19 ms·

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

577 points by beshrkayali 7y ago

eesmith 7y ago
From 2009-04-28. No activity on that bug, or on the bug it duplicates ('file' misidentifies a Postscript file as a Haskell file) for many years. Any news since?
- kalleboo 7y ago
  Looks like a fix was released in `file` later the same year https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619
aritmo 7y ago
Likely it was fixed in file
im3w1l 7y ago
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.
- jakobegger 7y ago
  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.
  - gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
    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...
    - EliRivers 7y ago
      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.
      - giancarlostoro 7y ago
        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.
        wtracy 7y ago
        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.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
        We actually broadly agree that it is a shame that Apple don't support their Unix utilities.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Excel mis-identifies CSV files whose first column is named "ID" as SYLK files. But who would EVER think of naming the first column of a spreadsheet "ID"? https://www.optibrium.com/community/forums/6-general-how-do-i/21-unable-to-open-csv-files-in-excel https://www.optibrium.com/community/forums/6-general-how-do-... >Q: I have saved the result table from admensa into .csv format. However I am not able to open in excel. It is said that SYLK: file format is not valid. Do you have any experience on it? Thanks. >A: This is an Excel 'feature.' I would guess that the first column of your data is entitled "ID". For some reason, Excel interprets any CSV file beginning with "ID" as an SYLK format file (not really sure what that is!). If you edit the file in, say, Notepad and change the name of the first column in the header row, you should find that it will load without a problem. >This will happen if you save a CSV file from any application with the first characters "ID". So, unfortunately, there's not much we can do about it, other than to recommend that users don't call their first column "ID"!
    - dfox 7y ago
      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 with most European locales where Excel uses "Semicolon"-SV and not "Comma"-SV but still calls it CSV)
      - wmoser 7y ago
        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.
        Symbiote 7y ago
        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 done with it.)
  - cannam 7y ago
    > Apple ships a very old magic file with macOS I particularly relish the way it identifies macOS disk image files as VAX executables. I hope they never change that.
  - andreareina 7y ago
    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.
- wazari972 7y ago
  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?
  - OskarS 7y ago
    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 should be printed differently than text files), what other option is there other than using something like "file" to try and guess the file type? It would be very annoying for the user to have to specify each time from a massive list of possible optins.
    - angrygoat 7y ago
      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?"
      - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
        There is no perfect heuristic here, because what if you, for example, want to print a plain text file that happens to be PostScript?
        zaarn 7y ago
        In most cases, you can't print plaintext easily to a printer, it needs some format like PS, so your PS file would be converted into a PS script that outputs your PS file.
        TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Yes, this is why you should engineer things properly. Not duck tape them together with shell scripts!
  - hiccuphippo 7y ago
    Actually the user was able to solve it because it was in a shell script. If the program had used libfile instead, there would be no easy way to edit it to change the date format other than recompiling it. They would have needed to wait until the maintainers fixed file itself.
    - silon42 7y ago
      using file is a bad idea anyway... you can't rely on a command that performs guesswork (aka "smart"). It's been a cause of security holes in similar contexts (browsers sniffing mime type from file content/extensions)
  - generationP 7y ago
    > duck tape That's a fascinatingly apt mixed metaphor: duct taping meets duck typing.
    - IshKebab 7y ago
      Ha I just looked up duck tape on wikipedia and it says "not to be confused with duck typing"!
  - rconti 7y ago
    *duct, ironically.
    - wtracy 7y ago
      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. ;-)
- blablabla123 7y ago
  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...)
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    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.
    - blablabla123 7y ago
      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.
  - D-Coder 7y ago
    File extensions go back a lot farther than MS-DOS, kid. :-)
  - protanopia 7y ago
    BeFS does use MIME types. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/08/metadata/9/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/08/metadata/9/
- lazyjones 7y ago
  It's both really. A workflow using "file" only (and without -k or so) is silly because, as everybody knows, some files are valid for more than one file format. "file" was obviously wrong in the described circumstances...
blemasle 7y ago
This thread from last July has a link about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344655
- 1_player 7y ago
  And this one from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010
hbbio 7y ago
Funny, but can someone add (2009) in the title?
geek_at 7y ago
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
- sdrothrock 7y ago
  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 http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles Edit: And the FAQ: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
  - CathedralBorrow 7y ago
    Probably my fifth read through and still love it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - torstenvl 7y ago
    Wait. How come it wasn't ~280 miles then? EDIT: Never mind, answered in the FAQ.
  - horomeme 7y ago
    My first time. Absolutely hilarious!
  - ascar 7y ago
    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.
- 7y ago
runxel 7y ago
Great! Reminds me of the bug with the car, that won't start if the owner buys a certain type of ice cream :D
- teddyh 7y ago
  That’s an old urban legend: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/
m4r35n357 7y ago
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 . . . .
- silon42 7y ago
  File should detect all possible file types, there is no reason to detect only the first one... It should not be used as a file type detection anyway if you want a reliable system.
- syncsynchalt 7y ago
  Looking at the patch (http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff 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.
d2p 7y ago
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/QF5pDB4XY6F https://plus.google.com/113181962167438638669/posts/QF5pDB4X...
- beshrkayali 7y ago
  i can't remember exactly now, but webpack had a monday-only bug as wellat some point last year.
  - foota 7y ago
    Probably https://github.com/webpack/webpack-cli/issues/962 https://github.com/webpack/webpack-cli/issues/962
  - dspillett 7y ago
    Monday-only bugs and similar are not unlikely with code dealing with weekday ordinals, when moving between locales with different conventions (is Monday or Sunday the first day of the week?). Or can cause any number of confusions if different bits of code make different assumptions. I'm not sure why that would affect something like webpack though (unless the problem was specific to a date manipulation library). Edit: spotted the post that arrived as I typed the above. Looks like an advertising related function that only ran once per week using something not available on all sorted OS builds for that code, so not a locale related problem. Advertising causing unexpected problems yet again!
- bserfaty 7y ago
  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.
angrygoat 7y ago
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 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.
- buckminster 7y ago
  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.
- mark-r 7y ago
  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.
paulintrognon 7y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010
hazeii 7y ago
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 it was probably swamping the optosensors I made sure I covered the side of the mouse with my hand when using it. His puzzled looks as the mouse worked for me but not for him were priceless (I did let him in on the secret after a few minutes).
- anovikov 7y ago
  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.
  - Phrenzy 7y ago
    So... This would not happen with Linux?
    - hazeii 7y ago
      I wonder if the downvoters missed the joke? >Fix: install window shutters.
  - zoomablemind 7y ago
    > ...It was in the time when mice still had balls, Thinking of present times and times forgone: now mice lost not only balls, they lost their tails, and often find themselves devoid of any 3-dimensionality, being reduced to flat touchpads. Using a mouse always felt to me as having a friedly handshake with the computer, something that touchpads can't emulate.
