Zap

/zap/

  1. n. Spiciness.
  2. vt. To make food spicy.
  3. vt. To make someone suffer by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.)

    See zapped.

  4. vt. To modify, usually to correct; esp. used when the action is performed with a debugger or binary patching tool. Also implies surgical precision.

    "Zap the debug level to 6 and run it again."

    In the IBM mainframe world, binary patches are applied to programs or to the OS with a program called superzap, whose file name is IMASPZAP (I M A SuPerZAP).

  5. vt. To erase or reset.
  6. To fry a chip with static electricity.

    "Uh oh -- I think that lightning strike may have zapped the disk controller."