WhatIs

/myü-zik/

n. A common extracurricular interest of hackers (compare science-fiction fandom, oriental food; see also filk). Hackish folklore has long claimed that musical and programming abilities are closely related, and there has been at least one large-scale statistical study that supports this. Hackers, as a rule, like music and often develop musical appreciation in unusual and interesting directions.

/mər-fēs lȯ/

prov. The correct, *original* Murphy's Law reads:

"If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it."

/məŋ/

alt. munge /muhnj/ [in 1960 at MIT, Mash Until No Good; sometime after that the derivation from the recursive acronym Mung Until No Good became standard]

vt. 1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevocable changes. See BLT.

/mən-dān/

[from SF fandom]

n. 1. A person who is not in science fiction fandom.

2. A person who is not in the computer industry. In this sense, most often an adjectival modifier as in "in my mundane life..."

See also Real World.

/mənch-kin/

[from the squeaky-voiced little people in L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz]

n. A teenage-or-younger micro enthusiast hacking BASIC or something else equally constricted. A term of mild derision -- munchkins are annoying but some grow up to be hackers after passing through a larval stage. The term urchin is also used.

See also wannabee, bitty box.

/mənchiŋ skwers/

n. A display-hack dating back to the PDP-1 (ca. 1962, reportedly discovered by Jackson Wright), which employs a trivial computation (repeatedly plotting the graph Y = X XOR T for successive values of T -- see HAKMEM items 146--148) to produce an impressive display of moving and growing squares that devour the screen. The initial value of T is treated as a parameter, which, when well-chosen, can produce amazing effects.

/mənchiŋ/

n. Exploration of security holes of someone else's computer for thrills, notoriety, or to annoy the system manager.

Compare cracker.

See also hacked off.

/mənch/

[often confused with mung, q.v.]

vt. To transform information in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation. To trace down a data structure. Related to crunch and nearly synonymous with grovel, but connotes less pain.

/məm-bəl/

interj. 1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion.

"Don't you think that we could improve LISP performance by using a hybrid reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough and there are some extra cache bits for the microcode to use?"

"Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it."

/məm-bə-läzh/

n. The topic of one's mumbling (see mumble). "All that mumblage" is used like "all that stuff" when it is not quite clear how the subject of discussion works, or like "all that crap" when 'mumble' is being used as an implicit replacement for pejoratives.