  - hazeii 7y ago
    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.
agateau 7y ago
I hit a similarly puzzling bug a few years ago in Gwenview (an image viewer) when a user reported it could not open some PNG files of a certain width. I wrote about it here: https://agateau.com/2012/qt-image-decoders-stepping-on-each-others/ https://agateau.com/2012/qt-image-decoders-stepping-on-each-...
krick 7y ago
That's disturbingly fragile filetype heuristic TBH. Couldn't they use anything better?
- syncsynchalt 7y ago
  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 http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff
mcv 7y ago
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.
soared 7y ago
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-to-vanilla-ice-cream-a-study-in-problem-solving-the-complete-case/ https://www.kepner-tregoe.com/blog/help-my-car-is-allergic-t...
- teddyh 7y ago
  That’s an old urban legend: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/
  - RealStickman 7y ago
    100% of what is in the link you sent is in the original link.
    - vinaypai 7y ago
      Except the part where it says that it's a "Legend", and the fact that the explanation and problem are reversed in older and newer versions of the legend. --- It’s interesting to note how the “vapor lock” explanation reversed itself over time. Earlier versions mentioned a flavor of ice cream that required handpacking (while all the others were prepackaged and ready to go); the vapor lock was said to form because it took so much longer to get out of the store with this one flavor. In newer versions, we’re told that vanilla was a popular flavor and was kept in a special case near the door, making purchasing it and getting back out to the car take considerably less time; the car then wouldn’t start because the vapor lock did not have enough time to dissipate.
- basilgohar 7y ago
  What is amazing about this and the other comments of similar, human-based issues affecting technology, is just how gosh darn_reliable_ we humans can be in some cases. Despite all the complexities and exceptions to human behavior, I think it can be argued that we are far more repetitious and our actions more reproducible than we'd like to admit lest we think we are giving up some of what we thought was actual human natures. However, we also regale to one-another tales of folks in simpler lifestyles that "always do the same thing, every day, for 50 years", lifestyles that don't change much over generations, and so on. So, if we look at this from a wider perspective, rationally, it shouldn't be that shocking. Still is interesting, nonetheless. :-) Edit: After seeing the sibling comment point out this was Snoped, I hope my otherwise seemingly insightful point still stands...:-p
guhcampos 7y ago
I had a user once calling me real desperately saying she was hacked. Got to her desk and nothing was going on. She then sit or her desk and started talking me through what she was doing, then suddenly the screen started to move by itself, stuff getting typed everywhere, applications opening and closing all around. Turns out she had accidentally turned on speech recognition on her mac, and the laptop was simply trying to parse - in English - everything we were saying - in Portuguese - into valid commands. Nice little havoc.
- tabtab 7y ago
  Gee, I thought she was a Perl programmer ;-)
notacoward 7y ago
This is why one of my favorite features in the original MacOS filesystem was type/creator fields (four uppercase letters each). Yes, it was possible for developers to create collisions, but it was still better than the UNIX method of applying fragile heuristics to the file contents. IMO it would still be a good idea to replicate this (minus the four-character limitation) with a standardized extended attribute, falling back to the heuristic method only when that fails.
- ken 7y ago
  Type/creator codes were any 4-byte OSType, actually. ASCII values were commonly used, for obvious reasons, but not required.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    I stand corrected. Thank you.
- yrro 7y ago
  The separation between type and creator had other beneficial side effects. The Type code told you which apps _could_ open a file (by drag and drop or via the file chooser dialog). The creator code told you which app _would_ be chosen when the file was opened in the Finder (e.g., double-clicked). So HTML documents I had created in some web authoring tool would open in it for editing, whereas those I had saved from a web browser would open in it for viewing. I don't remember it being possible to change either code using tools that shipped with the OS. I obtained a tool on one of MacFormat's early cover disks...
  - dgacmu 7y ago
    ResEdit was the apple program that could change it. Unfortunately, I don't remember off the top of my head if it shipped with the system or only with some of the developer tools. I _think_ early versions had it.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
sebastianconcpt 7y ago
So it's not a problem w/ openoffice.org, cups, or the brother printer drivers. It is a bug in the `file` utility, and documented at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619.* https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619.*
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
darekkay 7y ago
There is a GitHub repository that collects such debugging stories (this one included) [1]. [1] https://github.com/danluu/debugging-stories https://github.com/danluu/debugging-stories
NicoJuicy 7y ago
I got some legacy applications of work. One of them needed a new feature for something. Including database update scripts. So it was changed, very carefull because it had to use a database trigger ( ms sql) which i haven't used before. It was released in demo/test environment, for 1-2 months and there was never an error. When it got deployed into production, the integrating applications with it went to shit. Rollbacked everything and it was fine again. Made me seriously doubt myselve. I contacted the older devs that touched parts of the database and application, they didn't saw any issues. Fast forward 2 months, i heard it was deployed again into production without any issues. 1 month afterwards, a colleague found an "issue" with the deployments. In short: if you deploy to production, for some applications it would deploy and older version ( 50% chance since a swap happened). Urgh
TheMerovingian 7y ago
In my first install of Arch linux, I figured that using the bleeding edge software meant everything was supported. Upon plugging in an external monitor into my Dell laptop, it, indeed worked. Well, until I moved my mouse cursor over to that monitor. It then turned off. Move the mouse back to the laptop screen; external monitor turned back on. My first foray into Arch linux ended up with a bug report against Intel's graphics driver. Luckily, it was fixed very quickly and I'm proud to say it's finally time for Linux on the deskt---- err laptop.
chasd00 7y ago
One of my favorite pieces of debug folklore was the story of a minicomputer or some other serious machine rebooting in the middle of the night. I can't remember exactly but it was in some university during the 70s/80s. An important server would spontaneously reboot in the middle of the night on some days but not all. Finally, someone sat up all night to watch what happens and observed a cleaning lady unplugging the machine from power in order to plug in a vacuum. When she was finished, she plugged the computer back in and left. Another on of my favorites, not bug but more malicious, was someone wrote a program to swing the heads on one of those old giant hard drives back and forth. At the right frequency, the back and forth momentum would cause the drive to walk away from the wall and eventually unplug itself.
- coleca 7y ago
  We had a similar one when I worked for a large supermarket chain. We had one store that their In-Store Processor (ISP), which was a big IBM 6F1 RS/6000 box (about the size and looks of a large mini-fridge) was plagued with all kinds of weird and sporadic errors. Code that works fine in the rest of the chain would only sometimes work there, all kinds of disk errors, slowness, etc. We sent technicians to the store multiple times and they could never figure out the issue, we even swapped out most of the hardware. Eventually, we discovered that the young girl that was responsible for changing all the prices was using the server room as her makeshift office. She would stick all her magnetic clipboards with the upcoming price changes to the side of the server. When she heard the tech was coming she would clear out all her stuff since she knew no one was supposed to be in there. The magnets were wreaking havoc on the disks causing the errors. The store manager got her some proper office space and the errors went away.
- tabtab 7y ago
  Re: " someone wrote a program to swing the heads on one of those old giant hard drives back and forth. At the right frequency...cause the drive to walk away" On some TRS-80 models I discovered a certain POKE command would make the screen flash, click, and "bounce" the image, similar to a power spike. So in the university lab I wrote up a small BASIC script with a delay timer to repeat "DANGER: Computer Overheating!" as the clicking/flickering increased in rate. I stood back to watch and waited for the timer to kick in. Nearby students would freak out. When the script was done, it deleted itself in case they got the lab assistant to come over. I was a stinker.
vVv111y 7y ago
> “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009) > “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009) > “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)
