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home box
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home machinen.
1. Syn.home box. 2. The machine that receives your email. These senses might be distinct, for example, for a hacker who owns one computer at home, but reads email at work.
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home page
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honey pot
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home machine
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home pagen.
1. One's personal billboard on the World Wide Web. The term `home page' is perhaps a bit misleading because home directories and physical homes inRLare private, but home pages are designed to be very public. 2. By extension, a WWW repository for information and links related to a project or organization. Comparehome box.
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honey pot
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hook
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honey potn.
A box designed to attractcrackers so that they can be observed in action. It is usually well isolated from the rest of the network, but has extensive logging (usually network layer, on a different machine). Different from aniron boxin that it's purpose is to attract, not merely observe. Sometimes, it is also a defensive network security tactic - you set up an easy-to-crack box so that your real servers don't get messed with. The concept was presented in Cheswick & Bellovin's book "Firewalls and Internet Security".
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hook
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hop
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honey pot
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hookn.
A software or hardware feature included in order to simplify later additions or changes by a user. For example, a simple program that prints numbers might always print them in base 10, but a more flexible version would let a variable determine what base to use; setting the variable to 5 would make the program print numbers in base 5. The variable is a simple hook. An even more flexible program might examine the variable and treat a value of 16 or less as the base to use, but treat any other number as the address of a user-supplied routine for printing a number. This is ahairybut powerful hook; one can then write a routine to print numbers as Roman numerals, say, or as Hebrew characters, and plug it into the program through the hook. Often the difference between a good program and a superb one is that the latter has useful hooks in judiciously chosen places. Both may do the original job about equally well, but the one with the hooks is much more flexible for future expansion of capabilities (EMACS, for example, isallhooks). The term `user exit' is synonymous but much more formal and less hackish.
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hop
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hose
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hop
1. n. [common] One file transmission in a series required to get a file from point A to point B on a store-and-forward network. On such networks (includingUUCPNETandFidoNet), an important inter-machine metric is the number of hops in the shortest path between them, which can be more significant than their geographical separation. Seebang path. 2. v. [rare] To log in to a remote machine, esp. via rlogin or telnet. "I'll hop over to foovax to FTP that."
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hose
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hosed
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hose
1. vt. [common] To make non-functional or greatly degraded in performance. "That big ray-tracing program really hoses the system." Seehosed. 2. n. A narrow channel through which data flows under pressure. Generally denotes data paths that represent performance bottlenecks. 3. n. Cabling, especially thick Ethernet cable. This is sometimes called `bit hose' or `hosery' (play on `hosiery') or `etherhose'. See alsowashing machine.
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hosed
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hose
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hosedadj.
Same asdown. Used primarily by Unix hackers. Humorous: also implies a condition thought to be relatively easy to reverse. Probably derived from the Canadian slang `hoser' popularized by the Bob and Doug Mackenzie skits on SCTV, but this usage predated SCTV by years in hackerdom (it was certainly already live at CMU in the 1970s). Seehose. It is also widely used of people in the mainstream sense of `in an extremely unfortunate situation'.
Once upon a time, a Cray that had been experiencing periodic difficulties crashed, and it was announced to have been hosed. It was discovered that the crash was due to the disconnection of some coolant hoses. The problem was corrected, and users were then assured that everything was OK because the system had been rehosed. See alsodehose.
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hot chat
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hot spot
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hot chatn.
Sexually explicit one-on-one chat. Seeteledildonics.
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hot spot
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hotlink
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hot spotn.
1. [primarily used by C/Unix programmers, but spreading] It is received wisdom that in most programs, less than 10% of the code eats 90% of the execution time; if one were to graph instruction visits versus code addresses, one would typically see a few huge spikes amidst a lot of low-level noise. Such spikes are called `hot spots' and are good candidates for heavy optimization orhand-hacking. The term is especially used of tight loops and recursions in the code's central algorithm, as opposed to (say) initial set-up costs or large but infrequent I/O operations. Seetune,bum,hand-hacking. 2. The active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. "Put the mouse's hot spot on the `ON' widget and click the left button." 3. A screen region that is sensitive to mouse gestures, which trigger some action. World Wide Web pages now provide thecanonicalexamples; WWW browsers present hypertext links as hot spots which, when clicked on, point the browser at another document (these are specifically calledhotlinks). 4. In a massively parallel computer with shared memory, the one location that all 10,000 processors are trying to read or write at once (perhaps because they are all doing abusy-waiton the same lock). 5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns into a performance bottleneck due to resource contention.
