Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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Wudang said:
Agreed. I've spent too much time having to parse multi-purpose free text fields that should have been separate fields.
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Heh. Years ago I had to do a particularly horrible export of data. It took hours to run because 90% of the processing power was removing unnecessary whitespace from very large text fields. Users felt free to tab, space, and enter all over those fields. Didn't even bother trying to remove the asterisks, dashes, underscores, and other characters some would sometimes enter to "make pretty lines" in there. It was a horrible mess.
 
Tomorrow morning I have to run that application that is known by three letters that are also my initials. There's a big post-it in the middle of my desk that I wrote that confuses me momentarily every time I glance at it. I can't even write down the full na of the application because no one can remember what the three letters stand for. Ffs.
 
The problem is "Fields" are a double edged sword.

You have three separate fields for First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name.

What happens when you someone doesn't have a middle name? Or four names? Or a hyphenated last name? Or comes from a culture where the traditional form is to put the last name first?

The more "structured" something is the better it works when everything fits into the structure, but it breaks a lot harder when you have to deal with something that doesn't.

Sadly we aren't allowed to dictate rules to society based on what makes data entry easier. If it was up to IT everyone would have First and Last names of the exact same number of characters and nobody would be allowed to have the same name.
 
JoeMorgue said:
The problem is "Fields" are a double edged sword.

You have three separate fields for First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name.

What happens when you someone doesn't have a middle name? Or four names? Or a hyphenated last name? Or comes from a culture where the traditional form is to put the last name first?

The more "structured" something is the better it works when everything fits into the structure, but it breaks a lot harder when you have to deal with something that doesn't.

Sadly we aren't allowed to dictate rules to society based on what makes data entry easier. If it was up to IT everyone would have First and Last names of the exact same number of characters and nobody would be allowed to have the same name.
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Or anybody could have any name whatsoever, because we'd actually run everything behind the scenes off unique ID numbers. She may be Katyleigh-Bryttanee Melissa Khaleesi Jones-S'mith to her friends, but to me she's just ole' 293084917309. Hell, she could stick some emojis in there, it's just a display field.
 
JoeMorgue said:
The problem is "Fields" are a double edged sword.

You have three separate fields for First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name.

What happens when you someone doesn't have a middle name? Or four names? Or a hyphenated last name? Or comes from a culture where the traditional form is to put the last name first?

The more "structured" something is the better it works when everything fits into the structure, but it breaks a lot harder when you have to deal with something that doesn't.

Sadly we aren't allowed to dictate rules to society based on what makes data entry easier. If it was up to IT everyone would have First and Last names of the exact same number of characters and nobody would be allowed to have the same name.
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Asimov once tongue-in-cheek argued that if we want truly individual names we should all have a unique number.

Also I have in the past wanted to commit genocide against the good Sinhalese people for their very long and strangely structured names! That was back in the day when every bit and byte mattered so someone suddenly wanting "extra" characters? Or even worse have a family name and a surname as well as a first name..... !!!
 
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JoeMorgue said:
The problem is "Fields" are a double edged sword.

You have three separate fields for First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name.

What happens when you someone doesn't have a middle name? Or four names? Or a hyphenated last name? Or comes from a culture where the traditional form is to put the last name first?

The more "structured" something is the better it works when everything fits into the structure, but it breaks a lot harder when you have to deal with something that doesn't.

Sadly we aren't allowed to dictate rules to society based on what makes data entry easier. If it was up to IT everyone would have First and Last names of the exact same number of characters and nobody would be allowed to have the same name.
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Not really. It just needs programmers who understand what they're working with. The directory at the bank I worked at coped fine with Spanish two part family names, people with Chinese names who'd also adopted "western" names etc. Internationalisation in data, especially user data, has been a thing for several decades.
It's important when we want to tie people's records together. Or when people forget their unique id etc.
 
Wudang said:
Not really. It just needs programmers who understand what they're working with. The directory at the bank I worked at coped fine with Spanish two part family names, people with Chinese names who'd also adopted "western" names etc. Internationalisation in data, especially user data, has been a thing for several decades.
It's important when we want to tie people's records together. Or when people forget their unique id etc.
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I guess I'd have one field for the full name, in the order it's normally put. Then several separate fields for name elements, each with a number. Then another field that stores what order those name element fields are supposed to go. Maybe a couple of fields like that, representing the order to put the name elements for official use, for direct address, etc. And of course title fields, suffix fields, etc.
 
Darat said:
Asimov once tongue-in-cheek argued that if we want truly individual names we should all have a unique number.