widforss 7y ago
Reminds me of the traditional "gimme gimme gimme" easter egg. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...
diegoperini 7y ago
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 :)
- dajohnson89 7y ago
  Could you explain what happens there?
  - LorenPechtel 7y ago
    Infinite recursion.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rhacker 7y ago
It kinda pisses me off that the second line of the body became a sexist joke phrase title in hacker news. If you're not clued in on sexism: The stereotype reinforcement that women are dumb with technology is the punchline. It doesn't matter that there was actually an issue with the pipeline from OpenOffice -> Cups, but the hacker news title was cleverly crafted to reinforce a stereotype. I don't care that this will be downvoted to oblivion, but the seeds of sexism exist everywhere.
- jpleclerc90 7y ago
  I think that the only stereotype held by most people on HN is that 99% of people, both genders indiscriminately, are dumb with technology.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  In general I agree with you that "unconscious" sexism is common, but TFA is not an example. TFA describes a user who has accurately isolated the conditions that generate errors. That is a capable user. Arguably, the title would be improved by adding the third sentence as well...
- majos 7y ago
  A while back I read a little theory that the reason "so easy your mom can use it" is a thing is that older men are less likely to experiment with new stuff in the first place than older women. I have no evidence for this beyond second-hand anecdotes about who shows up to free computer education classes at their local library.
- beshrkayali 7y ago
  Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you're overthinking this. I personally read it this morning and honestly it didn't register to me in the way you're describing at all. I did not use the title as a sexist joke as you're saying, nor did I think that his wife is "dumb" because she thought that something is wrong with OpenOffice. The joke (if there's one) is that there's a twist, which is that programmers expect the worst description from non-technical users when explaining bugs, and "something doesn't work on Tuesdays" sounds a little absurd at first (like most interesting bugs). But even if it had occurred to me, omitting it just for the sake of not having the potential negative connotation is even worse imho. I haven't seen a single comment in this entire thread that addresses the issue as you're suggesting, not even hinting at it. Just because you thought that it could possibly have that implication doesn't mean that it actually does.
shanecleveland 7y ago
Problems like this make us IT folk seem magical. I routinely remove blank spaces from "empty" fields, rename files without slashes, quit and reload applications "doing something weird." The list goes on. Just this morning I changed an exclamation point a "1" to fix an error with a calculation. Many of these things can and should be programmed to work, despite the user error. But just as it can be hard for users to understand the fault in their ways, it is difficult for the programer to consider many of these possibilities when deploying applications.
goutham467 7y ago
In my new office, whenever any of my colleagues standup from their chair my external monitor would go blank, it was not happening consistently, especially when I called any of colleagues to see it. It drove me mad for days, I checked whether there were any loose connections, etc., but later after searching for the issue online, I found out this https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/738618-display-intermittently-blanking-flickering-or-los https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861...
annoyingnoob 7y ago
These are always fun. I've seen a number of them over the years. 1. Speech Recognition typing random garbage - user claims to be hacked. 2. Ambient light sensor on laptop turns off screen - user says my computer works at home but not at the office. 3. Set email background and font to white - user says he can't type new emails but can type replies.
variaga 7y ago
I had a bug on a small system (basically an embedded computer with some custom I/O hardware), where the report was a unit "wouldn't reboot if it was turned off for too long(!?)". Focused testing easily reproduced the problem. If you power cycled the machine and the off time was less than 30 seconds, it always rebooted correctly. If the off time was greater than 2 minutes, it ALSO always rebooted correctly, but if the off time was around 1 minute, it would reliably hang during the boot process. This behavior was rapidly confirmed on a number of other units taken off the production line. Needless to say this was very confusing. The eventual root cause was that during boot, a file-system was created in DRAM, similar to what a modern system would use initramfs for. The file system creation routine had originally been written for non-volatile memory, so it would by default check for a superblock to see if there was already a file system in place at the creation location and if there was, just use that (after unlinking all pre-existing files). If no pre-existing FS was found it would create a new one. But this was in DRAM, not non-volatile memory so: - if the off time was less than 30 seconds, the filesystem was STILL IN THE DRAM and the ramfs_create() routine would happily re-use it. - if the off time was over two minutes, there were enough bit errors in the DRAM that ramfs_create() would fail to recognize the superblock, overwrite it with a new one, and everything STILL worked fine. - in the critical timing zone, the number of bit errors in the superblock in DRAM would be small enough that the FS creation would recognize that there was a pre-existing filesystem, but large enough to cause the ramfs_create() function to error out. The boot would then hang when the DRAM filesystem was accessed. Of course there was no error checking on the ramfs_create() return. The solution was to change the flags to ramfs_create() to overwrite unconditionally. After that, booting was reliable with any amount of off time. Lesson is - cold boot attacks on DRAM contents are real, and we managed to do it to ourselves by accident.
jp1016 7y ago
when i got the computer for the first time , there was mcafee antivirus that came with it, i scanned the PC and found a virus, i was shattered and cheated by the computer seller as i thought it would damage the PC and i wont be able to use it ever again.I'm a software engineer now
jp1016 7y ago
i used to create virus on my school computer labs , a batch file with command to delete a critical windows file like ntldr.dll or somthing and restarts, then i rename it to fifa or GTA and put an icon of the game as well. someone from any other class when using the computer think they got a new game and click on it and it won't boot again. yeah , i was a bad kid
tzs 7y ago
If you think the heuristics in "file" are sometimes a bit scary, take a look at how PC hardware used to work back before the PCI bus become dominant. The heuristics there ended up bricking two expensive motherboards for me. The older ISA bus, which was quite common until at least the end of the '90s, did not have any way standard way for software to identify cards, nor any way for software to specifically talk to the card in a specific slot. PCI cards have a required Vendor ID assigned by the PCI-SIG, and a Device ID assigned by the vendor, and the PCI bus has a way to address by slot. A driver that supports a particular kind of card can scan the bus by slot, checking Vendor ID and Device ID to find cards it works with. With ISA cards, all that driver would know is that the card it is looking for has, say, 4 registers that appear at consecutive I/O addresses, and that there are jumpers on the card that can set the base I/O address to 0x200, 0x240, 0x280, or 0x2CO. The safe way to use a card was to install it in the PC, noting the jumper settings, and then install the driver and tell the driver what jumper settings you used. To know what jumper settings to use, you had to know what other cards were in the system and what I/O addresses they used so you could pick settings that didn't conflict with an existing card. No one wanted to make someone installing a new operating system on a working system open up the thing, find all the settings on all the cards, and report that to the OS. They wanted to just automatically work with cards that had drivers built-in to the OS. So what the OS installer would do is go through each built-in card it supported, and use heuristics to figure out if it is installed. For example, take that card I mentioned earlier that can be at 0x200, 0x240, 0x280, or 0x2C0. The OS might now that after reset that card should have 0x1F in register 0, 0x00 in register 1, and random values in registers 2 and 3. So if it doesn't see 0x1F at 0x200, 0x240, 0x280, or 0x2C0, it knows that the card is not present. But suppose there is 0x1F at 0x200 and 0x00 at 0x201. Then the card might be there. So now the driver would have to write to some of the registers, and see if the card responds the right way. Mostly it would do this be setting various modes, and then reading those mode settings, and see if they are right. If the card is not the right one, hopefully some of those commands don't make any sense to it, and so its responses are different. Think about this for a moment. Suppose the OS is looking for a network controller, and the card at that address is actually a disk controller that happens to have the same