Apostrophe Hall of Shame

-
The apostrophe in my name does cause a whole load of hassle.

Luckily for me, as a programmer, it makes me more likely to understand the frustration people must experience when they sign up on Internet forms and the thing fails.

These can include:

  • Validation errors kicking out my perfectly legal full name.
  • Database INSERT errors as the the apostrophe is the termination character.
  • Insufficient digits for my perfectly usable Andorran mobile number.
  • Messed up character when I enter the name of our house in the Pyrenees called 'Chalet Eché'.
Now living in Iberia with all the accents and other non-English characters, I can see we got a long way to go.

A lot of sites make it damn hard to contact them in any meaningful way so as a little helpful reminder here are some of the more annoying form breaks I've discovered as I surf the web.  I suspect a techie looking at the web server logs is more likely to pick up this post, rather than a customer support person who probably wouldn't know what I was on about.

Apostrophe Hall of Shame 

Instra.com


https://www.instra.com/en/create_user_account/enduser

British Car Auctions


https://auctionview.british-car-auctions.co.uk/registration/register















https://www.filelocker.com/signup/


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why does Premiere Pro "Sequence from clip" on MP4 and then "Match Sequence" result in a massive AVI file?

-
Image
Good Question! You would imagine that just "trimming" an MP4 file with same setting would be quick and painless, but when I tried it the resultant file was massive - like 10x the size of the original file. https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/match-sequence-settings-mp4-to-mpeg-is-this-normal/td-p/11042944 Turns out this is because the .mp4 compression means there aren't really full frames in the file just deltas. So when you select "Match Sequence Settings", it has to give you AVI format anyway. So this is what you HAVE to do.   Go ahead and create your HUGE AVI file.  Then use an app or an online service to compress it back down... I had a good result using  https://cloudconvert.com/avi-to-mp4 It shrunk the 76Mb AVI to less than half a Mb.  
Read more

Churchill's Reaction to Eisenhower's Speech at the English Speaking Union 1951

-
Image
I'm still reading Never Despair Winston S. Churchill  1945-1965 by Martin Gilbert.  It is a bible-sized book, albeit the print is slightly bigger, and it will take me a while yet. Recently I've come across an interesting chapter.   This section of interesting stuff starts on Page 619. Interesting to me, and those Brits and others on the EU side of the Brexit-argument, I've found more compelling evidence to answer the question:  " Would Winston Churchill have been in favour of Britain being in the EU?" .   Of course, I believe the answer (certainly after the War) was that he would have been in favour. Ike Eisenhower made a speech at the English Speaking Union Dinner on July 3, 1951.  Churchill was there.  Churchill didn't actually hear the speech well enough at the time, but read it's transcript the following day.  He was ecstatic when he did. Eisenhower and Churchill The relevant text, of the above mentioned book, is as follows;  " ...So pleased wa
Read more

Randsomeware and blackmail crimes to be solved in the future like DNA genetic finger prints can help now?

-
Having recently become away of an egregious cyber crime incident where a criminal gang attempted to extort a large sum from an organisation via blackmail using a crypto wallet as the money drop; I was musing about the possibility that this crime might one day be solved, and the culprits apprehended in the same way that sex criminals have been apprehended many years after their crimes by DNA matches to evidence left at the scene. Over the past years there have been many successful prosecutions of criminals who committed crimes against innocent people, during the assault they have left bodily fluids or matter that at the time of the assault would have been unable to identify the assailant. The clothing of the victim had been stored however by the police, and as time and technology has moved on so have advanced in DNA matching. Subsequently the criminal, often many years later, has been apprehended as for some reason, often suspicion to do with another crime, they have given a DNA sa
Read more