[speeder]

My name fail to register surprisingly often, even here in Brazil.

It is Hélder Maurício Gomes Ferreira Filho

Common reasons for failure is being too long and having non ASCII characters, but sometimes it fails for other reasons, for example do not allow me to register without a middle name ( I don't haven't one actually... ), me confused and not knowing how to register Filho ( it is not a family name, neither a surname or a last name, but it is still part of my name. It means Son, my father has the same name as me, without the Filho part), or breaking when it cross check with somewhere ( for several reasons I ended registering my name in several different ways, usually omitting Hélder, that I did not even knew was on my name until I got to school and got forced to use because of stupid rules that assume your first name is your typical name )

[masklinn]

> It means Son, my father has the same name as me, without the Filho part

Interesting, that's similar to Junior in the US, but there it generally isn't part of the "official" name, only informal.

[njharman]

Jr. is absolutely part of my official name in the USA. It is the only distinction between my and my father's name. Many forms have a specific spot for suffix.

[jonlucc]

Are you implying that two people (you and your father) can't have identical names in the US?

[njharman]

No I'm stating that Jr. is an official part of Norman John Harman Jr., my name. It is on my birth certificate, filled out on my tax return, etc. In any case were I'm required to use my real name if I used Norman John Harman Sr. I would be committing fraud. Likewise fraud if I left off the Jr. in an attempt to confuse with or impersonate my father.

[kevinpet]

"Norman John Harman Sr."

By your reasoning, there is no such person. If there can be a "Norman John Harman Sr." then there can also be a "Norman John Harman Jr." who does not have it listed on official documents.

[dublinben]

When your father dies, and you've named your son Norman John Harman as well, don't you become senior? It's can't be an immutable part of your name if your junior/senior status changes.

[Steko]

He'd become NJH II.

[auctiontheory]

Of course not! That would break the Computer.

[lostlogin]

One memorable day at work a POS Kodak system decided that it wouldn't store a particular record. Nothing worked. This happened a few times until it became clear that the only things these cases had in common was that the people's first names started BRE. I can remember a rather sad looking IT manager nodding with agreement having tried everything when I suggested we just get them to change their names. Bug is still there. It's just a historic archive now, thank god. Worst software ever.

[pmelendez]

> "having non ASCII characters"

Accented vowels are ASCII characters but in the extended set which people sometimes don't take account.

[keithwinstein]

Generally not. On the Internet, ASCII generally means ANSI_X3.4-1968, a 7-bit standard with 128 code points. (Run "man ascii" on a Unix system to see this.) There aren't any accented characters.

By contrast, there were national variants of ISO/IEC 646 (also a 7-bit character set, and essentially the internationalized version of ASCII) that included accented characters within those 128 code points. Generally these swapped out things like the at-sign (@) and the curly braces and vertical pipe character for accented vowels instead.

There were also lots of 8-bit character sets in ISO/IEC 8859 (e.g. Latin-1, or ISO/IEC 8859 part 1) that included accented characters within the "extended" set of code points 128-255.

[masklinn]

There are a number of different "extended set" (IBM code pages and ISO/IEC 8859 parts for instance), and they're "extended" because they're not ASCII but supersets of it (as is UTF-8).

ASCII is the 7-bit encoding ANSI_X3.4-1968, composed of 95 printable and 33 control characters.

[speeder]

Or they account wrongly ;) (ie: from the wrong set)

I love how sometimes even on the same company, each place account ASCII differently.

I remember registering for a IM, and in one info screen my name was Maur&cio and in the site info screen Maur€cio and in the search screen was Maur£cio and so on...

[tracker1]

ASCII is Obviously meant to use CP437 for character codes 128-254, duh...

Seriously though, most other code pages are pretty transparent to/from unicode... IBM PC-DOS extended ascii (classic ANSI-BBS) isn't so transparent.

[derleth]

Extended ASCII is not ASCII. There is ASCII, which has no accented characters, and there are other character encodings based on ASCII, which often do. Those other character encodings are not ASCII.

[goodcanadian]

I found your comments on "Filho" interesting. In English, the equivalent is "Junior" with the father sometimes using "Senior." It is not part of your name per se, and thus would not be typed into the name field of a form. However, in places where naming sons after their fathers is common, there is often be an additional drop down box listing (Jr, Sr, I, II, III, and so on).

[speeder]

Oh yeah, these drop boxes piss me off, specially because here in Brazil there is BOTH Junior and Filho... And I am Filho, not Junior.

(also we have "Neto" that means Grandson, it is quite popular, I know a bunch of guys like that, I don't think dro down boxes in other countries will expect that)

[aestra]

Prefix and Suffix should be free form text!

[walshemj]

thats why the x.400 and 500 standards had the concept of generational qualifiers.

[anotherevan]

It get's worse. A friend of mine has a hyphenated name, "Kerry-Jean". The hyphen alone often breaks things.

[mindslight]

Hyphenated last names seem to break many customer service people - they'll do things like insist one is the "real" name, assume you are married and ask when, etc. I think it's that hyphen is such a simple thing, it screams "understand me!" instead of simply being entered verbatim.

[aestra]

Assuming hyphen = married = wife's father's name-husband's father's name is just so ignorant. I've known many people who have always have hyphenated names, a few I've gone to primary school with. I have a good friend with an always-hyphenated-last-name who gets asked personal questions by strangers and near strangers about her name. How about "It isn't any of your business, I can have as many names as I want?"

[Dove]

My best friend in elementary school had the misfortune of a hyphenated last name that was exactly sixteen characters long. The systems at the school evidently limited you to fifteen characters, because I saw her name printed in a lot of places without the final character.

[anotherevan]

In this case, "Kerry-Jean" is her first name. (Just to be clear.)

[gcb0]

As a Portuguese speaker, i can say i would never write Hélder correctly if i simply hear it.

[speeder]

For a long time I did not even knew how to pronounce Hélder.

The thing is Dutch...

I am Hélder because of my father.

He is Hélder, because of the priest "Dom Hélder Câmara" (my Grandma was very Catholic)

Dom Hélder Câmara was named after the city of Den Helder in the Netherlands: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_Helder

The result is kinda wonky (lots of people write it wrong, usually "Elder" that of course resulted into video game savy friends nicknaming me "Mr. Scrolls")