this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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As a programmer, I consider The User to be the enemy. No matter how thoroughly I seemingly test my code, the second the user gets their hands on it, it breaks left and right from all the crazy shit they do.
I was a QA engineer. I think one of the guys on the team I was on developed a stress response from hearing me walk over to his desk.
Lots of "page crashes if the user doesn't have a last name"
"Why wouldn't they have a last name??"
"No idea, but 372 users in the DB don't, and 20 of them were created this month so it's not an old problem"
"incoherent muttering and cursing"
@jjjalljs @DharkStare https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Because I have been completely unable to find it again and this seems like a relevant place to ask: does anyone have a link to an article similar to this, that I believe might have been titled ‘My First Name is My Last Name’? This is made extra hard to look up because I’ve forgotten the specific culture and details it’s talking about, but it’s about the same basic issue with cultural conventions on names.
I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use "Given Name" "Patronym from father" - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she's not a "double". There's quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, ... - that write their names as "Family Name" "Given Name" as opposed to the other way around, if that's what you mean?
Apologies for being so sketchy on the details but I really can’t remember too many of the specifics. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t that his family name came first, because that’s fairly straightforward. I think the author might have been from an east or southeast Asian culture? I think that part of the essay might have been about how addressing him as Mr. Firstname is actually more formal than Mr. Lastname, even though Firstname is not his family name. I don’t want to keep guessing on more details about how the naming conventions were different because I’m probably going to get it wrong, I have fairly low confidence in what I remember from it.
Could it be Turkish? Just stumbled on this section on the Wikipedia article on mononyms
I love that article. There are also ones about dates and times. The more you deal with dates and times, the more you realize how messed up they are.
Some cultures don't use last names.
It's pretty common https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononym
my users are not allowed to be mononym
UPDATE User SET Last name='Solo' WHERE LastName='';
You can thank Disney for that one.
As a user, I sometimes do everything I can to see what breaks a system. (Often unintentionally)
Then, I don't do those this things.
(Learning permissions on Linux was a great way to destroy a system. Eg "sudo chown -R user:user /" didn't work as I first thought)
Ha, I've done the same thing
Let me guess; does it recursively remove all permissions from the file system?
The command in question recursively changes file ownership to account "user" and group "user" for every file and folder in the system. With linux, where many processes are run as root and on various other accounts (like apache or www-data for web server, mysql for MySql database and so on) and after that command none of the services can access the files they need to function. And as the whole system is broken on a very fundamental level changing everything back would be a huge pain in the rear.
On this ubuntu system I'm using right now I have 53 separate user accounts for various things. Some are obsolete and not in use, but majority are used for something and 15 of them are in active use for different services. Different systems have a bit different numbers, but you'd basically need to track down all the millions of files on your computer and fix each of their permission by hand. It can be done, and if you have similar system to copy privileges from you could write a script to fix most of the things, but in vast majority of cases it's easier to just wipe the drive and reinstall.
I am so grateful for snapshotting file systems like ZFS. Restore the last working snapshot and continue on.
Recursively changes ownership of all files to the user, which breaks tons of system processes
“Huh, I wonder” has been driving general scientific progress and heart failures in engineering since forever.