read values in its registers after a reset, so the probe for the network card has to go on to the writing part of the test. It's then writing network controller commands to a disk controller. If the command for "set status" on the network controller happens to be the same as the command for "write to disk" on the disk controller--you may have just trashed your disk. Oops. And so the OS vendors had to very carefully construct their device probes. If writing commands for card X to different kind of card Y could trash things on Y, they needed to make sure that they had probed for Y first, and so if any Y were present skip them when probing for X. Note that this doesn't necessarily work if you have any cards that the OS does not know about. If you card is going to need a third party driver installed after the OS is installed, it was best to take that card out during OS installation if having random junk written to it could cause harm. One day at work, we bought two very expensive top of the line motherboards. The box said that they required Windows 98 or later. I tried to install Windows 95 on one of them. The install went fine until it got to one of the places where it reboots, and the reboot failed utterly. It did not even show the BIOS messages. The system appeared to be thoroughly bricked. Figuring one of the motherboards was defective, I tried the other one. Same damn thing. Bricked during Windows 95 install! We eventually found out what happened. The Windows 95 searching for devices on the ISA bus ended up writing to some registers that on this machine controller the BIOS flashing. It had erased the BIOS. Windows 98 and later knew about the flash controller in the chipset used in this motherboard, and avoiding trashing your BIOS. (Not sure why the motherboards either didn't have a jumper to disable BIOS flashing, or shipped with that jumper set to enabled).
dodo6502 7y ago
I had a fun bug once where some functionality involving self sign certificates stopped working on Feb 29th. It came down to us simply adding +10 to the year for the expiration. There is no Feb 29th 10 years into the future, only 4, 8, 12, etc... That was a good lesson on why to always use a date library when adding or subtracting time. We weren't the only ones... Azure went down for the same reason that day.
gnicholas 7y ago
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!
- ianferrel 7y ago
  My wife had effectively the same issue where her macbook would "die", but only during video calls. We replaced it, then it happened again with the new one. A smart Apple tech eventually had her bring in everything on her desk and make a mockup video call in the store. The glitch happened when the magnetic cover she had curled up to use as a stand on her mini iPad (for her notes for the call) got a little too close to the latch sensor.
- sandymcmurray 7y ago
  I'm proud to say I managed to diagnose a similar issue over the phone. Employee called the Help Desk saying her screen would go black when she tried to sign in. When she finished entering her password and clicked the button on the trackpad the computer screen would suddenly go black. She said she had to start up the computer after each incident. She also noted that it didn't happen consistently, just some days. During troubleshooting we clarified that the computer was not shutting down; the login window appeared immediately if she pressed the power button gently instead of holding it down. She also allowed that the unexpected sleep was not only at login, but could happen any time if she got past the login window. And she could work around the problem by using a USB keyboard. The culprit was a magnetic bracelet that she wore only occasionally. First thing in the morning she would try to log in to the laptop, without the USB keyboard, and her wrist got close enough to trigger the sleep-when-lid-closed setting. I heard the bracelet jangle on the phone, and guessed correctly that it might be a magnet. This was my second encounter with this problem. The first time was when a laptop on my workbench died unexpectedly during troubleshooting and would not start up. It was stacked on top of another of the same model, and the lid of the laptop underneath was triggering sleep-on-closed-lid setting of the laptop on top. Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I diagnosed a similar problem in 5 seconds while walking through the office. Laptop sleep was being triggered by an employee's new Apple watch. It might take hours or days to figure out a problem the first time you encounter it. The second time is a memory test. The third time you look like a genius.
musicale 7y ago
Who needs to print on Tuesdays? Usually M/W/F are normal printing days. ;-)
knolan 7y ago
I had an intermittent printer issue recently. As a Mac user I have to submit jobs to the University printers via a web portal. I try to print very little so it’s not something I use a lot, however I end up printing large numbers of midterm scripts every semester. On occasion I would log into the portal, upload my file and select the printer and it would tell me the file was printed. However when I went to the printer there were no jobs to be seen. IT insisted that my files were somehow corrupt but eventually they sent someone over to see my issue and they too were stumped. Finally they logged the server side activity of my printer interaction and they noticed that there was a space appended to my username, presumably by iCloud Keychain and the behaviour was possibly changing between OS updates. The web portal would let me log in, the server managed the files but the printer would ignore the job all because of that space.
aaronscott 7y ago
I love these debug stories. My interesting one was from a job repairing computers in high school. My older colleague was upgrading a 486, and couldn't get the system to boot on the first try, but if you hit the reset button after it was already on then it would boot just fine. All the hardware tested fine in other systems. I figured out the problem by listening to the hard drive. I could tell it wasn't spinning at full speed when it was initially booting. The system would get through the POST process before the hard drive could finish spinning up. So the initial boot from power-off would fail. The solution ended up being to upgrade the hard drive (or downgrade the motherboard).
tabtab 7y ago
I now suspect he made it up for devious reasons, but I had a professor who told about the time random characters and cursor movements kept appearing during data input from a lady at a remote office at his org. Phone support couldn't solve the problem after many tries, including asking her to try a different work-station. So they flew in a technician. The technician arrived and sat to observe the lady as she did data entry. The technician eventually realized her rather large breasts were bumping the keyboard from time to time.
sarah180 7y ago
I once spent quite a long time tracking down a bug that would only occur if the time between 10:00 and 12:59 because of the extra character that occurred in the date formatting, leading to an unexpected line wrap that led to a lookup bug later on during a session. If I'd known that time of day was the variable causing the behavior change, it would have been fairly easy to resolve—but that wasn't the case. Instead it was only resolved by the large-scale collection of failure and success cases coupled with the careful correlation of bytes sent & received across an entire session.
aubreykilian 7y ago
I used to work as a Network Admin at a big university in Cape Town years back, and one of the urban legends at the time (late '90s) was that one of the long distance wireless (microwave? Line of sight required) network links were reported to drop every day at the exact same time for a a few minutes only. Lots of hours of troubleshooting hardware etc. later, and still no solution. Eventually a site-visit was done at both sides of the link, binoculars entow. The problem? The line of sight was going dangerously close to the top of a hill where a farmer had led his cattle every day at the same time. The cattle blocked the line of sight for 5 minutes every day. No idea if this is true though.
rramadass 7y ago
Windows 3.1 16-bit multi-functional modules app i.e. skeleton app which loaded multiple DLLs one for each type of functionality. When printing on a dot-matrix printer everything would work fine. However when printing on a (then new) Laser printer the entire system would hang randomly. Didn't matter which module was the initiator. Spent 2 weeks poring over the code in our common DLL used for printing and found nothing. Then started checking rest of the code in each module and found it. Each module called into the common "print dll" to print its graphs. On return back it would call a local function to print the "graph legends" and thats where the problem was. The last line of this function called "ReleaseDC" but the parameters "hWnd" and "hDC" were switched by mistake so Windows released some unexpected memory giving rise to the problem. This code was cut and pasted into each module with minor modifications and therefore existed in all the functional modules. I was somewhat proud of solving this :-)
AllNightLong 7y ago
I've only had issues with the software for school in the nights before I had to submit work. For exemple, I recently had to give back a work on matlab. And at 9 pm it didn't show up in the windows menu. So I tried to run the installer that was too long, until I found out you had to use a flash drive. Then it returned a lot of errors saying I didn't have the modules. And I have the same issue with every damn software. What should I do ?