Also I have in the past wanted to commit genocide against the good Sinhalese people for their very long and strangely structured names! That was back in the day when every bit and byte mattered so someone suddenly wanting "extra" characters? Or even worse have a family name and a surname as well as a first name..... !!!
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I've had the opposite problem, trying to perform fuzzy matching on surnames becomes very problematic when there's a large Chinese population with two-letter surname fields.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I guess I'd have one field for the full name, in the order it's normally put. Then several separate fields for name elements, each with a number. Then another field that stores what order those name element fields are supposed to go. Maybe a couple of fields like that, representing the order to put the name elements for official use, for direct address, etc. And of course title fields, suffix fields, etc.
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You might also need multiple surnames. My pal's surname in most DBs is Kusners. He spells it Kušners so you need to allow for other codesets. People get married, change names, family names in Gaelic regions can be spelled one way in family but be spelled in an Anglicized form officially. My middle name for example can be Donald or Dòmhnall.
For official use the "normal" format of <family name> comma <other names> seems to work well especially as it disambiguates Chinese names where some keep the family name first form and others adopt western form.
You can probably visualize the schema.
One workaround is to separate a "person" id representing an actual person then have that link to various other records. For example, the person is Ho, Gah Wing. This can link to a "pupil" record which records that a "Ho, John GW" attended school Madeup High from 2001 to 2003.
It's not a problem a competent software engineer shouldn't be able to find a lot of information on readily.
 
JoeMorgue said:
The problem is "Fields" are a double edged sword.

You have three separate fields for First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name.

What happens when you someone doesn't have a middle name? Or four names? Or a hyphenated last name?
Click to expand...
You either embrace the multitude of names with a repeating field, limit them to only putting two of their names or just have one big field in which to put the name in the order in which they would normally expect to see it written/said.

Or comes from a culture where the traditional form is to put the last name first?
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Use "given name" and "family name" or just have one big field in which to put the name in the order in which they would normally expect to see it written/said.

The more "structured" something is the better it works when everything fits into the structure, but it breaks a lot harder when you have to deal with something that doesn't.
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Frequently you don't really care how the field is structured. You are only recording it for the purposes of communicating back to the person filling it in. The address is the one that causes me the most PTSD. Even limiting yourself to just the UK, there are many variants of the address format. When I was doing some work for the organisation that handled many planning applications in England, they gave me a specification for the address that was two pages of XML schema and it was still broken. All you need is street address (not limited to 35 characters please, UK planning authorities), post code and some free text lines in between, which can now be filled in by doing a post code lookup (couldn't back then though).

Also, assuming the word "number" in "phone number" means you need to store it in a numeric field. My phone number, by the way, is 7.88e+09
 
Wudang said:
You might also need multiple surnames. My pal's surname in most DBs is Kusners. He spells it Kušners so you need to allow for other codesets. People get married, change names, family names in Gaelic regions can be spelled one way in family but be spelled in an Anglicized form officially. My middle name for example can be Donald or Dòmhnall.
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What encoding do you need other than UTF-8? There has been no excuse for not handling non US-ASCII characters for thirty years.
 
jeremyp said:
The address is the one that causes me the most PTSD.
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Ugh. Flashbacks to years ago when I worked with a particularly stupid application that would not accept anything other than a 5 digit numeric ZIP code. We did business with Canada, which uses six digits alternating alphabetical and numeric.
 
JoeMorgue said:
The problem is "Fields" are a double edged sword.

You have three separate fields for First Name, Middle Name, and Last Name.

What happens when you someone doesn't have a middle name? Or four names? Or a hyphenated last name? Or comes from a culture where the traditional form is to put the last name first?

The more "structured" something is the better it works when everything fits into the structure, but it breaks a lot harder when you have to deal with something that doesn't.

Sadly we aren't allowed to dictate rules to society based on what makes data entry easier. If it was up to IT everyone would have First and Last names of the exact same number of characters and nobody would be allowed to have the same name.
Click to expand...

I have an Indian colleague who only has one name. Many systems fail to work for him as a result
 
Computer hardware manufactures. Naming no names but it rhymes with Mewlit Mackard.

How the everloving hell do you actually manage to screw up something as simple as a Power LED. When the computer is off it off, when the computer is on it glows.

But no. You mental patients now have the only LED on the front of your Mini-PCs be "conceptual" sometimes it means it's on, sometimes it means an error code, sometimes it's... hell if know the price of tea in China in Morse Code.
 
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Speaking of lights, the docking station I use for my work laptop has an LED that blinks when the laptop is sleeping...but by "blink" I mean "stays on for thirty seconds then sloooowly fades out, then fades back in and holds on for thirty seconds". So if I'm passing by and want to make sure the thing's asleep and hasn't been jostled awake I have to stand there and watch the light for at least half a minute.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Speaking of lights, the docking station I use for my work laptop has an LED that blinks when the laptop is sleeping...but by "blink" I mean "stays on for thirty seconds then sloooowly fades out, then fades back in and holds on for thirty seconds". So if I'm passing by and want to make sure the thing's asleep and hasn't been jostled awake I have to stand there and watch the light for at least half a minute.
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//Total Hijack//

I can't remember the exact car but Doug Demuro reviewed a Luxury SUV with one of the worst design features. When you get out of the car the headlights stay on for 30 seconds or so to illuminate your path, that's normal most cars have that these days, but on this car the BACKUP lights also came on so you park your car, get out, and for 30 seconds it looks like you're going to back up.
 
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