WhatIs

/krip'ee/

n. A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements cryptographic software or hardware.

/kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch*/

interj. An encouragement sometimes muttered to a machine bogged down in a serious grovel. Also describes a notional sound made by groveling hardware.

See wugga wugga, grind (sense 3).

/kruhn'ch*/

1. vi. To process, usually in a time-consuming or complicated way. Connotes an essentially trivial operation that is nonetheless painful to perform. The pain may be due to the triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to 1,000,000,000. "FORTRAN programs do mostly number-crunching."

/krəm/

n. Two binary digits; a quad. Larger than a bit, smaller than a nybble. Considered silly.

Syn. tayste.

/kruhf'tee/

[origin unknown; poss. from 'crusty' or 'cruddy']

adj. 1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The canonical example is "This is standard old crufty DEC software". In fact, one fanciful theory of the origin of 'crufty' holds that was originally a mutation of 'crusty' applied to DEC software so old that the 's' characters were tall and skinny, looking more like 'f' characters.

2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and ketchup.

/kruhfts'm*n-ship/

n. [from cruft] The antithesis of craftsmanship.

/kruft tə-ˈge-t͟hər/

vt. (also 'cruft up') To throw together something ugly but temporarily workable. Like vt. kluge up, but more pejorative.

"There isn't any program now to reverse all the lines of a file, but I can probably cruft one together in about 10 minutes."

See hack together, hack up, kluge up, crufty.

/kruft/

[back-formation from crufty]

1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more.

2. n. The results of shoddy construction.

3. vt. [from 'hand cruft', pun on 'hand craft'] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see hand-hacking).

4. n. Excess; superfluous junk. Esp. used of redundant or superseded code.

/kruhd'weir/

n. Pejorative term for the hundreds of megabytes of low-quality freeware circulated by user's groups and BBS systems in the micro-hobbyist world. "Yet *another* set of disk catalog utilities for MS-DOS? What crudware!"

/krȯs-pōst/

[USENET]

vi. To post a single article simultaneously to several newsgroups. Distinguished from posting the article repeatedly, once to each newsgroup, which causes people to see it multiple times (this is very bad form). Gratuitous cross-posting without a Followup-To line directing responses to a single followup group is frowned upon, as it tends to cause followup articles to go to inappropriate newsgroups when people respond to only one part of the original posting.