
People with names that break computers - Libertatea
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems
======
subway
A few years ago I ordered a custom license plate 'NULL'. What should have been
a 2-3 week process lasted 8 months, with the order being canceled multiple
times, and at one point a blank plate being shipped to the county clerk's
office.

More recently I've gotten out of a parking ticket in a certain municipality
when a frustrated meter maid told me they saw my plates were valid, but the
handheld device used to issue tickets would crash any time they tried to issue
the ticket.

~~~
rexreed
I've always wanted a license plate I1II0O0O just to mess with the automated
license plate scanners and video tolls

~~~
habosa
Many states don't allow both "I" and "1" or "O" and "0" in their character
set. NJ is one that doesn't.

However in NYC I saw a limo with the plates "1I11II1"

~~~
cmarschner
Wouldn't be a problem if they used the FE font.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-
Schrift](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift)

------
tzs
Breaking computers can be useful.

Isaac Asimov had a series of short stories written in the form of
conversations between the writer and a friend named George. George claims to
have discovered how to summon a demon, and the conversations are about that
demon. The demon is not allowed to directly help George, but he will do favors
for George's friends.

These favors invariably do not turn out good for the friend. Each story is
basically George telling the author the tale of one of these favors, and the
writer trying to make sure George does not ask the demon to do any favors for
the writer.

Anyway, in one of the stories George had a friend who wants to be able to do
something to have a big positive impact on the world. George told the demon
about this, and the demon said he'd help.

The next time George encountered that friend, the friend told George that he
had been having all kinds of problems with computers. He'd go into his bank to
cash a check, and when he'd get to the teller their computer would stop
working. And it wasn't just the bank...anyone he encountered who was using a
computer would find that their computer crashed when the friend came near. His
mere presence seemed to be enough to crash computers.

This was, of course, making the friend's life miserable, and this was in the
1980s. If it kept happening it would get even worse, as computers were clearly
going to become more and more common in everyday life.

George found out from the demon what had happened. The demon had indeed
(irreversibly) made it so that computers could not work when the friend was
near, in order to grant the wish to make a big positive impact. The demon says
that when the friend is an old man humanity will be enslaved by an uprising of
intelligent computers, and the friend will be the weapon that humanity will
use to defeat the computers and regain freedom.

~~~
formula1
This story is great, I want to checkout the author now! The demon seems less
of an actual evil being and more as a person who gets excited about awesome
stories, uses ying yang guide the vine of destiny. Maybe half expecting a
smile only to see horror. I know this is now the best place for poetry, but
this story was very fun to read

~~~
imron
You want to check out the author? .... _Isaac Asimov_...

Yeah, you should probably do that.

~~~
solipsism
I checked out a bibliography. Seems like lots of derivative stuff playing on
the same old memes you see everywhere.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Most of those memes are memes because Asimov invented them.

You sound like I guy I once heard complain that The Lord of the Rings was just
a collection of D&D cliches.

~~~
stvswn
"I tried to read Shakespeare, but the storylines were so cliched... like every
romantic comedy..."

"I don't like the Beatles, I've heard that pop style a million times before"

~~~
yoklov
I think the latter is fairly reasonable. They may have invented it, but at
this point it has been done an awful lot, and someone could be forgiven for
being sick of it.

Shakespeare's writing OTOH is still outstanding even if the stories are cliche
(and they were cliche at the time as well)

------
msielski
I had a strange experience where my cable company's mobile app, which streams
most channels, was missing audio on a few channels. After escalating the issue
to an engineer, he finally got back to us and told us that if a username
contained "ts" like mine did this issue would happen. After making a second
username without that combination, all worked fine. I'd still like to know
what logic in their application would get stumped by these two letters.

~~~
JorgeGT
In the context of acoustics, "ts" almost always means time-step (inverse of
frequency). But I don't have the faintest idea of how it would collide with
the username string :|

~~~
nothrabannosir
Guessing they're scanning for parameters in a JSON object by doing something
like

    
    
        ts = parseInt(jsonstr.indexOf("ts")+2);
    

