Meta

Last weekend I flew out to Urbana Champaign to give a talk at their annual Reflections | Projections conference. The talk was on how to get started contributing to free software, and a big portion was on bugs - how to report them and to fix them. It was therefore painfully ironic when the free software I had used to prepare the talk - LibreOffice - essentially deleted the presentation an hour or so before I had to give it.

I had actually experienced this bug before. About a year ago, I was working on a novel when I had to power down unexpectedly. When I went to re-open the document, auto-recovery replaced it with a 0kb, empty file. Then, to my dismay, I discovered that automatic backups was not turned on - the default setting is off. I ended up using PhotoRec to recover my work, a process that involved restoring tens of thousands of deleted files, but without their names or file extensions, so that I had to write a script to look through them for the names of my characters. Even then, PhotoRec found many old versions of the file, so I had to visually check several dozen files until I found the right one.

It turns out LibreOffice’s Impress suffers from the same set of problems as their text document program. My presentation was replaced by an empty file and the auto backup was still set to its default, off. Given that PhotoRec had taken half a day to get my file last time, I knew it wasn’t an option.

I decided to go meta. I used the bug as an example of a problem in free software and showed the attendees the steps one would use to fix it, including searching the mailing list archives, browsing the bug tracker, and politely pleading with folks hanging around in the IRC channel. (Unfortunately the development environment set up for LibreOffice is kind of epic, otherwise I would have actually tried to fix the bug at our workshop the next day.)

There was a brief moment, shortly after the file disappeared, where I freaked out. I had already felt anxious about speaking, and to have my presentation vanish a couple hours before having to give it? You would have thrown your pillows all around the room, too. But once I considered the irony of the situation - and appreciated the opportunity to get all meta with my response - I calmed down considerably.

I’ll post again if I ever find a way to fix this particular bug. But in the mean time, anyone using LibreOffice should switch the auto-save on! Because you probably won’t have any ironic silver lining.