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Quite exciting this computer magic

Testing User Input

Scott Lock's post about people wanting to enter 1-800-CALL-ATT into a phone field reminded me of a data entry "problem" some students of mine ran into a couple years ago.  Keep in mind that while I live in the wonderful city of Louisville (15th largest US city), it happens to be surrounded by Kentucky.  Anyways, these students from eastern Kentucky (think the Hatfields' home) happened to be doing some type of batch updates.  If I recall correctly, they were trying to get a whole bunch of records from one hospital merged into another system.  Problem was, in this batch of seemingly properly formated data, it was failing to do the update.  So they went to task finding the problem record.

This issue at hand:  Someone's first name was "#1 UK Fan" and the checks on the system didn't like # in people's names.

My dad had a friend in college whose last name was List.  The system his college used would print everything in memory (or something like that) if it encountered the keyword list.  He went through school with a last name of List*.  Although looking at how some of the high school kids are spelling their names, I wouldn't be surprised if someone manages to accidently produce a sql injection query into their lastname.  Scott; 1=1'// or something like that.

Published Jun 20 2003, 01:13 AM by Phil Scott

Comments

 

Phil Scott said:

I was mistaken. We are 16th.

Rank City Population
1 New York 8,008,278
2 Los Angeles 3,694,820
3 Chicago 2,896,016
4 Houston 1,953,631
5 Philadelphia 1,517,550
6 Phoenix 1,321,045
7 San Diego 1,223,400
8 Dallas 1,188,580
9 San Antonio 1,144,646
10 Detroit 951,270
11 San Jose 894,943
12 Indianapolis 791,926
13 San Francisco 776,733
14 Jacksonville 735,617
15 Columbus 711,470
16 Louisville-Jefferson 693,604
17 Austin 656,562
18 Baltimore 651,154
19 Memphis 650,100
20 Milwaukee 596,974
21 Boston 589,141
22 Washington 572,059
23 Nashville-Davidson 569,891
24 El Paso 563,662
25 Seattle 563,374

We merged with the county this year :) Tajke that stupid Austin!
June 20, 2003 1:14 PM
 

jperry said:

hehehe. That's an interesting way for us hicks to cheat. I can just imagine the meeting now.

"I just found out that we aren't this hugh metropolis that I always thought we were. Well, we'll show them. We'll just call our whole county a city." ;-)

If you compare counties - Jefferson ranks 73rd. Of course, it's kind of arbitrary where you say a city begins and ends. For instance, I currently like outside the San Francisco Bay area and we did a quick little estimate at work the other day and we estimated that "Bay Area" (depending on what you call that) has about as many people in it as all of KY. It's kindo of silly to compare any of it as individual cities to other individual cities as you can't really figure out where any of those cities begin and end without signs or a map.

So I say let us Kentuckians have our delusions of grandeur, but I don't think anybody that goes to Denver, Las Vegas, Portland, Seattle, Boston, Baltimore, or Atlanta are really gonna believe that Louisville is bigger than those.

by the way: I don't know how I could have written this post without the use of: emacs, vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf . . . I can't imagine anyboy just using the little comment box on the web site to write all this ;-)

June 21, 2003 12:02 PM
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