I wish I didn't come to this guess by seeing it in real code so many times…

T_T

~~~
Gibbon1
One of the reasons I've always been leery of regex. Especially since everyone
I've seen using them tends to blindly copy an example from elsewhere and then
bats at it until the test case passes.

------
kstrauser
I wasn't able to buy tickets once because "your name cannot include numbers,
special characters, or the words 'select', 'drop', or 'user'". I (don't
really) apologize for having a name containing one of the magic words your
programmers aren't competent enough not to care about.

\--

In the 90s, I worked for an ISP. Our very first customer was "Joe Test". We
had well-meaning customer service people delete his account a few times
because our billing system didn't have fancy features like a notes section.

\--

I've been bitten many times by "People have, at this point in time, one full
name which they go by." I have the same first name as my son, my dad, my
grandpa, and back 6 further generations. We've all gone by nicknames or middle
names. My middle name _is_ my legal name, in the sense that it's what I do all
business as (and have for my entire life).

My signature is my middle name. My credit cards have my middle name. My
family, friends, teachers, students, and employers know me by my middle name.
And yet, so many institutions are incapable of handling the situation and
insist on calling me by my first name, which is _not_ who I am. If my doctor,
lawyer, and banker call all use my middle name, your system can deal with it
or I'll find an alternative.

~~~
chiph
> insist on calling me by my first name, which is not who I am.

As someone who goes by a nickname, I find this to be a feature. If I get a
phone call or email addressing me by my legal first name, it's almost
certainly a sales call, and I can take appropriate action.

~~~
kstrauser
> As someone who goes by a nickname, I find this to be a feature.

Oh, that's definitely a perk. "Hi, um, may I speak to... Firstname?" "No, but
I can take a message."

As a bonus, my first name is ridiculously pronounceable but cold callers act
like they've never seen that arrangement of letters before. Imagine being
Robert Joe Smith and they ask, "is... Row... Bort... there?" If you can't even
_say_ my first name, I have no prior business with you (and almost certainly
no future dealings).

------
HoopleHead
It doesn't even have to be an "edge case", as stated in the article. My first
name has a single accented vowel and breaks tons of online forms.

What annoys me is not so much having to re-enter my name with the unaccented
version of the vowel, it's when the form throws up an error message saying
"Enter a Valid Name" [or suchlike]. I find that insulting.

At least make your error text put the blame where it belongs: "Sorry. This
form can only handle ASCII Text". Don't insult your users by telling them
their name isn't real.

~~~
apozem
These kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural
biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A
Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents
and vowels because who has those in the States?

Anecdotally, I also heard of a female games journalist who had trouble using a
VR headset because she wore mascara. It threw off the eye tracking because the
system wasn't designed to handle that.

Any designer must test his or her product on many groups of people to find
these problems.

~~~
Klathmon
Wasn't there a thing that happened a while back where a fitness tracker was
found to not work with darker skinned individuals?

~~~
uremog
I recall Kinect had the same problems.

~~~
talmand
And now I feel compelled to mention Better Off Ted, Season 1 Episode 4.

~~~
golergka
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIBdmyFWZVE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIBdmyFWZVE)

------
phillc73
I have a close friend who lives in rural Ireland. That's not in a town, but on
a small farm in a general area of about 15-20 other small farms. His address
is just the name of the general area and the county.

The Irish postal system is clever enough to know that the person with this
name, in that general area lives in that house. In fact, he probably still
isn't even really classified by his name, rather as the husband of his wife,
whose family has been in the general area for generations.

This article made me think about how he deals with online forms. His response
was that it's been a godsend that finally this year Ireland has introduced
postcodes. Previously, and if the form still insists on a house number and
street name, he just "bashes his head against the wall."

~~~
Grishnakh
Ireland is like that throughout the whole country, except maybe Dublin. It's
worked for them for ages; there's been articles written about wackily-
addressed mail being sent to people in Ireland and arriving to the correct
destination. (I remember one that was just a long description going something
like "the lad who...").

The problem is if someone in Ireland tries to order something from a company
in another country, where the computer system isn't set up to handle totally
arbitrary addresses.

Even UK addresses look pretty anarchic to someone in America, where every
address has a street name, a house number, a city, a state, and a zip code. UK
addresses will have a postal code, and a city name, but after that there's no
telling; it'll frequently list smaller and smaller towns and then some hamlet,
and not have any kind of street or house number.

If you design your address-storage system to just handle two arbitrarily-long
"street" lines, plus a city and postal code, that should handle everything in
the UK. For Ireland, just don't require a postal code. The problem is when
programmers try to place restrictions on the address to ensure it has "correct
formatting". Don't do that; if you need to verify the address, there's APIs
you can subscribe to in different countries to check address correctness.
Doing it yourself is how these problems happen.

