phase of the moon
Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend.
Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability
seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This
feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch
set, and on the phase of the moon."
See also heisenbug.
True story: Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend on the phase
of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in
various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase.
GLS incorporated this routine into a Lisp program that, when it wrote out a
file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally
the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next
line, and when the file was later read back in the program would barf. The
length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the
length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug
literally depended on the phase of the moon!
The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of
one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter
"corrected" it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
[Jargon File]
(1995-02-22)
Nearby terms:
phase « phase alternating line « Phase Encoded «
phase of the moon » phase-wrapping » PHIGS »
Philips
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