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

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

#111

Post by mark-r »

drewbug wrote: post #29
arcturus17 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok don’t leave us hanging here what was the cause?

> Turns out that some joker pulled out two keys from the keyboard and switched their places. [...] They were both relatively good at typing and didn't look down at the keyboard when typing when sitting. But typing when standing is something they weren't used to and had to look down at the keyboard which made them press the wrong keys.

Once in college, somebody thought they'd be clever and remove all the keytops on the only CRT in one small timesharing computer lab. Didn't bother me, because I was a touch typist - didn't need to see the keys at all.

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

#112

Post by buckminster »

Symbiote wrote: post #77
wmoser wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll have to excuse me because I’m not in front of a windows computer right now, but if you open excel first, there is a data tab on the ribbon and an import data wizard or something like that and you can tell it what the delimiter is. You can also apply types to columns and whatnot before importing. Not the quickest but does help extract the data.

This is a fairly new feature in Excel. The lack of this feature pushed a lot of scientists to OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc. At first, just to open the file and "Save as Excel", but of course, then they start using Calc. (At least that's my experience writing scientific software in Europe. Excel localized not just display, but the input and output. With Calc you could just open a file as "pipe separated UTF-8" and be d…

If you rename your .csv as .txt then you get a wizard where you can choose delimiters, etc. This works in Excel 2000. I don't have an older version to hand.

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

#113

Post by ascar »

sdrothrock wrote: post #15
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

Maybe you've already seen this one, but maybe there are some people who haven't... I get a kick out of it every time I reread it, anyway. :) http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles Edit: And the FAQ: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

Fun to read. Thanks for sharing!

With the risk of sounding a bit arrogant, am I the only one who immediately thought about a timeout issue on the first description of the problem?

As a fan of online gaming I'm painfully aware that ping (and distance to server) matter. Especially when I was in Japan and tried to play with my friends in Germany, the fact that packets were routed over the US to Europe resulting in ~250ms pings was a constant annoyance.

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

#114

Post by dajohnson89 »

diegoperini wrote: post #110

1. Override `toString()` for a commonly used object in Java 2. Run the program and attach a debugger 3. Set up watchers for the object 4. Watch the world burn for your profiler :)

Could you explain what happens there?

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

#115

Post by buckminster »

angrygoat wrote: post #28

I ran into another strange doesn't-work-at-this-time issue at my first job, network/systems admin in the early 00s. We had a point to point microwave link that would go down at about 4:30pm every day. It was really bizarre; this was on kit on the roofs of two hospitals, and a pain to physically access. We spent quite a bit of time chasing down various options for it to be a software issue. Someone went and checked th…

A friend's company routed a microwave link through an open plan office in a taller building. It worked fine until the third party remodelled their office.

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

#116

Post by elwell »

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…

> after a few minutes

Savage...

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

#117

Post by devilbunny »

adwww wrote: post #107
numlock86 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Useful tip: carry a metal object (keys, soda can) with you. Grab it with as much surface area as possible (holding the twisting part of the key, or the whole of the can) and use the tip of the key or lid of the can to touch metal. Because you've spread out your contact over a much larger area, you won't feel the shock. You can use this to get some really impressive sparks - I've gotten as much as 5-6 mm long.

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

#118

Post by aphextim »

dantheman0207 wrote: post #85
DoubleGlazing wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an admin for a company that had lots of open plan offices. In one of these offices a specific row of computers kept failing. Although they were cheap (Compaq Evos with NT4), they were pretty damn reliable throughout the rest of the company. Lot of head scratching ensued about the fault. Nothing really made sense. Totally by chance we found out what was wrong. One Saturday when the office was empty and with no a…

I had a similar story. I set up a home pc for recording tv and hooked it up to the main entertainment system. I built it on a budget so it did it’s job but later on as we switched to more HD content it struggled occasionally. I went off to college. My mom noticed the fan noise was increasing and found it distracting. She wrapped the pc in a couple of blankets to cut down on the noise. When I came home the thing was i…

I am not sure if the following is true or one of those stories that gets recycled.

While I was working at Best Buy - the Geek squad told us a story of an older Lady who brought in a computer wrapped entirety in plastic saran wrap, to prevent the virus from escaping the computer and infecting people. She thought it was okay as she containing the virus and continued to use the computer before it turned off and didn't turn on again, which is whys she brought it in.

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

#119

Post by syncsynchalt »

m4r35n357 wrote: post #13

So the check for Erlang magic numbers ended up being passed before the _existing_ checks for other file types? Nice bit of pushing in, there. Still, it was accepted by the "file" devs . . . .

Looking at the patch (http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff), the issue was that the string "Tue Jan 22 14:32:44 MET 1991" is matched to check for an Erlang file, which seems weird but reasonable. The bug is that the spaces weren't escaped in the string, so it was only looking for "Tue" instead of the full string.

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

#120

Post by syncsynchalt »

krick wrote: post #46

That's disturbingly fragile filetype heuristic TBH. Couldn't they use anything better?

The heuristic was _supposed_ to be checking for the full string "Tue Jan 22 14:32:44 MET 1991", but the bug was that the spaces weren't escaped in that string, and only "Tue" was checked for.

The proper heuristic seems odd but reasonable to me.

diff for reference: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff

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