~~~
Symbiote
> UK addresses will have a postal code, and a city name, but after that
> there's no telling; it'll frequently list smaller and smaller towns and then
> some hamlet, and not have any kind of street or house number.

Royal Mail don't recommend these long addresses; there's a form on their
website to produce a canonical address, something like

    
    
      [Building name]
      [Number] Street
      [Hamlet/village/town]
      TOWN
      PO57 C0DE
    

However, good luck telling anyone who's proud of their tiny hamlet this...

[http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode](http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-
postcode) (and the "Read our PAF Code of Practice (PDF)" link).

~~~
beejiu
The fact that addresses don't come in canonical form is an interesting
challenge for anybody who wants to verify addresses, e.g. for fraud
preventing. Actually, many banks, when verifying addresses for online
transactions, just strip out all non-numeric characters when doing address
verification.

~~~
takno
My apartment has two different apartment numbers, the right one and the one
that Royal Mail made up for their database. Makes it interesting to match
things up on different accounts

~~~
DrJokepu
Also, a lot of websites have this thing where you have to enter your postal
code and then you can pick your address from a list of addresses associated
with the postal code. I used to live in a development for a while that was so
new that it didn't appear in many of these databases, so signing up for
various services (or even paying council tax) was near impossible.

~~~
phillc73
I had a similar, derived issue. A new house I was renting was marketed as "24
Street Name",the lease document was written as such and the front door had a
number 24 on it.

However, after moving in, we discovered that on all official databases it was
"24-26 Street Name".

This caused a number of frustrations over the years. After a while we just put
"24-26" on everything and be done with it.

------
cpeterso
Has anyone created a public data set for testing names? People publish lists
of exceptions (e.g. [1] and [2]), but it would be great to have actual
examples in a simple format that can be used for automated testing. The first
(and most difficult) step would be to create a universal name schema.

[1] [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

[2] [https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-
names](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names)

------
cdumler
People do no have names that break computers. Programmers believe they have
certain structures when they don't then his or her code fails.

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

~~~
teej
For what it's worth, programmers do not have the tools to perfectly handle the
complexity of human language. It's a hard problem.

~~~
Marazan
A free text entry field would cover almost everyone.

~~~
zimpenfish
Websites that insist on forcing me to enter a first and last name always get
abuse in the latter. What I call myself on websites is my business, not yours.

~~~
jhall1468
If at any point in the process they need to bill you for something, they have
to ask for your first and last name because that's exactly what the credit
card companies require. So there are use cases.

Personally, I don't see why any company is asking for a name if they aren't
billing you for something or they aren't a social network.

~~~
gnaritas
> they have to ask for your first and last name because that's exactly what
> the credit card companies require

No they don't, they ask for a single field, name on card which is a single
string containing everything on the card.

------
mariodiana
I realize that the issue of names is complicated when you consider different
practices the world over, but is there not some kind of RFC or other
specification that people are supposed to follow? How can that be in 2016?

The first job I took in IT, after graduating with a liberal arts degree, was
in software testing for a company that made point-of-sale systems. Only a
month or two out of training I was given the task to test a name and address
form. Knowing that quotes were special characters in databases, I tried
entering something like O'Connell as a last name. Sure enough, the system
broke. I remember filing a snarky bug report about how Irish and Arab people
ought to be able to use the form.

My point is that testing for quotes and "Null" as a surname isn't some kind of
esoteric science. What's wrong with people!

~~~
snacksthecat
My cousins have given up and changed their name from O'Keefe to OKeefe to
avoid the single quote headache that seems to plague a lot of systems.

~~~
Symbiote
An alternative which is truer to the original would be to use _Ó_. It means
'grandson of'. But perhaps the other part should also be "deanglicized",
giving either _Ó Caoimh_ or _Ó Cuív_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Keeffe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Keeffe)

------
dirkdk
I have had a decent number of forms that would not allow me to enter my last
name because it contains a space: De Kok. Apparently over the centuries
americans coming from Europe would drop spaces. For instance Vanderbilt is a
Dutch name, that stems from the original Van der Bilt (means from the Bilt,
which is a Dutch city)

So now American programmers assume a space in a last name (or a dash for that
matter) never happens so is an illegal condition that should cause validation
to fail. I don't agree

~~~
mabbo
A friend in university had the last name "des Trois Maisons", or "Of the three
houses" (if I'm remembering it correctly). I can only imagine the number of
computer systems that just die on that. Not one space, but _two_!