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hotlink
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house wizard
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hotlink/hot'link/ n.
Ahot spoton a World Wide Web page; an area, which, when clicked or selected, chases a URL. Also spelled `hot link'. Use of this term focuses on the link's role as an immediate part of your display, as opposed to the timeless sense of logical connection suggested byweb pointer. Your screen shows hotlinks but your document has web pointers, not (in normal usage) the other way around.
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house wizard
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HP-SUX
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house wizardn.
[prob. from ad-agency tradetalk, `house freak'] A hacker occupying a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A really effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of Unix wizards. The term `house guru' is equivalent.
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HP-SUX
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HP-SUX/H-P suhks/ n.
Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's Unix port, which features some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals and elsewhere (these occasionally create portability problems). HP-UX is often referred to as `hockey-pux' inside HP, and one respondent claims that the proper pronunciation is /H-P ukkkhhhh/ as though one were about to spit. Another such alternate spelling and pronunciation is "H-PUX" /H-puhks/. Hackers at HP/Apollo (the former Apollo Computers which was swallowed by HP in 1989) have been heard to complain that Mr. Packard should have pushed to have his name first, if for no other reason than the greater eloquence of the resulting acronym. CompareAIDX,buglix. See alsoNominal Semidestructor,Telerat,ScumOS,sun-stools,Slowlaris.
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HTH
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HTH//
[Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: Hope This Helps (e.g. following a response to a technical question). Often used just beforeHAND. See alsoYHBT.
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huff
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humma
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huffv.
To compress data using a Huffman code. Various programs that use such methods have been called `HUFF' or some variant thereof. Opposepuff. Comparecrunch,compress.
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humma
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humma// excl.
A filler word used on various `chat' and `talk' programs when you had nothing to say but felt that it was important to say something. The word apparently originated (at least with this definition) on the MECC Timeshare System (MTS, a now-defunct educational time-sharing system running in Minnesota during the 1970s and the early 1980s) but was later sighted on early Unix systems. Compare the U.K'swibble.
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hung
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hungadj.
[from `hung up'; common] Equivalent towedged, but more common at Unix/C sites. Not generally used of people. Syn. withlocked up,wedged; comparehosed. See alsohang. A hung state is distinguished fromcrashed ordown, where the program or system is also unusable but because it is not running rather than because it is waiting for something. However, the recovery from both situations is often the same. It is also distinguished from the similar but more drastic statewedged- hung software can be woken up with easy things like interrupt keys, but wedged will need a kill -9 or even reboot.
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hungry puppy
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hungus
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hung
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hungry puppyn.
Syn.slopsucker.
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hungus
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hyperspace
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hungus/huhng'g*s/ adj.
[perhaps related to slang `humongous'] Large, unwieldy, usually unmanageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of code." "This is a hungus set of modifications." TheInfocomtext adventure game "Beyond Zork" included two monsters called hunguses.
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hyperspace
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hyperspace/hi:'per-spays/ n.
A memory location that isfaraway from where the program counter should be pointing, especially a place that is inaccessible because it is not even mapped in by the virtual-memory system. "Another core dump -- looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow." (Comparejump off into never-never land.) This usage is from the SF notion of a spaceship jumping `into hyperspace', that is, taking a shortcut through higher-dimensional space -- in other words, bypassing this universe. The variant `east hyperspace' is recorded among CMU and Bliss hackers.
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hysterical reasons
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hysterical reasonsn.
(also `hysterical raisins') A variant on the stock phrase "for historical reasons", indicating specifically that something must be done in some stupid way for backwards compatibility, and moreover that the feature it must be compatible with was the result of a bad design in the first place. "All IBM PC video adapters have to support MDA text mode for hysterical reasons." Comparebug-for-bug compatible.
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The Jargon Lexicon
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I didn't change anything!
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I see no X here.
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hysterical reasons
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I didn't change anything!interj.
An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression test. Thecanonicalreply to this assertion is "Then it works just the same as it did before, doesn't it?" See alsoone-line fix. This is also heard from applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications problem on an unrelated systems software change, for example a divide-by-0 fault after terminals were added to a network. Usually, their statement is found to be false. Upon close questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of the program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion, but which actuallyhosedthe code completely.
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I see no X here.
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IANAL
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I didn't change anything!
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