WhatIs

/kä-mi-ˈkä-zē pa-kət/

n. The official jargon for what is more commonly called a Christmas tree packet. RFC-1025, TCP and IP Bake Off says:

10 points for correctly being able to process a "Kamikaze" packet (AKA nastygram, christmas tree packet, lamp test segment, et al.). That is, correctly handle a segment with the maximum combination of features at once (e.g., a SYN URG PUSH FIN segment with options and data).

See also Chernobyl packet.

/kə-ˈhü-nə/

[IBM: from the Hawaiian title for a shaman]

n. Synonym for wizard, guru.

/kā & är/

[Kernighan and Ritchie]

n. Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's book 'The C Programming Language', esp. the classic and influential first edition (Prentice-Hall 1978; ISBN 0-113-110163-3).

Syn. White Book, Old Testament.

See also New Testament.

/k/

[from kilo-]

n. A kilobyte. This is used both as a spoken word and a written suffix (like meg and gig for megabyte and gigabyte).

See quantifiers.

/jəmp ȯf in-(ˌ)tü ne-vər-ne-vər land/

[ from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan ]

v. Same as branch to Fishkill, but more common in technical cultures associated with non-IBM computers that use the term jump rather than branch.

Compare hyperspace.

/jə-​g(ə-​)liŋ egs/

vi. Keeping a lot of state in your head while modifying a program. "Don't bother me now, I'm juggling eggs", means that an interrupt is likely to result in the program's being scrambled. In the classic first-contact SF novel 'The Mote in God's Eye', by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an alien describes a very difficult task by saying "We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity." That is a very hackish use of language.

See also hack mode.

/jerst/

[based on the PDP-10 jump instruction]

v.,obs. To suddenly change subjects, with no intention of returning to the previous topic. Usage: rather rare except among PDP-10 diehards, and considered silly.

See also AOS.

/J-R-L/, /J-R-N/

n. The names JRL and JRN were sometimes used as example names when discussing a kind of user ID used under TOPS-10; they were understood to be the initials of (fictitious) programmers named 'J. Random Loser' and 'J. Random Nerd' (see J. Random). For example, if one said "To log in, type log one comma jay are en" (that is, "log 1,JRN"), the listener would have understood that he should use his own computer ID in place of 'JRN'.

/jō kōd/

n. 1. Code that is overly tense and unmaintainable.

"Perl may be a handy program, but if you look at the source, it's complete joe code."

2. Badly written, possibly buggy code. Correspondents wishing to remain anonymous have fingered a particular Joe at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and observed that usage has drifted slightly; the original sobriquet Joe code was intended in sense 1.

/jäk/

n. 1. A programmer who is characterized by large and somewhat brute-force programs.

See brute force.

2. When modified by another noun, describes a specialist in some particular computing area. The compounds compiler jock and systems jock seem to be the best-established examples of this.