577 points by beshrkayali 7y ago

From 2009-04-28. No activity on that bug, or on the bug it duplicates ('file' misidentifies a Postscript file as a Haskell file) for many years. Any news since?

kalleboo 7y ago
Looks like a fix was released in `file` later the same year https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619

aritmo 7y ago

Likely it was fixed in file

im3w1l 7y ago

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.

jakobegger 7y ago
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.
- gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
  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...
  - EliRivers 7y ago
    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.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      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.
      - wtracy 7y ago
        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.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
      We actually broadly agree that it is a shame that Apple don't support their Unix utilities.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Excel mis-identifies CSV files whose first column is named "ID" as SYLK files. But who would EVER think of naming the first column of a spreadsheet "ID"? https://www.optibrium.com/community/forums/6-general-how-do-i/21-unable-to-open-csv-files-in-excel https://www.optibrium.com/community/forums/6-general-how-do-... >Q: I have saved the result table from admensa into .csv format. However I am not able to open in excel. It is said that SYLK: file format is not valid. Do you have any experience on it? Thanks. >A: This is an Excel 'feature.' I would guess that the first column of your data is entitled "ID". For some reason, Excel interprets any CSV file beginning with "ID" as an SYLK format file (not really sure what that is!). If you edit the file in, say, Notepad and change the name of the first column in the header row, you should find that it will load without a problem. >This will happen if you save a CSV file from any application with the first characters "ID". So, unfortunately, there's not much we can do about it, other than to recommend that users don't call their first column "ID"!
  - dfox 7y ago
    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 with most European locales where Excel uses "Semicolon"-SV and not "Comma"-SV but still calls it CSV)
    - wmoser 7y ago
      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.
      - Symbiote 7y ago
        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 done with it.)
- cannam 7y ago
  > Apple ships a very old magic file with macOS I particularly relish the way it identifies macOS disk image files as VAX executables. I hope they never change that.
- andreareina 7y ago
  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.
wazari972 7y ago
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?
- OskarS 7y ago
  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 should be printed differently than text files), what other option is there other than using something like "file" to try and guess the file type? It would be very annoying for the user to have to specify each time from a massive list of possible optins.
  - angrygoat 7y ago
    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?"
    - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
      There is no perfect heuristic here, because what if you, for example, want to print a plain text file that happens to be PostScript?
      - zaarn 7y ago
        In most cases, you can't print plaintext easily to a printer, it needs some format like PS, so your PS file would be converted into a PS script that outputs your PS file.
        TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
IshKebab 7y ago
Yes, this is why you should engineer things properly. Not duck tape them together with shell scripts!
- hiccuphippo 7y ago
  Actually the user was able to solve it because it was in a shell script. If the program had used libfile instead, there would be no easy way to edit it to change the date format other than recompiling it. They would have needed to wait until the maintainers fixed file itself.
  - silon42 7y ago
    using file is a bad idea anyway... you can't rely on a command that performs guesswork (aka "smart"). It's been a cause of security holes in similar contexts (browsers sniffing mime type from file content/extensions)
- generationP 7y ago
  > duck tape That's a fascinatingly apt mixed metaphor: duct taping meets duck typing.
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    Ha I just looked up duck tape on wikipedia and it says "not to be confused with duck typing"!
- rconti 7y ago
  *duct, ironically.
  - wtracy 7y ago
    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. ;-)
blablabla123 7y ago
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...)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  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.
  - blablabla123 7y ago
    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.
- D-Coder 7y ago
  File extensions go back a lot farther than MS-DOS, kid. :-)
- protanopia 7y ago
  BeFS does use MIME types. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/08/metadata/9/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/08/metadata/9/
lazyjones 7y ago
It's both really. A workflow using "file" only (and without -k or so) is silly because, as everybody knows, some files are valid for more than one file format. "file" was obviously wrong in the described circumstances...

blemasle 7y ago

This thread from last July has a link about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344655

1_player 7y ago
And this one from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010

hbbio 7y ago

Funny, but can someone add (2009) in the title?

geek_at 7y ago

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

sdrothrock 7y ago
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 http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles Edit: And the FAQ: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
- CathedralBorrow 7y ago
  Probably my fifth read through and still love it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- torstenvl 7y ago
  Wait. How come it wasn't ~280 miles then? EDIT: Never mind, answered in the FAQ.
- horomeme 7y ago
  My first time. Absolutely hilarious!
- ascar 7y ago
  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.
7y ago

runxel 7y ago

Great! Reminds me of the bug with the car, that won't start if the owner buys a certain type of ice cream :D

teddyh 7y ago
That’s an old urban legend: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

m4r35n357 7y ago

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 . . . .

silon42 7y ago
File should detect all possible file types, there is no reason to detect only the first one... It should not be used as a file type detection anyway if you want a reliable system.
syncsynchalt 7y ago
Looking at the patch (http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff 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.

d2p 7y ago

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/QF5pDB4XY6F https://plus.google.com/113181962167438638669/posts/QF5pDB4X...

beshrkayali 7y ago
i can't remember exactly now, but webpack had a monday-only bug as wellat some point last year.
- foota 7y ago
  Probably https://github.com/webpack/webpack-cli/issues/962 https://github.com/webpack/webpack-cli/issues/962
- dspillett 7y ago
  Monday-only bugs and similar are not unlikely with code dealing with weekday ordinals, when moving between locales with different conventions (is Monday or Sunday the first day of the week?). Or can cause any number of confusions if different bits of code make different assumptions. I'm not sure why that would affect something like webpack though (unless the problem was specific to a date manipulation library). Edit: spotted the post that arrived as I typed the above. Looks like an advertising related function that only ran once per week using something not available on all sorted OS builds for that code, so not a locale related problem. Advertising causing unexpected problems yet again!
bserfaty 7y ago
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.

angrygoat 7y ago

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 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.

buckminster 7y ago
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.
mark-r 7y ago
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.

paulintrognon 7y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11717010

hazeii 7y ago

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 it was probably swamping the optosensors I made sure I covered the side of the mouse with my hand when using it. His puzzled looks as the mouse worked for me but not for him were priceless (I did let him in on the secret after a few minutes).

anovikov 7y ago
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.
- Phrenzy 7y ago
  So... This would not happen with Linux?
  - hazeii 7y ago
    I wonder if the downvoters missed the joke? >Fix: install window shutters.
- zoomablemind 7y ago
  > ...It was in the time when mice still had balls, Thinking of present times and times forgone: now mice lost not only balls, they lost their tails, and often find themselves devoid of any 3-dimensionality, being reduced to flat touchpads. Using a mouse always felt to me as having a friedly handshake with the computer, something that touchpads can't emulate.
- hazeii 7y ago
  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.

agateau 7y ago

I hit a similarly puzzling bug a few years ago in Gwenview (an image viewer) when a user reported it could not open some PNG files of a certain width. I wrote about it here: https://agateau.com/2012/qt-image-decoders-stepping-on-each-others/ https://agateau.com/2012/qt-image-decoders-stepping-on-each-...

krick 7y ago

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

syncsynchalt 7y ago
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 http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27497360/hardy.diff

mcv 7y ago

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.