Come to think of it, I bet he reads this comments. Hi [name withheld]!

Seriously, what a great last name.

~~~
rcthompson
You might want to edit your comment to avoid giving out your friend's first
and last names.

~~~
rconti
Or at least to provide sensationalistic information about the billions in gold
he has stored at his house.

------
silveira
I have a first name composed of two names, and one of them with an acute
accent. This is enough to cause some of my credit cards to be printed with a
repeated name because they assume my "second first name" to be a middle name
too. The acute accent results in encoding problems once in a while.

But nothing compares the problems that people with names longer than 30
characters have to face. Creating a SSN card, or driver license, or pretty
much any official document can be very painful. The name does fit in their
systems and the attendants just don't know what to do and most of them are
very reluctant in using abbreviations.

Every programmer should at least read Patrick's article that is cited in the
story: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names)

And if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their
lives, give them short names.

~~~
david-given
That list makes me very sad. Not because it's not interesting, which it is,
but because it'd be so much _more_ interesting if it discussed each item as it
went.

This one, for example:

    
    
        People’s names are assigned at birth.
        OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
        Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
        Five years?
        You’re kidding me, right?
    

Don't leave me there! Tell me which culture assigns names more than five years
after birth!

I'd love to see an annotated version.

~~~
JorgeGT
>Tell me which culture assigns names more than five years after birth!

In the United States of America it is common for females to change their name
at marriage, substituting their birth surname for that of their husband.

Also, in many tribal cultures the definitive name is not assigned until an
adulthood rite of passage has been passed.

Adult names also change to reflect upgrades in social status such as the
completion of a PhD, admittance into a society, acquisition of nobility
titles, etc.

~~~
david-given
That's _changing_ a name, not _assigning_ a name. The list is implying that
some people don't have names for at least five years after their birth.

...or maybe it's not; without expanding on the items in the list, it's kinda
hard to tell.

------
martincmartin
My legal name is Martin C. Martin. This has only been a problem for computer
systems 2 or 3 times. Once or twice on some no-name web site, which rejected
names where first and last were the same. The other time was when the company
I was working at was bought by Oracle. Oracle's internal email system simply
refused to create a user with the same first name as last name.

(For the curious, I was born Martin C. Hilgerdenaar and changed my name in
college.)

~~~
randallsquared
Heh. My name is Randall R. Randall. I have had quite a lot of pushback from
humans ("No, sorry, I need your LAST name..."), but I can only remember two
systems that ever really caused me issues: Facebook and Google+.

~~~
mikeash
I have to ask. Does the R also stand for Randall?

~~~
randallsquared
No, it's Reginald. You are in good company in wondering, though. :)

~~~
mikeash
Oh well. I was secretly hoping it stood for Randall R. Randall.

~~~
mynewtb
At the third level you may call him Recursive.

------
cafard
In _Programming Pearls_ , Jon Bentley mentions the story of an application,
written in APL that bombed when it got to Ecuadorean data. Somebody figured
out that it read the name "Quito" and processed it as "Quit".

------
srwx
A large global company I worked at hired someone who chose the username 'lib'
and this user was based in a remote location (China as I recall), I don't
remember exactly but I think it was their first name. Some of the developer
tools recursively searched parent directories for a 'lib' when running builds,
this in turn caused a massive mysterious increase in build times when users in
the USA were suddenly sending NFS requests to China looking in /home/lib for
libraries.

