Tag Archives: bug triage

Prevent Adobe Acrobat Crashing Firefox

I’m using Adobe Acrobat (for compatibilities sake only, please post your favourite PDF program in the comments below!), but I’ve been rather annoyed recently at it having a tendency to hang Firefox if I tried to open more than one PDF file from the internet.

Simple fix/hack – make Firefox save PDF files rather than open them.

  1. Open Options (Tools \ Options in Windows and Edit \ Preferences in Linux)
  2. Open the Applications tab
  3. under ‘Adobe Acrobat Document’ change the value of the dropdown to ‘Save file’

Firefox Applications options tab. Vista I know!

  1. OK the change
  2. All done. Hopefully that’s one less annoying crash to worry about!

Ps get Session manager to save yourself loosing a window full of tabs or having to do a horribly manual procedure like recovering tabs from a accidentally closed Firefox window.

People are strange

We have a lot of customers. A few, whilst emailing us at tech-support can be rude. It’s interesting, visiting their sites, and seeing whether that is just because they’re stressed, under the effects of caffeine, or are just naturally rude.

Take one example… one person just kept ignoring what I said, treating it as if I didn’t know what I was writing about. Turns out, I did, and I fixed the immediate problem (if not the whole one, but that’s something different altogether). He still insists on treating me as if I’m not worth listening to.

Surprise surprise, if I am given the choice (and at the end of the day, when I’m just doing support tickets to stop them needing to be done tomorrow, I often am,) I will delay answering the tickets of those who have been rude. They’ll get done at some point, but I won’t prioritize them; what’s the point? I’d rather help someone who will be grateful! I will go all out in my own time on a problem that interests me, or a customer who is kind. I will go all out if you are rude, but you are stressed and have an excuse. I may force myself to go all out if you pay us a lot of money (but it won’t be on my own time 😉 )

I’ve stayed in the office till 10pm, on a ‘I’m not getting paid right now’ problem, because it interested me, and I liked the people running the website involved. I will gladly spend my free time trying to help them.

If you talk to tech support, be nice! Say thank you, treat us with respect, and you’ll find we’ll be inclined to help you a lot more. Ignore what we say, treat us rudely or as if we don’t know what we’re talking about, and we’ll get dispirited. The last thing you want is dispirited sysadmins. They tend to go home on the dot, and they won’t go out of their way to help you.

If you’re angry, worried, stressed, take a deep breath and a calming moment before speaking to us. We, like anyone else, don’t like people shouting at us for something we can’t help. If your website goes down, because the server it’s on has blown up, and you didn’t pay for a fail-over system, we can’t help you any faster by you shouting at us, and you shouting at us will not make us like you 😉

In the end, just remember, we’re human too! That person you call up because your email is broken has emotions, and they’re likely busy fixing problems, or helping others already. Don’t let the frustration of the problem blow into anger at the people who try to fix it for you 🙂

Bugs, a failed walk, and photos

Bugs

Since my rant about the state of bugs in Ubuntu, I’ve been going over my bugs, one by one, poking them and re-triaging them. I did this to one bug for gweled, 110268. One of the people who had experienced this one tagged it “bitesize” (easy to fix) and “packaging”. I reset it into “confirmed” state, assigned it to the MOTUs. (I tend to set them to “incomplete” whilst poking them to make sure they’re still an issue – that way if there is no response and I randomly disappear, launchpad will automatically mark them for expiration). As a result of my poking it, Effie Jayx was asked to it, and the bug is no-more in Hardy. Nice 😀

Thinking about it, I probably should have chucked that particular bug upstream earlier. The reporters had done all the work tracking down the bug… there we go, live and learn. I’m slowly poking all the bugs that haven’t been fixed, that I’ve triaged, making sure they all go to the right places…

A failed walk

‘How can a walk fail?’ I hear you ask. Quite simple, I was attempting to find a few geocaches, in a long walk around my local area. Geocaches are basically small hidden caches, which you find with a hand-held GPS.

So, I parked up with my recently repaired car (long story), and set off. However, I managed to go the wrong way (yes, even with a gps with topographical maps of the area), so I didn’t get anywhere close to finding any geocaches. I’ll probably try a completly different route next time…

On the way though, I did manage to take a couple of nice photos, so here are the best of them. As usual, all photos are under the Creative Commons share-alike attribution licence, click on the photos to see a bigger version on flickr.

This one is looking through a wire fence, fairly close to where my next one was taken. Sorry the background is blurry, should have put it into macro mode. The hill was quite steep here and my footing was tenuous so I wanted to move on quickly…

Hillside fence

Went past this wall whilst walking back to my car in the woods. Its falling to bits, but not being kept up, as it’s been replaced by wire fences. There are quite a lot of crumbling dry-stone walls in this particular wood.

Crumbling Wall

Weir

As usual, my water photography continues 😉
I took these two at a local park, which is very close to where I work. I go there to eat lunch sometimes, and there’s a artificial pond created by this weir/dam.

Dark Weir Weir