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

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

#121

Post by dfox » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

wmoser wrote: post #72

dfox wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel actually mostly ignores the extension and relies on heuristics to detect the file type on load. Many web applications used to implement "XLS export" by writing out CSV file with .xls extension. This magic detection of file type has one unfortunate side effect: it is not exactly obvious how to convince Excel to load plain text data that is not CSV with delimiters from the current locale. (which is major PITA wit…

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.

I'm aware of that. But that is also partly my point, before ribbon there was 'File->Import...' which did essentially the same thing but at least for me (and many users I work with) was more discoverable.

Another thing is that LO Calc will present you with text import dialog when you open anything vaguely text like and also when you paste multiline plain text from clipboard.

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

#122

Post by mark-r » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

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…

I once worked with a guy who had been a computer tech early in his career. He told a story of moving a computer on a military base up one floor. After the move, the tape drive stopped working - it would glitch every few seconds. He tried everything he could to diagnose the problem. Then one moment while deep in thought he wandered over to the nearest window, where he saw a radar antenna sweep around. Sure enough, the glitches were occurring when the antenna was pointed his direction. The location on the lower floor didn't have direct line-of-sight to the antenna.

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

#123

Post by LorenPechtel » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

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…

20+ years ago, machines with a monochrome and a color monitor. One machine the color monitor would fail every afternoon.

Turns out that for some reason there was a little notch cut in one slat of the blinds. (Presumably to fit around something that was no longer there.) That allowed the sunlight to strike the video card, apparently that was just enough heat to push it over the edge. (This was before PCs were full of cooling fans.)

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

#124

Post by LorenPechtel » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

verall wrote: post #98

clmul wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar issue with my desktop computer: when I suspend or hibernate it, it sometimes wakes up again when I'm standing, getting up from my chair or leaving the room. This also occasionally happens (when hibernated) after I have physically switched off the power of the computer and switch it on again. The issue occurred first a few years after I bought it, but right now I have just given up debugging it, as I…

If you have a nicer mouse with a quality sensor, a pretty slight bump or vibration to the desk can cause it to move and wake the computer. Try disabling wake on mouse so you can only wake with the keyboard.

Yup. I puzzled over this one for a while when it happened to me. My mouse was on a pull-out surface from the desk and thus any vibration was amplified. It was sensitive enough to wake the computer merely from walking up to it.

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

#125

Post by aidenn0 » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

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

My most recent one was that 3 minutes after someone else would SSH into my workstation, my X11 session would crash, but when I would SSH into my workstation, there was no error.

It turns out the default configuration for systemd-logind is to sandbox it away from networking; it's an NIS setup where I am, but I had a local passwd entry for myself so that my home directory would be local. There was a 3 minute timeout on something NIS related, which would cause an error. Then systemd-logind would restart system-wide, including my local login.

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

#126

Post by LorenPechtel » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

dajohnson89 wrote: post #114

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?

Infinite recursion.

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

#127

Post by andreareina » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

jakobegger wrote: post #7

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.

I agree that you should use care when using file. My app relied on "file" to identify file types, and in some cases it mis-identified some Microsoft Office files. The problem was that Apple ships a very old magic file with macOS, and when I reported the bug they said they don't care.

Oh yeah, I got bitten by that. Turns out that MS Office files are zip-compressed xml files. Well I didn't know that, and the files were named something like data.csv, so that left me confused until a coworker told me what's up.

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

#128

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

blablabla123 wrote: post #88

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.

I wish filesystems would commonly support to store the Mime type. File extensions seem to me still a residue from MS DOS times. That would also make working with static (file) webservers much easier. (It's such a breeze to work with blob stores that allow to save the mime type...)

Well one advantage of the "file extension" mechanism is that it is the stupidest thing that will work [0]. It's just like having a type code only it is embedded in the file name so it doesn't require any special features from any filesystem.

[0] Actually, UNIX's "everybody just guess" mechanism is probably the stupidest, but it is so stupid I didn't even consider it.

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

#129

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#130

Post by LinuxBender » Mon, Jan 27, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

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…

Similar story in the USAF. We transitioned the academy from Banyon Vines to TCP/IP. An entire building wing went offline every day. A team was flown out with a network analyzer. Sure enough, same time every day, the entire wing of the building went offline. Turns out, the person buffing the floor needed a place to plug in the buffer and the only place they could find had this big box with lots of blinky LED's on it, so they unplugged it, buffed the floor and plugged it back in. Half-split troubleshooting may have saved a plane flight.