A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [^a-zA-Z]
Appendix A --- Appendix B --- Appendix C
/ob/ pref. Obligatory. A piece of netiquette acknowledging that the author has been straying from the newsgroup's charter topic. For example, if a posting in alt.sex is a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing particularly to do with sex, the author may append `ObSex' (or `Obsex') and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual erotic act. It is considered a sign of great winnitude when one's Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings.
n. (in full, the `International
Obfuscated C Code Contest', or IOCCC) An annual contest run since
1984 over Usenet by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall
winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and
bizarre (but working) C program; various other prizes are awarded
at the judges' whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor
facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning
programs often manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b)
breathtaking works of art, and (c) horrible examples of how
*not* to code in C.
This relatively short and sweet entry might help convey the flavor
of obfuscated C:
/*
* HELLO WORLD program
* by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985
*/
main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)";
(!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c));
**c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);}
Here's another good one:
/*
* Program to compute an approximation of pi
* by Brian Westley, 1988
*/
#define _ -F<00||--F-OO--;
int F=00,OO=00;
main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO()
{
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}
Note that this program works by computing its own area. For more
digits, write a bigger program. See also hello,_world.
/oh'bee-won` er'*r/ n. [RPI, from `off-by-one' and the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in "Star Wars"] A loop of some sort in which the index is off by 1. Common when the index should have started from 0 but instead started from 1. A kind of off-by-one_error. See also zeroth.
n. Hackish take on "Objective-C", the
name of an object-oriented dialect of C in competition with the
better-known C++ (it is used to write native applications on the
NeXT machine). Objectionable-C uses a Smalltalk-like syntax, but
lacks the flexibility of Smalltalk method calls, and (like many
such efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining the Right_Thing
without actually doing so.
adj. Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to imply total incomprehensibility. "The reason for that last crash is obscure." "The `find(1)' command's syntax is obscure!" The phrase `moderately obscure' implies that something could be figured out but probably isn't worth the trouble. The construction `obscure in the extreme' is the preferred emphatic form.
/ok'tl for'tee/ n. Hackish way of saying "I'm drawing a blank." Octal 40 is the ASCII space character, 0100000; by an odd coincidence, hex 40 (01000000) is the EBCDIC space character. See wall.
adj. Describes the behavior of a program that malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually crash or abort. See glitch, bug, deep_space.
n. Exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such as by starting at 0 when you should have started at 1 or vice-versa, or by writing `< N' instead of `<= N' or vice-versa. Also applied to giving something to the person next to the one who should have gotten it. Often confounded with fencepost_error, which is properly a particular subtype of it.
adv. Not now or not here. "Let's take this discussion offline." Specifically used on Usenet to suggest that a discussion be moved off a public newsgroup to email.
/og/ v. [CMU] 1. In the multi-player space combat game Netrek, to execute kamikaze attacks against enemy ships which are carrying armies or occupying strategic positions. Named during a game in which one of the players repeatedly used the tactic while playing Orion ship G, showing up in the player list as "Og". This trick has been roundly denounced by those who would return to the good old days when the tactic of dogfighting was dominant, but as Sun Tzu wrote, "What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy." However, the traditional answer to the newbie question "What does ogg mean?" is just "Pick up some armies and I'll show you." 2. In other games, to forcefully attack an opponent with the expectation that the resources expended will be renewed faster than the opponent will be able to regain his previous advantage. Taken more seriously as a tactic since it has gained a simple name. 3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. "I guess I'd better go ogg the problem set that's due tomorrow." "Whoops! I looked down at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car."
n. Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable frequency by (esp.) Usenetters who have been programming for more than about 25 years; often appears in sig_block s attached to Jargon File contributions of great archeological significance. This is a term of insult in the second or third person but one of pride in first person.
n. [C programmers] The first edition of K&R, the sacred text describing Classic_C.
n. At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on the operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys can be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana problem is simple; hence, "It's only a one-banana job at the most; what's taking them so long?" At IBM, folklore divides the world into one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures have different hierarchies and may divide them more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house sysapes is said to be two bananas and three grapes (another source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes "However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO"). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the manufacturers to send someone around to check things. See also Infinite-Monkey_Theorem.
n. Used (often sarcastically) of a change to a program that is thought to be trivial or insignificant right up to the moment it crashes the system. Usually `cured' by another one-line fix. See also I_didn't_change_anything!
n. A game popular among hackers who code in
the language APL (see write-only_language and line_noise
). The objective is to see who can code the most interesting
and/or useful routine in one line of operators chosen from APL's
exceedingly hairy primitive set. A similar amusement was
practiced among TECO hackers and is now popular among
Perl aficionados.
Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a
one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the
prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this:
(2 = 0 +.= T o.| T) / T <- iN
where `o' is the APL null character, the assignment arrow is a
single character, and `i' represents the APL iota.
/oo'blik/ n. [from the Dr. Seuss title
"Bartholomew and the Oobleck"] A bizarre semi-liquid sludge
made from cornstarch and water. Enjoyed among hackers who make
batches during playtime at parties for its amusing and extremely
non-Newtonian behavior; it pours and splatters, but resists rapid
motion like a solid and will even crack when hit by a hammer.
Often found near lasers.
Here is a field-tested ooblick recipe contributed by GLS:
1 cup cornstarch
1 cup baking soda
3/4 cup water
N drops of food coloring
This recipe isn't quite as non-Newtonian as a pure cornstarch
ooblick, but has an appropriately slimy feel.
Some, however, insist that the notion of an ooblick *recipe*
is far too mechanical, and that it is best to add the water in
small increments so that the various mixed states the cornstarch
goes through as it *becomes* ooblick can be grokked in
fullness by many hands. For optional ingredients of this
experience, see the "Ceremonial_Chemicals" section of
Appendix B.
/op/ n. 1. In England and Ireland, common verbal abbreviation for `operator', as in system operator. Less common in the U.S., where sysop seems to be preferred. 2. [IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on IRC, not limited to a particular channel. These are generally people who are in charge of the IRC server at their particular site. Sometimes used interchangeably with CHOP. Compare sysop.
n. Abbreviation for `open (or left) parenthesis' --- used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. To read aloud the LISP form (DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1)) one might say: "Open defun foo, open eks close, open, plus eks one, close close."
n. Abusive hackerism for the Santa Cruz Operation's `Open DeskTop' product, a Motif-based graphical interface over their UNIX. The funniest part is that this was coined by SCO's own developers.... Compare AIDX, Macintrash Nominal_Semidestructor, ScumOS, sun-stools, HP-SUX.
n. [IBM: prob. from railroading] An unresolved question, issue, or problem.
: n. [techspeak] (Often abbreviated `OS') The foundation software of a machine, of course; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications. The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around its host machines. Hacker folklore has been shaped primarily by the UNIX, ITS, TOPS-10, TOPS-20/TWENEX, WAITS, CP/M, MS-DOS, and Multics operating systems (most importantly by ITS and UNIX).
n. See vdiff.
n. See vgrep.
n. What a programmer is full of after fixing the
last bug and before discovering the *next* last bug. Fred
Brooks's book "The Mythical Man-Month" (See "Brooks's
Law") contains the following paragraph that describes this
extremely well:
All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery
especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy
godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive
away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps
it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger,
and the young are always optimists. But however the selection
process works, the result is indisputable: "This time it will
surely run," or "I just found the last bug.".
See also Lubarsky's_Law_of_Cybernetic_Entomology.
n. The U.S. Government's standards document "Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard 5200.28-STD, December, 1985" which characterize secure computing architectures and defines levels A1 (most secure) through D (least). Stock UNIXes are roughly C1, and can be upgraded to about C2 without excessive pain. See also crayola_books, book_titles .
: n. Hackers display an intense tropism towards oriental cuisine, especially Chinese, and especially of the spicier varieties such as Szechuan and Hunan. This phenomenon (which has also been observed in subcultures that overlap heavily with hackerdom, most notably science-fiction fandom) has never been satisfactorily explained, but is sufficiently intense that one can assume the target of a hackish dinner expedition to be the best local Chinese place and be right at least three times out of four. See also ravs, great-wall, stir-fried_random, laser_chicken, Yu-Shiang_Whole_Fish. Thai, Indian, Korean, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular.
n. [UNIX] A process whose parent has died; one inherited by `init(1)'. Compare zombie.