soared 7y ago

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-to-vanilla-ice-cream-a-study-in-problem-solving-the-complete-case/ https://www.kepner-tregoe.com/blog/help-my-car-is-allergic-t...

teddyh 7y ago
That’s an old urban legend: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/
- RealStickman 7y ago
  100% of what is in the link you sent is in the original link.
  - vinaypai 7y ago
    Except the part where it says that it's a "Legend", and the fact that the explanation and problem are reversed in older and newer versions of the legend. --- It’s interesting to note how the “vapor lock” explanation reversed itself over time. Earlier versions mentioned a flavor of ice cream that required handpacking (while all the others were prepackaged and ready to go); the vapor lock was said to form because it took so much longer to get out of the store with this one flavor. In newer versions, we’re told that vanilla was a popular flavor and was kept in a special case near the door, making purchasing it and getting back out to the car take considerably less time; the car then wouldn’t start because the vapor lock did not have enough time to dissipate.
basilgohar 7y ago
What is amazing about this and the other comments of similar, human-based issues affecting technology, is just how gosh darn_reliable_ we humans can be in some cases. Despite all the complexities and exceptions to human behavior, I think it can be argued that we are far more repetitious and our actions more reproducible than we'd like to admit lest we think we are giving up some of what we thought was actual human natures. However, we also regale to one-another tales of folks in simpler lifestyles that "always do the same thing, every day, for 50 years", lifestyles that don't change much over generations, and so on. So, if we look at this from a wider perspective, rationally, it shouldn't be that shocking. Still is interesting, nonetheless. :-) Edit: After seeing the sibling comment point out this was Snoped, I hope my otherwise seemingly insightful point still stands...:-p

guhcampos 7y ago

I had a user once calling me real desperately saying she was hacked. Got to her desk and nothing was going on. She then sit or her desk and started talking me through what she was doing, then suddenly the screen started to move by itself, stuff getting typed everywhere, applications opening and closing all around. Turns out she had accidentally turned on speech recognition on her mac, and the laptop was simply trying to parse - in English - everything we were saying - in Portuguese - into valid commands. Nice little havoc.

tabtab 7y ago
Gee, I thought she was a Perl programmer ;-)

notacoward 7y ago

This is why one of my favorite features in the original MacOS filesystem was type/creator fields (four uppercase letters each). Yes, it was possible for developers to create collisions, but it was still better than the UNIX method of applying fragile heuristics to the file contents. IMO it would still be a good idea to replicate this (minus the four-character limitation) with a standardized extended attribute, falling back to the heuristic method only when that fails.

ken 7y ago
Type/creator codes were any 4-byte OSType, actually. ASCII values were commonly used, for obvious reasons, but not required.
- notacoward 7y ago
  I stand corrected. Thank you.
yrro 7y ago
The separation between type and creator had other beneficial side effects. The Type code told you which apps _could_ open a file (by drag and drop or via the file chooser dialog). The creator code told you which app _would_ be chosen when the file was opened in the Finder (e.g., double-clicked). So HTML documents I had created in some web authoring tool would open in it for editing, whereas those I had saved from a web browser would open in it for viewing. I don't remember it being possible to change either code using tools that shipped with the OS. I obtained a tool on one of MacFormat's early cover disks...
- dgacmu 7y ago
  ResEdit was the apple program that could change it. Unfortunately, I don't remember off the top of my head if it shipped with the system or only with some of the developer tools. I _think_ early versions had it.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago

sebastianconcpt 7y ago

So it's not a problem w/ openoffice.org, cups, or the brother printer drivers. It is a bug in the `file` utility, and documented at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619.* https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619.*

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

darekkay 7y ago

There is a GitHub repository that collects such debugging stories (this one included) [1]. [1] https://github.com/danluu/debugging-stories https://github.com/danluu/debugging-stories

NicoJuicy 7y ago

I got some legacy applications of work. One of them needed a new feature for something. Including database update scripts. So it was changed, very carefull because it had to use a database trigger ( ms sql) which i haven't used before. It was released in demo/test environment, for 1-2 months and there was never an error. When it got deployed into production, the integrating applications with it went to shit. Rollbacked everything and it was fine again. Made me seriously doubt myselve. I contacted the older devs that touched parts of the database and application, they didn't saw any issues. Fast forward 2 months, i heard it was deployed again into production without any issues. 1 month afterwards, a colleague found an "issue" with the deployments. In short: if you deploy to production, for some applications it would deploy and older version ( 50% chance since a swap happened). Urgh

TheMerovingian 7y ago

In my first install of Arch linux, I figured that using the bleeding edge software meant everything was supported. Upon plugging in an external monitor into my Dell laptop, it, indeed worked. Well, until I moved my mouse cursor over to that monitor. It then turned off. Move the mouse back to the laptop screen; external monitor turned back on. My first foray into Arch linux ended up with a bug report against Intel's graphics driver. Luckily, it was fixed very quickly and I'm proud to say it's finally time for Linux on the deskt---- err laptop.

chasd00 7y ago

One of my favorite pieces of debug folklore was the story of a minicomputer or some other serious machine rebooting in the middle of the night. I can't remember exactly but it was in some university during the 70s/80s. An important server would spontaneously reboot in the middle of the night on some days but not all. Finally, someone sat up all night to watch what happens and observed a cleaning lady unplugging the machine from power in order to plug in a vacuum. When she was finished, she plugged the computer back in and left. Another on of my favorites, not bug but more malicious, was someone wrote a program to swing the heads on one of those old giant hard drives back and forth. At the right frequency, the back and forth momentum would cause the drive to walk away from the wall and eventually unplug itself.

coleca 7y ago
We had a similar one when I worked for a large supermarket chain. We had one store that their In-Store Processor (ISP), which was a big IBM 6F1 RS/6000 box (about the size and looks of a large mini-fridge) was plagued with all kinds of weird and sporadic errors. Code that works fine in the rest of the chain would only sometimes work there, all kinds of disk errors, slowness, etc. We sent technicians to the store multiple times and they could never figure out the issue, we even swapped out most of the hardware. Eventually, we discovered that the young girl that was responsible for changing all the prices was using the server room as her makeshift office. She would stick all her magnetic clipboards with the upcoming price changes to the side of the server. When she heard the tech was coming she would clear out all her stuff since she knew no one was supposed to be in there. The magnets were wreaking havoc on the disks causing the errors. The store manager got her some proper office space and the errors went away.
tabtab 7y ago
Re: " someone wrote a program to swing the heads on one of those old giant hard drives back and forth. At the right frequency...cause the drive to walk away" On some TRS-80 models I discovered a certain POKE command would make the screen flash, click, and "bounce" the image, similar to a power spike. So in the university lab I wrote up a small BASIC script with a delay timer to repeat "DANGER: Computer Overheating!" as the clicking/flickering increased in rate. I stood back to watch and waited for the timer to kick in. Nearby students would freak out. When the script was done, it deleted itself in case they got the lab assistant to come over. I was a stinker.

vVv111y 7y ago

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

widforss 7y ago

Reminds me of the traditional "gimme gimme gimme" easter egg. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...

diegoperini 7y ago

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 :)

dajohnson89 7y ago
Could you explain what happens there?
- LorenPechtel 7y ago
  Infinite recursion.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rhacker 7y ago

