13 Apr
2005
13 Apr
'05
12:47 a.m.
At 00:57 13/04/2005, Scott Stevens wrote:
I had a 'filter' on my BBS because one single
user had an annoying habit
of typing in ALL CAPS. And he didn't have an all-caps terminal to use
as an excuse. So one night I dug in and hacked the Pascal code (this
was a WWIV BBS) to not allow any but the first letter in an entered word
to be upper case (it would automatically force all following letters to
lower case until some whitespace occured). Next time Mister All-Caps
logged in he had a fit. What a riot online life was those days...
You still run into those, on the web. I've given up complaining about web
based order forms etc that decide they know better than me how to
capitalise my surname, (though I wonder if they'd fix it if McDonalds
complained) but there are rather a lot of systems that simply break when
they encounter the apostrophe in my name. Sometimes they refuse to accept
it at all, but at least that's better than those that accept it, then fall
over later on in incredibly more subtle ways. (o2.com anybody?)
The number of MS-SQL errors I see when I hit Submit ...
Rob O'Donnell.