Great! Reminds me of the bug with the car, that won't start if the owner buys a certain type of ice cream :D
That’s an old urban legend:
“My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
21–30 of 216 posts
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#22I 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 favorite one is the one where engineer notices that he can login on terminal only when sitting down. When standing up, login fails.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#23I 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 favorite one is the one where engineer notices that he can login on terminal only when sitting down. When standing up, login fails.
wait really?
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure to agree: if/as *nix systems do not use the extension to know the filetype, then `file`-like heuristics is the only other way to know the file nature, or do I miss someting?
Presumably OpenOffice could pass along a thing that says "please print this PostScript file" so that the printer software knows which type of file it is printing and doesn't have to guess with "file". OpenOffice knows what type of file it's outputting, after all. But your point arguably stands: if a user says "print file X", and you want different files printed using different logic (e.g. PDFs and PostScript files sh…
I think the issue here is the question that should be being asked is: "is this a postscript file?". `file` answers a different question, "what is the most likely type for this file?"
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#25I 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 favorite one is the one where engineer notices that he can login on terminal only when sitting down. When standing up, login fails.
Ok don’t leave us hanging here what was the cause?
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#26I'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.
Not sure why people think they can rely on the pre-installed Unix utilities on macOS.
EDIT: Apple routinely don't update the Unix utilities for a decade...
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not sure why people think they can rely on the pre-installed Unix utilities on macOS. EDIT: Apple routinely don't update the Unix utilities for a decade...
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.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#28I 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 the kit and visually saw that we had clean line-of-sight for the link.
It kept happening.
Eventually, a colleague went out while it was down. It turned out that there was a crane on a building site, and when they parked it stationary it blocked line of sight.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite one is the one where engineer notices that he can login on terminal only when sitting down. When standing up, login fails.
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.
Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite one is the one where engineer notices that he can login on terminal only when sitting down. When standing up, login fails.
Ok don’t leave us hanging here what was the cause?
https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...
Not as interesting as initially hoped for :D