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.

