Ubuntu Bug 255161: Openoffice can’t print on Tuesdays

[cbright]

It's interesting to follow some of abrianb's comments by date:

"When I click print I get nothing." -Tuesday, August 5, 2008

"I downloaded those updates and Open Office Still prints." -Friday, August 8, 2008

"Open Office stopped printing today." -Tuesday, August 12, 2008

"I just updated and still print." -Monday, August 18, 2008

"I stand corrected, after a boot cycle Open Office failed to print." -Tuesday, August 19, 2008

[lauradhamilton]

To be fair, if that bug happened to me, even with 10-20 data points I don't think I would have figured out it was a Tuesday bug.

[gala8y]

My girlfriend just stated, sitting desk to desk: "Every time I remove HN icon from bookmarks bar, it keeps reapearing". My answer, while reading this thread: "Must be a bug, file it." (of course she knows why)

[tagawa]

This reminds me of the case of the 500-mile email: http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

[dangoldin]

Also the printer that would jam when printing one file: http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200811/print_this_file_your_pr...

[rbinv]

This is great :-)

[spacefight]

The tracked and actually fixed bug is: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619

[NAFV_P]

I usually rely on LibreOffice, but I was tempted to get OpenOffice back on my machine just to try out the bug.

Anyway, thank you for the link.

[riquito]

In the end the error was in the program "file", which erroneously was detecting the postscript file as an Erlang JAM file

(see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619)

[scrollaway]

Speaking as someone who has worked a lot on mime types: Do not ever use `file` as a means to identify a file type. Use the shared-mime-info database.

http://standards.freedesktop.org/shared-mime-info-spec/share...

File has its own internal database. It can do more than the mime type db and is great for quickly identifying and getting lots of info about various file types, but it is AWFUL when used within other apps. Please, don't use it like so.

[franze]

file is funny, i just did file on standard JS file

  >file main.js 
  >main.js: ASCII C++ program text, with very long lines

[computatrum]

This reminds me to a a bug in pdftk that appeared only between April and December when Austria's localization is used: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pdftk/+bug/779908/...

[progx]

Tuesday is no print day. Save paper ;-)

[Aarvay]

This made me smile! :)