Jim Plush's Programming Paradise

I'm in the business of making In-flight Entertainment systems for airlines. We let you watch movies, play games, check the news, etc from the back of your seat. I was listening to a conversation the other day with the media database guys. Apparently Borat broke alot of software here :)

You see the full title: "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" was apparently the longest title in the database and some of the crappy developers did not truncate titles properly. Needless to say there are a few GUI programs fixing code right now because of Borat :)

So the lesson of the day is... test your data with various sources people! Expect giant strings, expect tiny strings, expect non-ascii data. Expect the un-expected, write defensive software. I learned that lesson from a real prick I used to work with, but damn if he wasn't a smart guy.