------
stygiansonic
My favourite "real world fails to fit the model we've come up with" is Carmel-
by-the-Sea, which has many streets that have no addresses:

" _To this day, there are still no addresses, parking meters or street lights,
and no sidewalks outside of Carmel 's downtown commercial area. Those seeking
directions receive hints such as “fifth house on the east side of Torres
Street, green trim, driftwood fence” or by the legendary names adorning most
houses, such as “Hansel” or “Sea Urchin.”_"

[http://www.carmelcalifornia.com/fun-facts-about-
carmel.htm](http://www.carmelcalifornia.com/fun-facts-about-carmel.htm)

~~~
parennoob
> My favourite "real world fails to fit the model we've come up with" is
> Carmel-by-the-Sea, which has many streets that have no addresses

You might be surprised to learn that in India, _all_ addresses are more or
less like this. This is due to the fact that we never ended up with the
standardised street numbers and names that a lot of other countries have, and
road naming is a highly political thing in India, so a lot of people call
roads by colloquial names.

A typical address in India goes

    
    
      - House / Building Name (a lot of bungalows in India have names)
      - Locality
      - Near [Landmark]
      - Possibly another Landmark
      - Road Name
      - City Name
      - Post Code
      - State Name
      - India

~~~
david-given
I grew up in rural Scotland with an address which was:

    
    
        - House name
        - Community name
        - County
        - SCOTLAND
    

Just the other day I found myself explaining this to a cow orker some ten
years younger than me, and they couldn't believe it.

"But how did the postman know where the house was without a number?"

"They just knew."

"What, all of them?"

"Yup. Each postman knew their own area."

"But how did the post get to that postman? There's no postcode!"

"People in the sorting office read the addresses..."

We also had a three-digit phone number. (One of the outer isles used to have
one-digit phone numbers.)

------
jessriedel
Air Canada and several other airlines have for several years been unable to
read my passport on the automated check in because I have a suffix in my name
(II). I am told that "this happens with everyone who has a suffix", which just
boggles my mind.

~~~
RijilV
I have the same situation, though my suffix is less common. My strategy is to
drop the suffix when purchasing a ticket, which has mixed results. Some
airlines (United) remove the space between my last name and suffix when I do
have to use it (International flights) which caused me some angst until I
figured it out.

------
Zikes
I have a coworker whose last name is Corp. He was unable to create a Google+
account for a couple years and had a bit of difficulty with his Facebook
account because they assumed he was a business.

~~~
linuxlizard
Had a friend with last name of "Root". She worked as a UNIX admin back in the
day. Had trouble off and on with her name.

~~~
shogun21
> whoami

------
mds
Another fun edge case -- people with just one name.

Teller (of Penn and Teller) legally changed his name to just "Teller".
Apparently his drivers license reads Teller NLN for No Last Name.

------
Freak_NL
In addition to the obligatory little Bobby Tables, this blog post describing
the falsehoods programmers believe about names is informative and a must-read
for anyone dealing with names in software:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

~~~
ams6110
It's linked in the story, too.

------
alkonaut
I can see how having a non-representable name can lead to problems (e.g a non-
unicode character), but I fail to see how a system can end up with a bug that
converts the string "null" into a null or blank string? Even throughform posts
and sql there is a difference between "null" the string and null the literal?

Edit: ah saw the SO link now. Shoddy roundtrips to xml/soap/json can do it.

------
bitslayer
Randall Munroe numbers his jokes, and so many threads end up with multiple
links to the same strip. It will end up like the old joke:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2uuii3/a_man_goes_to...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2uuii3/a_man_goes_to_prison_joke_with_two_opposite/)

