, the Bangkok Post reported."
Traveler charged extra booking fee for having a long last name
I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly.
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Traveler Charged Extra Booking Fee for Having a Long Last Name
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Saturday May 12 2018, @08:00AM (6 children)
15 is actually correct. Unless you're some special snowflake that has a deliberately out there name like Moon Unit, or something that for some reason needed an underscore in it. Numbers are for when you're junior, the third, or fourth. In those cases, Roman numerals are used. III, IV, V, etc,. So unless we decide that we're going to *start*, we haven't actually been using straight Arabic numbers in names yet.
40 is just stupid. I program databases, and yes, everybody has a fucking name. Unless you were Prince, and even then, it would just be a Unicode symbol if anything. Or a wingdings :)
In the end, I don't care about accounting for a weird ass name. I would rather have sanitized inputs, and that means no, you are not having numbers in it, or any kind of character that can be used by Tommy Tables. Except that damned ' character. Why they decided a perfectly valid character for a name, and a fucking popular one at that, would be the programmatic bookends is beyond me. That required a lot of complicated code to parse correctly. At least with parameterized inputs you can deal with it.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @08:35AM (1 child)
Chinese regularly have two words for their first name. Spelt with a space between. "Loud gazer" for example.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday May 12 2018, @10:28AM
Mexicans often have two words for their last name. For example, "Miguel Martinez-Gonzalez."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @10:15AM
You are better off with escaping the damn characters (preferably automated), not masking the problem with white/black lists.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @01:06PM
Babies when born to parents who haven't yet decided on a name will initially have no name. If you're looking from the legal perspective, then depending on country, they remain legally nameless until their birth is registered at the local registrars and perhaps a certificate provided.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Saturday May 12 2018, @02:07PM (1 child)
You are wrong or mistaken. Judgmentally so, to see the stupid snowflakeness of anyone who might disagree with your position.
List of real people whose names contain numbers: http://www.tvwiki.tv/wiki/List_of_personal_names_that_contain_numbers [tvwiki.tv]
It's a mix of names from other cultures, stage names, and, yes, special snowflakes. You seem to have missed that criticizing their snowflakeyness doesn't mean their name doesn't contain a number.
As for the "People have names", here's the thing. People are not born with names. They usually acquire them at some point, whether shortly after birth, or eventually after birth. If someone dies before acquiring a name, they may live their entire lives with no name and die never having had one. This not only happens--old census records are full of things like "baby girl smith" and "baby boy jones", using the age and gender + name of the people the nameless person was born to in place of their actual no-name--but it's explained it the list itself:
If acknowledging this is considered to be "Just Stupid", then I'll stand over with the just-stupid snowflakes.
I get it; it's frustrating. Designing a database means you have to pick your assumptions about the data you will be handling. If you get good at this, and have someone remind you that those assumptions are false when you apply them to names in general, you can have a bad, emotional reaction.
But the goal is for you to design a system that never has an outcome like that in TFA.
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* Name modified slightly. You know who you are. If you're reading this, know that I will ever think of Che's insecticide as a "silly subplot".
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @10:35AM
Most of those names contain numbers spelled out, like Zero or Five, not numerals. I doubt there are any systems that have a problem with that.
The rest are just special little snowflakes who can suck it up and put up with the problems their snowflakiness causes.