Re: sustainable swag

Mark wrote:

> Learned more than I wanted
> about this issue when
> designing a data entry system
> which had to work for large and
> small numbers throughout the
> world. The validation rules
> were tricky

Not exactly on topic (suprise! ;-) but a quick question for Mark about 
another pet peeve: the way databases mishandle hyphens in names, such 
as mine.

Almost all databases drop the hyphen (resulting in me being filed 
under "P" rather than "T"). One gets used to this, but I was really 
pretty irritated when our local Registrar of Voters could not even get 
this right. I wrote several letters of complaint over the course of 
several months, only to be told finally that they had tried over & 
over, and there was simply no way to make their database accept 
hyphenated last names.

Actually, what they said was that the hyphen was really still there, 
it just was invisible to all & sundry. It doesn't show on screen when 
I check my registration data; it isn't passed to the politicians and 
others who obtain our contact data from the Registrar of Voters (thus 
spreading the error all over); and it doesn't show up on any of their 
printouts, including my official ballots, which I'm supposed to sign 
with my legal name when I vote.

In frustration, I opted to forgo the invisible hyphen and directed 
them to just run the 2 names together, concluding from this that if 
they couldn't even get voters' names right in their official 
government database, how could I trust them to properly handle the 
complexities of electronic voting?

(Rhetorical question to which I received no answer.)

... But perhaps I was missing some real design difficulties here?

Deborah
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Deborah Taylor-Pearce
[email protected]
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