Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

bugs.launchpad.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 216 posts

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#101

Post by chasd00 »

One of my favorite pieces of debug folklore was the story of a minicomputer or some other serious machine rebooting in the middle of the night. I can't remember exactly but it was in some university during the 70s/80s. An important server would spontaneously reboot in the middle of the night on some days but not all.

Finally, someone sat up all night to watch what happens and observed a cleaning lady unplugging the machine from power in order to plug in a vacuum. When she was finished, she plugged the computer back in and left.

Another on of my favorites, not bug but more malicious, was someone wrote a program to swing the heads on one of those old giant hard drives back and forth. At the right frequency, the back and forth momentum would cause the drive to walk away from the wall and eventually unplug itself.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#102

Post by froindt »

hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

I did an industrial automation class in college. We had a PLC setup with optical sensors and were sorting cylinders by height.

We wired it up tested it, then called the TA over to review. It failed despite no changes and working minutes earlier.

We changed some logic, tested again, and again called the TA over. It failed. We had another team look at our code and see if we were missing something obvious. Nope, it looked the same.

Finally I realized I was standing when we did the testing. I shaded the sensors and kept them from being overloaded with sunlight. We were the only table in direct sunlight, so only we were experiencing the issue.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#103

Post by vVv111y »

> “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

> “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

> “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#104

Post by zaarn »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #100
zaarn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most cases, you can't print plaintext easily to a printer, it needs some format like PS, so your PS file would be converted into a PS script that outputs your PS file.

Are you sure? I am pretty sure a lot of printers support text directly, they use control codes for additional capabilities.

I'm fairly certain (minus Linefeed Printers of the old days) most modern printers are either Host-rendered (ie, the host renders text and tells the printer what to print) or use something like PCL, which even in the most plaintext mode, still requires some setup to describe and format the page.

You can't just pipe a textfile into printer port and hope your printer spits out anything useful.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#106

Post by dunham »

hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

Back in college (90's) we had a professor who, about once a year, would send an email to help desk saying his monitor had gotten blurry and he needed a new one. We'd go to his office, wipe off the thick layer of dust and it'd be as good as new again.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#107

Post by adwww »

numlock86 wrote: post #34
geek_at wrote: post #9

I love bugs like this. As a developer or Sysadmin you'd think the users are crazy again but then you dig deeper until you lose all hope and already book flights to become a farmer in the midwest and then you find something like thís

I can't find it, but a while ago there was a post on some StackExchange page (SuperUser maybe?) and reddit that had the following problem: Whenever a specific person passed a specific cubicle, one of the monitors would turn black/lose signal and turned back on after the person was away again. I don't remember how it got resolved or rather what the problem was. Since it only happened on a specific person people were g…

I have a pair of Trickers boots with a rubber sole that give me and everyone who touches me massive static shocks when I'm in the office.

It never happens anywhere else, so it must be something about the office carpet, and maybe inadaqute earthing of the desks or something.

But every single time I wear those boots to work I will shock myself a dozen or more times that day.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#108

Post by lazyjones »

im3w1l wrote: post #4

I'm gonna argue that the bug is not in "file". The bug is that the workflow uses file, which by it's very nature must be based on heuristics and will get things wrong occasionally. EDIT: Well file really had a bug in this case, where they didn't detect what they thought they were, but the point stands.

It's both really. A workflow using "file" only (and without -k or so) is silly because, as everybody knows, some files are valid for more than one file format. "file" was obviously wrong in the described circumstances...

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#109

Post by onceUponADime »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #89
Japhy_Ryder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is absolutely hilarious. Flashback to a similar technology `sleight of hand` - Back in middleschool, when JavaScript's window.open allowed you easily to launch a fullscreen window with no browser chrome, and setting the background-image to a screenshot of the desktop... it was so entertaining watching students and teachers alike try to use the machine and thinking it was frozen!

And tech people wonder why the general populace doesn't like them.

We work hard for the pitchforks and torches..
Post reply on HN