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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)

#41

Post by anovikov »

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…

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.

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

EliRivers wrote: post #27
gdfasfklshg4 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by gdfasfklshg4 »

EliRivers wrote: post #27
gdfasfklshg4 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We actually broadly agree that it is a shame that Apple don't support their Unix utilities.

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

#44

Post by bserfaty »

d2p wrote: post #14

Reminds me of a bug in PostSharp.. After making some changes our app would throw a NullReferenceException Mondays. It turned out to be a bug in some optimisation, but it only occurred on Monday because they skipped licence checks unlocking "full functionality" on a Monday (Happy Monday!) which enabled the optimisation. https://plus.google.com/113181962167438638669/posts/QF5pDB4X...

We had a bug that would pop up only when we weren't working (at lunch breaks, meetings etc) but when we were at our desks it never reproduces. It ended up related to the screen saver starting up. It took us too long to find that out but that was a very good laugh.

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

#47

Post by CathedralBorrow »

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

Probably my fifth read through and still love it.

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

#48

Post by pjc50 »

wazari972 wrote: post #11
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'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?

Well, the true UNIX philosophy is that everything is a text file ...

.. but as one of the other comments says, programs which want specific interpretation should consider having their own heuristics, especially including "precedence". In the Excel example, it should be considering XLS and CSV first before trying other things.

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

#49

Post by mcv »

I wonder why anyone thought that `file` should have hard-coded custom behaviour on that one very specific type of Erlang file, and how something like that ever ended up getting accepted into the general code base. It sounds like either a very personal workaround for a personal problem, or completely the wrong way to solve a possibly more common problem.

Fixing the bug by properly escaping the string that matches the special file still sounds like the wrong solution to me.

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

#50

Post by DagAgren »

stazz1 wrote: post #39
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…

https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-... Also, some reddit makes it seem like a Titanium pin in his shoulder was to blame: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2rsivw/monitor...

At university, we once built a networked doorbell system for the offices. Lots of small displays with a button outside the doors, connected on a CAN bus to a controller, that you could configure, and another device in the office to make noise and control the screen.

We had a problem, though: The door display devices would randomly crash and require somebody to go over and reboot them. This was very annoying, and we could never reproduce it. We added monitoring for it, and after a while the problem mostly went away on its own. But half a year later, it was back. It seems the system worked fine in summer, but started crashing in winter.

We finally, after much testing and deliberation, realised it was caused by the devices having a metal front plate which would easily attract static shocks, which would crash the device. And in winter, the dry air and wooly clothing would cause a lot more static discharges.

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