Sun - December 24, 2006

“Brain the size of a planet, and they want me to run software from the 1950’s.”


Marvin the Paranoid Android would probably get all sulky if he were a web server.

Today, while attempting to create an account on a website, I got this not-so-helpful reply:

“The screen name you requested is too short, too long, or contains illegal characters. Screen names must be between 2 and 24 characters long and can contain only letters and numbers (no spaces).”

Well, don’t keep me guessing, which is it? Too short? Too long? Does it contain spaces or accents that are known to make computers explode in a shower of sparks while repeating “does not compute” in a voice suspiciously similar to that of Lwaxana Troi?

Clearly, some human wrote code to test for each of these failures individually, so why didn’t they report which specific test (or tests) failed, instead of requiring me to waste time performing the same tests so I can figure out how to change my desired screen name to fit in its puny electronic brain?

Of course, the larger issue is that these limitations are almost entirely unnecessary. Sure, some finite restrictions on the length make sense; however, twenty four characters is shorter than many real-world names, and both computers and humans are entirely capable of handling multiple words, accents and other letters and symbols from the world of written communication. Not since perhaps the 1970’s have these limitations been widely required by computing systems. These sorts of restrictions are artificial and should be relegated to history before extraterrestrials finally do show up to visit and we have to embarrassingly explain why we need them to spell their names with fewer than twenty four letters from the Roman alphabet.

I still occasionally come across forms both electronic and paper that force me to truncate my first name, Christopher, to an annoying ten-character “Christophe”. I guess Christopher is one of those whacky names from the 1960’s that people just don’t use much.

Posted at 05:02 AM    

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