Posted on 03/28/2016 5:52:41 PM PDT by Kaslin
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
I used to be neighbors with the Tree family. They had a son named Del. One day I came home from work and the entire family was gone.
That’s like when Rene Des Cartes went into a bar and the bartender asked ‘will you have a beer?’ and Rene said “I think not” and disappeared.
Somewhat related: When I first started working on a computer, in 1988, we were doing a book of quotations, and some of them started with . . . The computer thought that was a dot command and deleted the whole first line of the quote. Took a while for us to catch on.
I was thinking the same thing.
Most applications like this capitalize names because that’s how they are on the passport. And at that point, Ms. Null becomes NULL and you start having problems.
Name is not “null” versus name is not null. Hmm someone pulling our leg?
Aren’t they a week early with this story? Shouldn’t they have released it on April 1?
Does anyone here know DOM. Be very careful with DOM cause its very bad.
Pretty common these days.
The “NULL” value in a database and the string “Null” are two entirely different things.
Somebody is programming stupidly.
I’ve seen this in some old databases at NASA. Someone didn’t like database fields left blank so they would put 0 in numerical fields and the string ‘null’ in string fields.
A string is a string. Doesn’t matter if it’s all caps or proper case. A string is not a NULL value.
Isn’t that Odd?
Doesn’t matter. I like puns.
An actual null as a word/string?
It’s hard to believe.
Next someone’s going to tell us a guy named “Format Hard Drives” caused millions of illegal Mexicans’ records to disappear.
Im kids named is Control Break Escape
Most here seem to be assuming that data input through web interfaces is properly escaped which is true most of the time.. A lot of these types of problems arise when there are more than one language interface etc. Something like html->javascript->json->java->xml->java->sql And that’s rather common and trivial transform, there are much worse bloatware scenarios, especially if it crosses between java and any of the open source dynamic languages or between MS/open-source. You have to be pretty foolish to treat any string input as anything other than a string, particularly if its user entered, but I see it in code all the time.
“Somebody is programming stupidly.”
That’s a first. (Said the man who’s never been to the grocery store.)
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