/or'f*nd i:'nohd/ n. [UNIX] 1. [techspeak] A file that retains storage but no longer appears in the directories of a filesystem. 2. By extension, a pejorative for any person no longer serving a useful function within some organization, esp. lion_food without subordinates.
adj. [from mathematics] Mutually independent; well separated; sometimes, irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, span the entire `capability space' of the system and are in some sense non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in architectures such as the PDP-11 or VAX where all or nearly all registers can be used interchangeably in any role with respect to any instruction, the register set is said to be orthogonal. Or, in logic, the set of operators `not' and `or' is orthogonal, but the set `nand', `or', and `not' is not (because any one of these can be expressed in terms of the others). Also used in comments on human discourse: "This may be orthogonal to the discussion, but...."
/O-S/ 1. [Operating System] n. An abbreviation heavily used in email, occasionally in speech. 2. n.,obs. On ITS, an output spy. See "OS_and_JEDGAR" in Appendix A.
/O S too/ n. The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Often called `Half-an-OS'. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers --- the design was so baroque, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that 3 years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands -- in unary. The 2.x versions are said to have improved somewhat, and informed hackers now rate them superior to Microsoft Windows (an endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning with faint praise). See monstrosity, cretinous, second-system_effect.
/O-S-U/ n.,obs. [TMRC] Acronym for Officially Sanctioned User; a user who is recognized as such by the computer authorities and allowed to use the computer above the objections of the security monitor.
[USENET] On The Other Hand.
adj. [from telecommunications and network theory] 1. In software, describes values of a function which are not in its `natural' range of return values, but are rather signals that some kind of exception has occurred. Many C functions, for example, return a nonnegative integral value, but indicate failure with an out-of-band return value of -1. Compare hidden_flag, green_bytes, fence. 2. Also sometimes used to describe what communications people call `shift characters', such as the ESC that leads control sequences for many terminals, or the level shift indicators in the old 5-bit Baudot codes. 3. In personal communication, using methods other than email, such as telephones or snail-mail.
n. 1. [techspeak] A flag on some processors indicating an attempt to calculate a result too large for a register to hold. 2. More generally, an indication of any kind of capacity overload condition. "Well, the Ada description was baroque all right, but I could hack it OK until they got to the exception handling ... that set my overflow bit." 3. The hypothetical bit that will be set if a hacker doesn't get to make a trip to the Room of Porcelain Fixtures: "I'd better process an internal interrupt before the overflow bit gets set".
n. [MIT] The place where you put things when
your pdl is full. If you don't have one and too many things
get pushed, you forget something. The overflow pdl for a person's
memory might be a memo pad. This usage inspired the following
doggerel:
Hey, diddle, diddle
The overflow pdl
To get a little more stack;
If that's not enough
Then you lose it all,
And have to pop all the way back.
--The Great Quux
The term pdl seems to be primarily an MITism; outside MIT this
term is replaced by `overflow stack'.
n. 1. [techspeak] Term for a frequent consequence of data arriving faster than it can be consumed, esp. in serial line communications. For example, at 9600 baud there is almost exactly one character per millisecond, so if a silo can hold only two characters and the machine takes longer than 2 msec to get to service the interrupt, at least one character will be lost. 2. Also applied to non-serial-I/O communications. "I forgot to pay my electric bill due to mail overrun." "Sorry, I got four phone calls in 3 minutes last night and lost your message to overrun." When thrashing at tasks, the next person to make a request might be told "Overrun!" Compare firehose_syndrome. 3. More loosely, may refer to a buffer_overflow not necessarily related to processing time (as in overrun_screw).
n. [C programming] A variety of fandango_on_core
produced by scribbling past the end of an array (C
implementations typically have no checks for this error). This is
relatively benign and easy to spot if the array is static; if it is
auto, the result may be to smash_the_stack -- often resulting
in heisenbugs of the most diabolical subtlety. The term
`overrun screw' is used esp. of scribbles beyond the end of
arrays allocated with `malloc(3)'; this typically trashes the
allocation header for the next block in the arena, producing
massive lossage within malloc and often a core dump on the next
operation to use `stdio(3)' or `malloc(3)' itself. See
spam, overrun; see also memory_leak, memory_smash
, aliasing_bug, precedence_lossage, fandango_on_core
, secondary_damage.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [^a-zA-Z]
Appendix A --- Appendix B --- Appendix C