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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)

#171
post #53

Arguably the most famous example of a bug like this is the person who would drive to the store to buy ice cream and depending on what flavor of ice cream they bought, the car would or would not start back up. https://www.kepner-tregoe.com/blog/help-my-car-is-allergic-t...

That reads like an email my grandfather would send me with a subject line full of "fwd: " prepends.

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

#172
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…

How funny - exactly the same thing happened to me, which I wrote about in my first comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12482834

I had this one as "weird random stuff that no-one else will never get" so pleasing to know others - like you - not only hit the issue but also worked it out.

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

#173
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...)

File extensions go back a lot farther than MS-DOS, kid. :-)

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

#174
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…

Remember exactly same thing happening to me some 18-19 years ago lol! It was in the time when mice still had balls, so the reading sensor got blinded by sunlight in at least one direction - sometimes mouse won't work at all, sometimes would but only on X or only on Y axis. Fix: install window shutters.

That's about the right timescale, I guess mice of the era was a bit 'sensitive'. Lucky we were a small office, I wouldn't have wanted to sent out a memo telling people to cover their mouse in the afternoon.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, those idiots! They buy something from Apple, and then find it doesn't work. What did they expect. This, of course, is passive-aggressive snark. Suffice to say that I disagree with you; why shouldn't people expect software they buy from Apple to work? People buy from Apple because they don't want to have to deal with all this sort of crap; they just want it to work.

I am more surprised Apple doesnt invest in their own Unix utils packages honestly. Its not like they dont have the money to do so.

Steve Jobs originally wanted to strip out the shell entirely and only support POSIX at the level of the C API. To this day, Apple acts like they've been strong-armed into providing support for the Unix utilities.

I can understand the attitude that 99% of their userbase will never touch the command line, but that last 1% represents the developers that keep the whole ecosystem going.

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

#176
I had a 2011 Macbook Air that would go blank randomly. After some investigation, I determined it was often when I was moving it from one place to another (sometimes even just repositioning on my lap), and that it was going to sleep, not completely crashing.

Of course, MBAs have no moving parts, and there were no rattles when I shook the machine and listened. Apple also could not figure it out. After replacing several parts, they eventually replaced the unit with a newer model (it was 2014 at the time).

Soon after getting my new MBA up and running, it experienced the exact same glitch. I knew it had to be something environmental, since the odds would be astronomical that they would have replaced my unit with one that had the same rare glitch. But I was traveling, which eliminated anything relating to my house, neighborhood, power lines, etc.

Then I looked at my wrist, on which I wore a Seiko Kinetic watch. It was triggering the magnetic lid-closure detector, which is on the sides of the base of the MBA. When I picked up my computer with my left hand (I'm right-handed, so this was less common), it would trip the sensor.

Interestingly, there is a very easy fix for this (and similar issues, mentioned in other comments in this thread), which is to only sleep the machine if both left AND right sensors are triggered. If it seems like the left side of the lid is closed and the right side is not closed, probably it's a false positive!

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

#177

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 must confess that the eleven year old me didn't realize it would be a problem to put a screwdriver through the PSU grid to stop the fan from making noise and that it may have been preventing that musheen from working properly at some point. Yeah, I am sensible to some sound :/.

I'm guilty of this at 14; this was the only way I could get away with late night BBSing since the fan was loud and other folks would be disrupted into halting my modem joy. Only when our EE neighbor saw my rig and sternly told me not to do that did I realize it meant anything at all. sheesh

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

#178
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember the bad old days of only 10-20 years ago when it wasn't unheard of to send a document to the printer, then walk over to discover a zillion pages of plain text starting with %!PS-Adobe-3.0.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes sure, it can always be attached somehow. But even if used everywhere it has it's limits and ambiguities, e.g. when dealing with .jpg vs. .jpeg, .yml vs. .yaml and so on... It gets even more interesting when Editors create a temporary file by adding a prefix or suffix, or git/a package manager creates an additional file for conflict resolution.

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

#180
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is why you should engineer things properly. Not duck tape them together with shell scripts!

*duct, ironically.

Duck Tape is the brand name of the original product. "Duct tape" is the generic name that the industry settled on.

("Duck" refers to the water-resistant nature of the tape. Duct doesn't actually mean anything other than sounding like "duck". Ironically, duct tape is the wrong type of tape to use on heating ducts.)

If you're going to be pedantic, then get it right. ;-)

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