It kinda pisses me off that the second line of the body became a sexist joke phrase title in hacker news. If you're not clued in on sexism: The stereotype reinforcement that women are dumb with technology is the punchline. It doesn't matter that there was actually an issue with the pipeline from OpenOffice -> Cups, but the hacker news title was cleverly crafted to reinforce a stereotype. I don't care that this will be downvoted to oblivion, but the seeds of sexism exist everywhere.

jpleclerc90 7y ago
I think that the only stereotype held by most people on HN is that 99% of people, both genders indiscriminately, are dumb with technology.
jessaustin 7y ago
In general I agree with you that "unconscious" sexism is common, but TFA is not an example. TFA describes a user who has accurately isolated the conditions that generate errors. That is a capable user. Arguably, the title would be improved by adding the third sentence as well...
majos 7y ago
A while back I read a little theory that the reason "so easy your mom can use it" is a thing is that older men are less likely to experiment with new stuff in the first place than older women. I have no evidence for this beyond second-hand anecdotes about who shows up to free computer education classes at their local library.
beshrkayali 7y ago
Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you're overthinking this. I personally read it this morning and honestly it didn't register to me in the way you're describing at all. I did not use the title as a sexist joke as you're saying, nor did I think that his wife is "dumb" because she thought that something is wrong with OpenOffice. The joke (if there's one) is that there's a twist, which is that programmers expect the worst description from non-technical users when explaining bugs, and "something doesn't work on Tuesdays" sounds a little absurd at first (like most interesting bugs). But even if it had occurred to me, omitting it just for the sake of not having the potential negative connotation is even worse imho. I haven't seen a single comment in this entire thread that addresses the issue as you're suggesting, not even hinting at it. Just because you thought that it could possibly have that implication doesn't mean that it actually does.

shanecleveland 7y ago

Problems like this make us IT folk seem magical. I routinely remove blank spaces from "empty" fields, rename files without slashes, quit and reload applications "doing something weird." The list goes on. Just this morning I changed an exclamation point a "1" to fix an error with a calculation. Many of these things can and should be programmed to work, despite the user error. But just as it can be hard for users to understand the fault in their ways, it is difficult for the programer to consider many of these possibilities when deploying applications.

goutham467 7y ago

In my new office, whenever any of my colleagues standup from their chair my external monitor would go blank, it was not happening consistently, especially when I called any of colleagues to see it. It drove me mad for days, I checked whether there were any loose connections, etc., but later after searching for the issue online, I found out this https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/738618-display-intermittently-blanking-flickering-or-los https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861...

annoyingnoob 7y ago

These are always fun. I've seen a number of them over the years. 1. Speech Recognition typing random garbage - user claims to be hacked. 2. Ambient light sensor on laptop turns off screen - user says my computer works at home but not at the office. 3. Set email background and font to white - user says he can't type new emails but can type replies.

variaga 7y ago

I had a bug on a small system (basically an embedded computer with some custom I/O hardware), where the report was a unit "wouldn't reboot if it was turned off for too long(!?)". Focused testing easily reproduced the problem. If you power cycled the machine and the off time was less than 30 seconds, it always rebooted correctly. If the off time was greater than 2 minutes, it ALSO always rebooted correctly, but if the off time was around 1 minute, it would reliably hang during the boot process. This behavior was rapidly confirmed on a number of other units taken off the production line. Needless to say this was very confusing. The eventual root cause was that during boot, a file-system was created in DRAM, similar to what a modern system would use initramfs for. The file system creation routine had originally been written for non-volatile memory, so it would by default check for a superblock to see if there was already a file system in place at the creation location and if there was, just use that (after unlinking all pre-existing files). If no pre-existing FS was found it would create a new one. But this was in DRAM, not non-volatile memory so: - if the off time was less than 30 seconds, the filesystem was STILL IN THE DRAM and the ramfs_create() routine would happily re-use it. - if the off time was over two minutes, there were enough bit errors in the DRAM that ramfs_create() would fail to recognize the superblock, overwrite it with a new one, and everything STILL worked fine. - in the critical timing zone, the number of bit errors in the superblock in DRAM would be small enough that the FS creation would recognize that there was a pre-existing filesystem, but large enough to cause the ramfs_create() function to error out. The boot would then hang when the DRAM filesystem was accessed. Of course there was no error checking on the ramfs_create() return. The solution was to change the flags to ramfs_create() to overwrite unconditionally. After that, booting was reliable with any amount of off time. Lesson is - cold boot attacks on DRAM contents are real, and we managed to do it to ourselves by accident.

jp1016 7y ago

when i got the computer for the first time , there was mcafee antivirus that came with it, i scanned the PC and found a virus, i was shattered and cheated by the computer seller as i thought it would damage the PC and i wont be able to use it ever again.I'm a software engineer now

jp1016 7y ago

i used to create virus on my school computer labs , a batch file with command to delete a critical windows file like ntldr.dll or somthing and restarts, then i rename it to fifa or GTA and put an icon of the game as well. someone from any other class when using the computer think they got a new game and click on it and it won't boot again. yeah , i was a bad kid

tzs 7y ago

If you think the heuristics in "file" are sometimes a bit scary, take a look at how PC hardware used to work back before the PCI bus become dominant. The heuristics there ended up bricking two expensive motherboards for me. The older ISA bus, which was quite common until at least the end of the '90s, did not have any way standard way for software to identify cards, nor any way for software to specifically talk to the card in a specific slot. PCI cards have a required Vendor ID assigned by the PCI-SIG, and a Device ID assigned by the vendor, and the PCI bus has a way to address by slot. A driver that supports a particular kind of card can scan the bus by slot, checking Vendor ID and Device ID to find cards it works with. With ISA cards, all that driver would know is that the card it is looking for has, say, 4 registers that appear at consecutive I/O addresses, and that there are jumpers on the card that can set the base I/O address to 0x200, 0x240, 0x280, or 0x2CO. The safe way to use a card was to install it in the PC, noting the jumper settings, and then install the driver and tell the driver what jumper settings you used. To know what jumper settings to use, you had to know what other cards were in the system and what I/O addresses they used so you could pick settings that didn't conflict with an existing card. No one wanted to make someone installing a new operating system on a working system open up the thing, find all the settings on all the cards, and report that to the OS. They wanted to just automatically work with cards that had drivers built-in to the OS. So what the OS installer would do is go through each built-in card it supported, and use heuristics to figure out if it is installed. For example, take that card I mentioned earlier that can be at 0x200, 0x240, 0x280, or 0x2C0. The OS might now that after reset that card should have 0x1F in register 0, 0x00 in register 1, and random values in registers 2 and 3. So if it doesn't see 0x1F at 0x200, 0x240, 0x280, or 0x2C0, it knows that the card is not present. But suppose there is 0x1F at 0x200 and 0x00 at 0x201. Then the card might be there. So now the driver would have to write to some of the registers, and see if the card responds the right way. Mostly it would do this be setting various modes, and then reading those mode settings, and see if they are right. If the card is not the right one, hopefully some of those commands don't make any sense to it, and so its responses are different. Think about this for a moment. Suppose the OS is looking for a network controller, and the card at that address is actually a disk controller that happens to have the same read values in its registers after a reset, so the probe for the network card has to go on to the writing part of the test. It's then writing network controller commands to a disk controller. If the command for "set status" on the network controller happens to be the same as the command for "write to disk" on the disk controller--you may have just trashed your disk. Oops. And so the OS vendors had to very carefully construct their device probes. If writing commands for card X to different kind of card Y could trash things on Y, they needed to make sure that they had probed for Y first, and so if any Y were present skip them when probing for X. Note that this doesn't necessarily work if you have any cards that the OS does not know about. If you card is going to need a third party driver installed after the OS is installed, it was best to take that card out during OS installation if having random junk written to it could cause harm. One day at work, we bought two very expensive top of the line motherboards. The box said that they required Windows 98 or later. I tried to install Windows 95 on one of them. The install went fine until it got to one of the places where it reboots, and the reboot failed utterly. It did not even show the BIOS messages. The system appeared to be thoroughly bricked. Figuring one of the motherboards was defective, I tried the other one. Same damn thing. Bricked during Windows 95 install! We eventually found out what happened. The Windows 95 searching for devices on the ISA bus ended up writing to some registers that on this machine controller the BIOS flashing. It had erased the BIOS. Windows 98 and later knew about the flash controller in the chipset used in this motherboard, and avoiding trashing your BIOS. (Not sure why the motherboards either didn't have a jumper to disable BIOS flashing, or shipped with that jumper set to enabled).

