Interesting Links for 05-05-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Delighted to see the Conservatives do badly in the local elections, and the Greens and Lib Dems do so well.

(tags:politics UK )

2. North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs

(tags:language English sign UK OhForFucksSake )

3. Liz Truss pushing up mortgage rates may have handed the election to Labour

(tags:conservatives mortgages economics labour )

4. Why do lorries hit bridges?

(tags:UK transport bridge accident )

5. New poll finds support for monarchy in Scotland falling rapidly (majority now support an elected head of state)

(tags:monarchy Scotland polls )

Comments

[simont]

#2: clicking through to the article, the reason appears to be something along the lines of "because it's easier than us actually learning how to properly quote our shell and SQL inputs". Arrgh!

[andrewducker]

It's just terrible. Compete admission of incompetence.

[simont]

And it surely won't even work, because even if official street names don't contain SQL-difficult characters, that won't stop people from entering them anyway into local government website forms, or any other place where they can still inject an apostrophe into a website backend.

So those forms will still have to deal with names like "St Mary's Road", or indeed "St Mary'); DROP TABLE STREETS; -- Road", without being bamboozled.

[calimac]

2) Though it's irritating, I find this vastly less annoying than putting apostrophes in where they don't belong.

There used to be a candy bar called the "$100,000 Bar". But the name was changed to "100 Grand" not, as I'd presumed, because some shop clerk tried to charge $100,000 for one, but because computer systems couldn't take a name beginning with $. Bah.

Somewhere recently I read an article about some jurisdiction which refuses to accept diacritical marks in its citizens' names.

[redbird]

A variety of Irish government and commercial databases used to have trouble with apostrophes in names like "O'Malley." (I don't know if they fixed that, or how recently, but my Irish-born friend who told me about his problems with this now lives in Canada and no longer has an account at the Bank of Ireland.)

[channelpenguin]

I was at uni with a Dutch guy called Martin 'tHart. Even software that coped with O'Whatever used to choke on his name. There's an awesome webpage somewhere about all the things programmers think about names that aren't true...

Name of the Rows

[hairyears]

Falsehoods programmers believe about names.

My favourite factoid, here, is the common Hungarian surname of 'Null'.

[marymac]

A variety of Irish governmental databases have not only had difficulty with apostrophes, but also have immense difficulty with fadas. This has caused a number of unholy rows and OGCIO are probably going to set the whole alphabet on fire one of these days.

[andrewducker]

You'd think it would have to be part of any specification process nowadays!

[marymac]

This was a substantial aspect of the fight with the National Transport Authority, yep.

Mind you when I left Public Expenditure they were still using Lotus Notes for expenses claims...

[andrewducker]

Old stuff I can understand.

But nowadays everything should be UTF-8, which handles this kind of thing perfectly!

[redbird]

I had to look up the word "fada," but the symbol's used in several other European languages, often called an "acute accent." Spanish uses that symbol both to indicate which syllable to stress, and sometimes to distinguish in writing between two words. "Si" is "if," and "sí" is "yes," pronounced the same (like "too" and "two" in English).

[marymac]

Irish uses it to indicate the long vowel, which does quite substantial things to the meaning and pronunciation of names. And several government departments...

Unfortunately a lot of this stuff gets bought in from the UK, which doesn't use accents at all.

[foms]

Sort of re #4:
It is only days ago that I contemplated divesting myself of somewhere between two and three linear feet of folded maps. It has been over two decades since I worked in the transportation industry. For a while, I did rural residential delivery. It used to be that I stopped at the city hall or the police station in most towns that were new to me to get a local map because it was the only way to find many of the smaller roads.

I was never in a truck that hit a bridge -- a gate, once -- but I did have to pay a little bit of attention, once in a while. There are other considerations than straight height that the link doesn't talk about. The shape of the underside of the bridge is relatively obvious. The shape of the road (hill or camber) that passes beneath and the length of the truck wheel base can combine to make a significant difference and make it much harder to see the danger.

I'm also reminded of an incident that didn't involve the top of a truck but came relatively close to killing me. I was walking under the bridge, here, when a truck took the corner too tightly, above and brushed the railing, knocking one bar out of its mooring. The bar passed before my eyes and struck the walkway, vertically, a couple of feet in front of me and then toppled into the road. I cleared the bar from the way and then climbed the embankment to spot for the driver to disentangle and clear the path. It made me late for work.

[andrewducker]

You were very good there, with someone who nearly killed you!