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casting the runes: n. What a guru does when you ask him or her to
run a particular program and type at it because it never works for anyone
else; esp. used when nobody can ever see what the guru is doing different
from what J. Random Luser does. Compare
incantation, runes,
examining the entrails; also see the AI koan about
Tom Knight in Some AI Koans (in Appendix
A). A correspondent from England tells us that one of ICL's most talented
systems designers used to be called out occasionally to service machines
which the field circus had given up on. Since he
knew the design inside out, he could often find faults simply by listening
to a quick outline of the symptoms. He used to play on this by going to
some site where the field circus had just spent the last two weeks solid
trying to find a fault, and spreading a diagram of the system out on a
table top. He'd then shake some chicken bones and cast them over the
diagram, peer at the bones intently for a minute, and then tell them that a
certain module needed replacing. The system would start working again
immediately upon the replacement.
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