327!

~~~
dsr_
I only recognize 386, but that's "Someone is wrong..." and now you will too.

------
wodenokoto
The official way to transcribe the Danish letter ø into English is OE,and if
you scan my passport the ø part of my name will show up as OE, but nobody
knows this and the transcription is not clearly visible when looking at the
passport.

So what should I write when I order a plane ticket? Write an O that the agents
looking at my passport expects or the OE that matches what the computer reads?

------
pjdorrell
There is a story within the story here: this article was not "fact-checked" by
any person who has ever actually used SQL while developing software.

To quote: 'This is because the word “null” is often inserted into database
fields to indicate that there is no data there.'

The story is that companies can't be bothered to hire programmers who are
clever enough to know that null and "null" are not the same thing.

The story within the story is that news websites can't be bothered to get
their technical stories proof-read by people who actually know the
technicalities.

------
Zenst
WHen I started programing (mainframes) in the early 80's I came across an odd
instance in which my name messed things up. All printouts had 3 letter as a
banner that were used to identify who to hand them too once burst up from the
line printer. Popped onto a trolley in which they would be shipped up to us
programmers. Now alas I only had a first and surname and in part due to
bureaucracy had to add a middle letter as PG was not acceptable for some
unknown reason of standards that was in play. SO I added an X for PXG and then
spent several years explaining to anybody new that my middle name was not
Xavior.

Equally during my training we were coding a script upon a GCOS 8 machine and
had to copy current edit file to a new file and on the system (asterix)SRC was
used to reference that file.

Now one person doing the exercise thought they would cheat, looked at mine,
then another chap and concluded I'd copied his and he would be clever and not
make the same mistake. Turns out the other chap he was checked was with the
initials SRC and whilst neither of us had copied anybodies this cunning chap
ended up with (asterix)MTW. Sadly this chap went on to the systems division
and too this day, still bewildered how and who he sucked up too for that
position with such talents.

So names are and always will be amusing at times, in more ways than breaking a
system as well.

------
Someone
I guess that you need to hire Portuguese or Brazilian programmers to write
programs handling names. They have both accents and long names.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_name](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_name):

 _" It is not uncommon in Portugal that a married woman has two given names
and six surnames, two from her mother's family, two from her father's family,
and the last two coming from her husband. In addition, some of these names may
be made of more than one word, so that a full feminine name can have more than
12 words. [...] For the sake of simplicity, most Portuguese people have two
surnames"_

Those Portuguese/Brazilian programmers will not forget to accept short names
they may use a nickname. Examples from football are Edson Arantes do
Nascimento (Pelé), and the various Ronaldo's and Ronaldinho's.
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/brazil/78105...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/brazil/7810561/World-
Cup-2010-Brazilian-players-nicknames-explained.html):

 _" Back when Ronaldo, he of the record for most goals scored in the World
Cup, joined the Brazilian team, the squad already had a Ronaldo, a defender.
So Ronaldo became Ronaldinho. Then another Ronaldinho came along, and they
called him Ronaldinho Gaucho, for the area in Brazil where he was from. When
the first Ronaldo was done playing, Ronaldinho became Ronaldo again and
Ronaldinho Gaucho lost the Gaucho. (For everyday use, that is. He's often
listed as Ronaldinho Gaucho in squads, and his official website is
www.ronaldinhogaucho.com.)"_

------
hvo
I am convinced that the programmer interviewed in this article by BBC is the
same Patrick McKenzie(patio11).

~~~
harryh
It must be right? How many Patrick McKenzies that live in Japan and can talk
to a reporter about tech issues can there be?

~~~
hvo
Yes.I am.

------
sevensor
I received a Dutch surname as a second middle name. I can never use it -- the
"Van" alone is enough to break things. But even without "Van", having two
middle names usually does not compute. I've seen people who lack middle names
entirely have the opposite problem and insert the middle initial "X" just to
satisfy the system.

~~~
phillc73
My wife and son have no middle name. An ex-girlfriend also had no middle name.
I would have thought it's pretty common.

~~~
5555624
I commonly see "NMI" for "No Middle Initial."

~~~
rconti
Sounds like NMI actually is TMI. Perhaps you meant NMN?

~~~
scholia
Might be a factor of certain systems. I was registered with NMI (not having a
middle name) on IBM computers in the early 1970s. Not seen it since....

We were still using punch cards back then.

~~~
StephanTLavavej
Star Trek memorably listed LT CDR NFN/NMI DATA, see the screenshot at
[http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Data](http://memory-
alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Data) (third from the top, on the right).

~~~
scholia
Ah, thanks!

------
FroshKiller
One of the applications I work on has a long history of problems handling data
for people with the last name Null. I've given feedback on these bugs and make
several recommendations for fixing them, but the folks who work on the
application framework just...don't care? I don't know. They certainly don't
design with exceptions in mind.

That's such an alien way of thinking to me. I was taught that 80% of your work
is spent handling 20% of the data. Is there something cultural that prevents
other programmers from working in exceptions-first mode?

Maybe it's just with boring business logic. I've heard that the most robust
networking applications are written assuming constant worst-case failure
states. Anyone have any insight into this phenomenon? I get that there are
practical limits to what you can plan for, but if you're accepting string
input, shouldn't you at least be prepared for apostrophes?

