OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays (2009)
49 points by juliethefoxcoon
49 points by juliethefoxcoon
Reminded me of the case of the 500-mile email (2002).
Both of these are also on The Cursed Computer Iceberg, https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/
That's excellent. Thank you for sharing it. I was aware of some but not all of the stories on there.
There's even more of these if you follow the more such crazy stories link at the bottom of the page!
Submission is dated 2023, references an entry in a mailing list from 2009, which points to a bug filed in 2003.
I remember reading about this one years ago. A lovely bug, worthy of being used as a teaching example of how simple flaws in complex chains of processes can produce apparently impossible bugs.
On what part of the stack between OpenOffice and a printer is something running Erlang?
Nothing is running Erlang :-) see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619
tl;dr: something in cups uses the file utility to identify the file type; there was a bad pattern in file’s magic database that mis-identified a postscript file containing a creation date of “Tue …” as an Erlang JAM file, so cups refused to print it.
The original magic signature with the missing escapes was from the Erlang FAQ:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070614203705/http://www.erlang.org/faq/x779.html#AEN812
Without the escapes everything after "Tue" was considered part of the "message" field that is printed by file in the identification output.