What's In A Name?

Everything, pretty much. You are basically no one without one.

So why do we suck so badly at gathering them? I'll give you a hint; it has 20 letters in it, 18 of which are usually glossed over, much like the concept itself: Internationalization, or i18n.

For the ignorant, get your overview here and some more depth here (as always).

Now go ye, and rip out all of those Euro-centric First Name/Last Name fields and fix them. What to do with the database columns you are storing them in, is another problem/post.