~~~
a3n
I have a one word name. I was recently pulled over for speeding. When I called
the court, the ticket had already been dismissed. Because the officer hadn't
properly filled out the ticket; he had copied my (one) name from my DL.

So, don't fix that particular system, thanks very much.

------
uremog
For anyone wondering about the Hawaiian name:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2013/12/31/258673819/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2013/12/31/258673819/hawaiian-woman-gets-ids-that-fit-her-36-character-
last-name)

Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele, pronounced as: KAY'-ee-hah-nah-EE'-coo-
COW'-ah-KAH'-hee-HOO'-lee-heh-eh-KAH'-how-NAH-eh-leh

Rough meaning: 'When there is chaos and confusion, you are one that will stand
up and get people to focus in one direction and come out of the chaos.' It
also references the origins of her and her husband's family."

------
sjclemmy
Ha ha, the first response; "There's no way that's true". How right they are.

~~~
uremog
Yet it may or may not be false.

------
ape4
This should not be a problem by now. Especially in government databases. Is
there a corpus of names that can be used for testing?

------
danso
I'm thinking I should either name my child "Define", or change my surname to
"Define"...should make Google searching for personal information somewhat
frustrating.

------
fallenshell
Close to relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

------
sargas
Edge cases like the ones mentioned on this article will keep happening more
often with the increased access to the internet worldwide.

Either programs deal with these cases more intelligently or some family names
will stop existing, virtually speaking.

I have lost count of how many different versions of my last name I have since
I moved to the United States. My health insurance, car insurance, apartment
contract, driver's license, passport (this one has the correct name) are all
spelled differently because some systems here don't accept white spaces on
last names, so they add dashes. They length constraint is a short number, so
they concatenate my 3 last names into a humongous word. Etc.

I always find it funny, except when I need to, say, take an official
certificate test and the name I put on the registration doesn't match to one
on the IDs I bring, therefore I can't get admitted into the testing center.

Of course I learned how to work with the system by now.

------
balls187
Growing up, the class roster printout did not have characters to show my full
name. As a result, it would truncate the last letter of my first name, showing
"Ala" instead of "Alan."

Inevitably, on the first day of a new class, the teacher would call out
attendance, and would briefly pause with a puzzled look on their face, and
attempt call me "Ala"? "Allah?" while my friends snickered in the background.

I'd sigh, and say "No it's Alan" and the teacher would correct the attendance
sheet and we'd be done with that, for that semester at least.

Until there was a substitute, and we'd start the whole process over.

These days, I don't mind people butchering my last name, and when I have to
spell it out over the phone, I endure the occasional comment about it. I take
it in stride, as I myself struggle with ethnic asian names. However, I get
very testy when someone butchers my first name (it happens more than you would
expect).

------
intopieces
A company I used to work for ran into some trouble when a customer attempted
to change their payment information on the company's website. All attempts
resulted in a rather frightening (to the user) "Access Denied" screen. The
customer's last name was "Curl."

------
devy
This article reminds me of Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (aka Tony Hoare)'s
InfoQ presentation [1]. What the article described are part of that $1 billion
damages.

For people who don't know Tony, he's is a British computer scientist, probably
best known for the development in 1960, at age 26, of Quicksort. He also
developed Hoare logic, the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes
(CSP), and inspired the Occam programming language. [1][2]

[1] [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-
Billi...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-
Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare)

------
biot
There's an amusing short story from the 1960s called "Computers Don't Argue"
which this reminds me of:
[http://atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133](http://atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133)

------
gumby
I am glad the Null family doesn't give in. I was quite sad when the Spaniards
changed the collation of the "ll" and "ch" digraphs in the mid 1990s simply
because it made life hard for programmers.

------
ErikAugust
But 'NULL' !== NULL. Well, in a more perfect world ;)

~~~
elchief
Heck, even NULL !== NULL

------
llf
Speaking of web form, I always think it's more 'universal' to use 'Given Name'
and 'Surname' instead of 'First Name' and 'Last Name'. Many languages
(Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc) put surname in front of given name. Your
thought?

------
m-i-l
I know someone who had no idea why their surname was being removed from posts
to the internal social media system. It was because their surname was on the
list of blocked words, but I don't know how far this was explained to them. We
were also unable to post anything about welly wanging or Numberwang.

