Word of the Day: Weasel

by Jon 7/21/2008 6:37:00 AM

I hate bugs that I can't fix because the cause is buried in a third party architecture (like WCF) and disappears faster than the symptoms occur. I call these things weasels, as in those little bastards that pop their heads out and make a nuisance and disappear under the ground before you have a chance to ask what the heck happened. (The other dictionary definition fits the bill, too: a sneaky, untrustworthy, or insincere person. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weasel)

I once saw an app show up on my taskbar for a split second and it knocked whatever I was working on out of focus .. I didn't know what the heck it was, there was no way to trace it .. so I created a Windows app called "Weasel Monitor" that basically monitored all processes and made a bunch of noise (showed up on a log) if a process's lifetime was only a tiny split second. This worked for me, and the term weasel stuck.

Could've gone with mole but that word is severely over-used in software to mean different things. (Spelunking, anybody?)

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About the author

Jon Davis Jon Davis (aka "stimpy77") is a software and web developer by day and a software and web enthusiast (geek) by night. He was recently a senior web engineer for the enthusiast division of a major magazine publishing company for nearly two years. He has been a programmer, developer, and consultant for web and Windows software solutions professionally since 1997, with experience ranging from OS and hardware support to DHTML programming to IIS/ASP web apps to Java network programming to Visual Basic applications to C# desktop apps. Lately, Jon's professional focus has been on C#, ASP.NET, Windows services, WCF, custom Javascript libraries, and implementations of Lucene.net and telligent's Community Server for multiple web sites.
 
Software in all forms is also his sole hobby, whether playing PC games or tinkering with programming them. "I was playing Defender on the Commodore 64," he reminisces, "when I decided at the age of 12 or so that I want to be a computer programmer when I grow up."

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