dodo6502 7y ago

I had a fun bug once where some functionality involving self sign certificates stopped working on Feb 29th. It came down to us simply adding +10 to the year for the expiration. There is no Feb 29th 10 years into the future, only 4, 8, 12, etc... That was a good lesson on why to always use a date library when adding or subtracting time. We weren't the only ones... Azure went down for the same reason that day.

gnicholas 7y ago

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!

ianferrel 7y ago
My wife had effectively the same issue where her macbook would "die", but only during video calls. We replaced it, then it happened again with the new one. A smart Apple tech eventually had her bring in everything on her desk and make a mockup video call in the store. The glitch happened when the magnetic cover she had curled up to use as a stand on her mini iPad (for her notes for the call) got a little too close to the latch sensor.
sandymcmurray 7y ago
I'm proud to say I managed to diagnose a similar issue over the phone. Employee called the Help Desk saying her screen would go black when she tried to sign in. When she finished entering her password and clicked the button on the trackpad the computer screen would suddenly go black. She said she had to start up the computer after each incident. She also noted that it didn't happen consistently, just some days. During troubleshooting we clarified that the computer was not shutting down; the login window appeared immediately if she pressed the power button gently instead of holding it down. She also allowed that the unexpected sleep was not only at login, but could happen any time if she got past the login window. And she could work around the problem by using a USB keyboard. The culprit was a magnetic bracelet that she wore only occasionally. First thing in the morning she would try to log in to the laptop, without the USB keyboard, and her wrist got close enough to trigger the sleep-when-lid-closed setting. I heard the bracelet jangle on the phone, and guessed correctly that it might be a magnet. This was my second encounter with this problem. The first time was when a laptop on my workbench died unexpectedly during troubleshooting and would not start up. It was stacked on top of another of the same model, and the lid of the laptop underneath was triggering sleep-on-closed-lid setting of the laptop on top. Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I diagnosed a similar problem in 5 seconds while walking through the office. Laptop sleep was being triggered by an employee's new Apple watch. It might take hours or days to figure out a problem the first time you encounter it. The second time is a memory test. The third time you look like a genius.

musicale 7y ago

Who needs to print on Tuesdays? Usually M/W/F are normal printing days. ;-)

knolan 7y ago

I had an intermittent printer issue recently. As a Mac user I have to submit jobs to the University printers via a web portal. I try to print very little so it’s not something I use a lot, however I end up printing large numbers of midterm scripts every semester. On occasion I would log into the portal, upload my file and select the printer and it would tell me the file was printed. However when I went to the printer there were no jobs to be seen. IT insisted that my files were somehow corrupt but eventually they sent someone over to see my issue and they too were stumped. Finally they logged the server side activity of my printer interaction and they noticed that there was a space appended to my username, presumably by iCloud Keychain and the behaviour was possibly changing between OS updates. The web portal would let me log in, the server managed the files but the printer would ignore the job all because of that space.

aaronscott 7y ago

I love these debug stories. My interesting one was from a job repairing computers in high school. My older colleague was upgrading a 486, and couldn't get the system to boot on the first try, but if you hit the reset button after it was already on then it would boot just fine. All the hardware tested fine in other systems. I figured out the problem by listening to the hard drive. I could tell it wasn't spinning at full speed when it was initially booting. The system would get through the POST process before the hard drive could finish spinning up. So the initial boot from power-off would fail. The solution ended up being to upgrade the hard drive (or downgrade the motherboard).

tabtab 7y ago

I now suspect he made it up for devious reasons, but I had a professor who told about the time random characters and cursor movements kept appearing during data input from a lady at a remote office at his org. Phone support couldn't solve the problem after many tries, including asking her to try a different work-station. So they flew in a technician. The technician arrived and sat to observe the lady as she did data entry. The technician eventually realized her rather large breasts were bumping the keyboard from time to time.

sarah180 7y ago

I once spent quite a long time tracking down a bug that would only occur if the time between 10:00 and 12:59 because of the extra character that occurred in the date formatting, leading to an unexpected line wrap that led to a lookup bug later on during a session. If I'd known that time of day was the variable causing the behavior change, it would have been fairly easy to resolve—but that wasn't the case. Instead it was only resolved by the large-scale collection of failure and success cases coupled with the careful correlation of bytes sent & received across an entire session.

aubreykilian 7y ago

I used to work as a Network Admin at a big university in Cape Town years back, and one of the urban legends at the time (late '90s) was that one of the long distance wireless (microwave? Line of sight required) network links were reported to drop every day at the exact same time for a a few minutes only. Lots of hours of troubleshooting hardware etc. later, and still no solution. Eventually a site-visit was done at both sides of the link, binoculars entow. The problem? The line of sight was going dangerously close to the top of a hill where a farmer had led his cattle every day at the same time. The cattle blocked the line of sight for 5 minutes every day. No idea if this is true though.

rramadass 7y ago

Windows 3.1 16-bit multi-functional modules app i.e. skeleton app which loaded multiple DLLs one for each type of functionality. When printing on a dot-matrix printer everything would work fine. However when printing on a (then new) Laser printer the entire system would hang randomly. Didn't matter which module was the initiator. Spent 2 weeks poring over the code in our common DLL used for printing and found nothing. Then started checking rest of the code in each module and found it. Each module called into the common "print dll" to print its graphs. On return back it would call a local function to print the "graph legends" and thats where the problem was. The last line of this function called "ReleaseDC" but the parameters "hWnd" and "hDC" were switched by mistake so Windows released some unexpected memory giving rise to the problem. This code was cut and pasted into each module with minor modifications and therefore existed in all the functional modules. I was somewhat proud of solving this :-)

AllNightLong 7y ago

I've only had issues with the software for school in the nights before I had to submit work. For exemple, I recently had to give back a work on matlab. And at 9 pm it didn't show up in the windows menu. So I tried to run the installer that was too long, until I found out you had to use a flash drive. Then it returned a lot of errors saying I didn't have the modules. And I have the same issue with every damn software. What should I do ?