------
tyleo
If these services are evaluating the string in the text field such that it
results in the value Null rather than the string "Null" it is concerning. The
usibility my be compromised for users with these surnames but I wonder if the
security is also compromised via code injection through these fields.

------
Kenji
People who cannot properly separate database contents from metadata and
control words in 2016 are incompetent.

~~~
gumby
Though I wholeheartedly agree, 2016 may not be a big problem. Theres still a
lot of code from the 1970s in routine use today.

------
mwcampbell
Also on the subject of being reckless with strings, I recommend this blog post
by Glyph Lefkowitz:

[https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/data-in-garbage-
out....](https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/data-in-garbage-out.html)

------
jboles
There have been a few British tourists over the years that have tried to visit
Sydney NSW (New South Wales) and ended up in Sydney NS (Nova Scotia), perhaps
because some computer system incorrectly truncated the state abbreviation to
US/Canadian 2 letters.

------
unitfloat
From an online form:

Location (City, Country): Singapore

Nope.

Singapore, Singapore.

>:(

~~~
twic
UK forms which ask for a city and a county present the same problem for
residents of London. US forms which ask for a city and a state present a
similar problem for residents of New York. You're part of a select club!

~~~
thisone
Not sure I understand. The city of London is in the county of Greater London.
New York City is in the state of New York. But Singapore is a city-state.

~~~
twic
Do you really not understand, or are you being oblique?

In any case, there is no county of Greater London. Greater London is an
'administrative area' \- have a read of the London Government Act 1963, which
created it, and abolished the county of London which had existed before.
That's why we have a Greater London Authority (and before that a Greater
London Council), rather than the London County Council we had when London was
a county. Of course, everyone treats it as a county because it would be
maddening not to, but that's a bit like how everyone treats Washington DC as a
state of the US (oh, we should add Washington DC to that list).

Legally, there is no 'London' which is a proper subset of Greater London
(other than the City of London, which is a red herring in this case). So
putting "London, London" is directly analogous to putting "Singapore,
Singapore".

The New York case is different, but it still involves writing the name of your
city twice. If anything, it's even sillier, because the whole state is named
after one city.

EDIT: clarify about the GLA, GLC, and LCC (i hope)

~~~
takno
London, along with most county towns in the UK shouldn't have a county
appended to them. This isn't the case for New York.

~~~
twic
In a postal address, no. But in the comment which spawned this godforsaken
subthread, i specifically referred to "UK forms which ask for a city and a
county".

~~~
takno
In administrative terms about half the cities and many of the large towns in
the UK aren't part of a county anymore. It's just a field which doesn't help
much if there's a postcode, and should never have been mandatory anywhere.

------
cmdrfred
Isn't this problem mostly solved by type casting? I've never encountered a
problem where 'Null' and Null were the same thing. Is it just shoddy code that
runs everything through an eval or lambda?

~~~
rcthompson
Read the StackOverflow link in the article for an example of how it can
happen.

------
ommunist
well, computers do not stop a microsecond upon any name. They consider them in
digits anyway. What fails in certain cases is logic of the executed programme,
and by no means its a program failure. It was management failure to ensure
edge cases have proper workarounds.

I still suffer when LLOYDS online bank cannot accept my long name in certain
forms, stripping the last 3 chars.

During my US time, I met no systems capable of storing and displaying Eastern
European diakritical chars.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
This is why you avoid in-band signalling if you can. If you must do it, at
least have escape sequences which are consistently applied.

------
cha5m
This is just terrible programming. Everything should get escaped and quoted
before interacting with any code.

------
elchief
A friend of mine, last name O'Neil, legally changed it to ONeil so he could
fill out more forms online.

------
klue07
How is Null as a name a problem? Null value and null string are different.

~~~
maccard
Did you look at the stack overflow link?

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-do-i-
correctl...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-do-i-correctly-
pass-the-string-null-an-employees-proper-surname-to-a-so)

~~~
kpil
Oh snap. I just felt the urge to break some web services...

------
CapitalistCartr
Little Bobby Tables [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

(Edited)

~~~
StefanKarpinski
Why does everyone seem to refer to this as "Little Johnny Tables". It's
"Little Bobby Tables" – which is so much better.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Whoops, right you are.

------
mozumder
Little Bobby Tables made some new friends.

------
leni536
[https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

------
thatcherclay
Obligatory: [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

