Related:

• ain dance n. 1. Any ceremonial action taken to correct a hardware problem, with the expectation that nothing will be accomplished.
  This especially applies to reseating printed circuit boards, reconnecting cables, etc....
• voodoo programming: [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] n.
  The use by guess or cookbook of an {obscure} or {hairy} system, feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand....
• wizard: n. 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, who {grok}s it)
  esp. someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency....
• wave a dead chicken: v. To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended.
  I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug....
• wave a dead chicken v. To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended.
  I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug....
• black art: n. A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by implication) mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular application or systems area (compare {black magic}).
  VLSI design and compiler code optimization were (in their beginnings) considered classic examples of black a...
• cargo cult programming: n. A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose.
  A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare {shotgun debugging}, {voodoo programming})....
• wizard n. 1. Transitively, a person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, who groks it)
  esp. someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency....
• black magic: n. A technique that works, though nobody really understands why.
  More obscure than {voodoo programming}, which may be done by cookbook....