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munchkin
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mundane
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munching squares
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munchkin/muhnch'kin/ n.
[from the squeaky-voiced little people in L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz"] 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 alarval stage. The termurchinis also used. See alsowannabee,bitty box.
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mundane
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mundanen.
[from SF fandom] 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 alsoReal World,muggle.
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mung/muhng/ vt.
[in 1960 at MIT, `Mash Until No Good'; sometime after that the derivation from therecursive acronym`Mung Until No Good' became standard; but seemunge] 1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevocable changes. SeeBLT. 2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things maliciously; this is a consequence ofFinagle's Law. Seescribble,mangle,trash,nuke. Reports fromUsenetsuggest that the pronunciation /muhnj/ is now usual in speech, but the spelling `mung' is still common in program comments (compare the widespread confusion over the proper spelling ofkluge). 3. The kind of beans the sprouts of which are used in Chinese food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!)
Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have originated atTMRC; it was already in use there in 1958. Peter Samson (compiler of the original TMRC lexicon) thinks it may originally have been onomatopoeic for the sound of a relay spring (contact) being twanged. However, it is known that during the World Wars, `mung' was U.S. army slang for the ersatz creamed chipped beef better known as `SOS', and it seems quite likely that the word in fact goes back to Scots-dialectmunge.
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munge
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Murphy's Law
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munge/muhnj/ vt.
1. [derogatory] To imperfectly transform information. 2. A comprehensive rewrite of a routine, data structure or the whole program. 3. To modify data in some way the speaker doesn't need to go into right now or cannot describe succinctly (comparemumble). 4. To addspamblockto an email address.
This term is often confused withmung, which probably was derived from it. However, it also appears the word `munge' was in common use in Scotland in the 1940s, and in Yorkshire in the 1950s, as a verb, meaning to munch up into a masticated mess, and as a noun, meaning the result of munging something up (the parallel with thekluge/kludgepair is amusing). The OED reports `munge' as an archaic verb nmeaning "to wipe (a person's nose)".
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Murphy's Law
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Murphy's Lawprov.
The correct,originalMurphy'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." This is a principle of defensive design, cited here because it is usually given in mutant forms less descriptive of the challenges of design forlusers. For example, you don't make a two-pin plug symmetrical and then label it `THIS WAY UP'; if it matters which way it is plugged in, then you make the design asymmetrical (see also the anecdote undermagic smoke).
Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later.
Within months `Murphy's Law' had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants on "Anything that can go wrong, will"; this is correctly referred to asFinagle's Law. The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself!
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music
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musicn.
A common extracurricular interest of hackers (comparescience-fiction fandom,oriental food; see alsofilk). 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. Folk music is very big in hacker circles; so is electronic music, and the sort of elaborate instrumental jazz/rock that used to be called `progressive' and isn't recorded much any more. The hacker's musical range tends to be wide; many can listen with equal appreciation to (say) Talking Heads, Yes, Gentle Giant, Pat Metheny, Scott Joplin, Tangerine Dream, Dream Theater, King Sunny Ade, The Pretenders, Screaming Trees, or the Brandenburg Concerti. It is also apparently true that hackerdom includes a much higher concentration of talented amateur musicians than one would expect from a similar-sized control group ofmundanetypes.
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muttervt.
To quietly enter a command not meant for the ears, eyes, or fingers of ordinary mortals. Often used in `mutter anincantation'. See alsowizard.
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The Jargon Lexicon
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N
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N/N/ quant.
1. A large and indeterminate number of objects: "There were N bugs in that crock!" Also used in its original sense of a variable name: "This crock has N bugs, as N goes to infinity." (The true number of bugs is always at least N + 1; seeLubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology.) 2. A variable whose value is inherited from the current context. For example, when a meal is being ordered at a restaurant, N may be understood to mean however many people there are at the table. From the remark "We'd like to order N wonton soups and a family dinner for N - 1" you can deduce that one person at the table wants to eat only soup, even though you don't know how many people there are (seegreat-wall). 3. `Nth': adj. The ordinal counterpart of N, senses 1 and 2. "Now for the Nth and last time..." In the specific context "Nth-year grad student", N is generally assumed to be at least 4, and is usually 5 or more (seetenured graduate student). See alsorandom numbers,two-to-the-N.
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nadger
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nadger/nad'jr/ v.
[UK, from rude slang noun `nadgers' for testicles; compare American & British `bollixed'] Of software or hardware (not people), to twiddle some object in a hidden manner, generally so that it conforms better to some format. For instance, string printing routines on 8-bit processors often take the string text from the instruction stream, thus a print call looks likejsr print:"Hello world". The print routine has to `nadger' the saved instruction pointer so that the processor doesn't try to execute the text as instructions when the subroutine returns. Seeadger.
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nagware
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nagware/nag'weir/ n.
[Usenet] The variety ofsharewarethat displays a large screen at the beginning or end reminding you to register, typically requiring some sort of keystroke to continue so that you can't use the software in batch mode. Compareannoyware,crippleware.
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nailed to the walladj.
[like a trophy] Said of a bug finally eliminated after protracted, and even heroic, effort.
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nailing jellyvi.
Seelike nailing jelly to a tree.
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naive
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naiveadj.
1. Untutored in the perversities of some particular program or system; one who still tries to do things in an intuitive way, rather than the right way (in really good designs these coincide, but most designs aren't `really good' in the appropriate sense). This trait is completely unrelated to general maturity or competence, or even competence at any other specific program. It is a sad commentary on the primitive state of computing that the natural opposite of this term is often claimed to be `experienced user' but is really more like `cynical user'. 2. Said of an algorithm that doesn't take advantage of some superior but advanced technique, e.g., thebubble sort. It may imply naivete on the part of the programmer, although there are situations where a naive algorithm is preferred, because it is more important to keep the code comprehensible than to go for maximum performance. "I know the linear search is naive, but in this case the list typically only has half a dozen items."
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naive user
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naive usern.
Aluser. Tends to imply someone who is ignorant mainly owing to inexperience. When this is applied to someone whohasexperience, there is a definite implication of stupidity.
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NAK/nak/ interj.
[from the ASCII mnemonic for 0010101] 1. On-line joke answer toACK?: "I'm not here." 2. On-line answer to a request for chat: "I'm not available." 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you don't understand their point or that they have suddenly stopped making sense. SeeACK, sense 3. "And then, after we recode the project in COBOL...." "Nak, Nak, Nak! I thought I heard you say COBOL!" 4. A negative answer. "OK if I boot the server?" "NAK!"
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NANA//
[Usenet] The newsgroups news.admin.net-abuse.*, devoted to fightingspamand network abuse. Each individual newsgroup is often referred to by adding a letter to NANA. For example, NANAU would refer to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet.
When spam began to be a serious problem around 1995, and a loose network of anti-spammers formed to combat it, spammers immediately accused them of being thebackbone cabal, or the Cabal reborn. Though this was not true, spam-fighters ironically accepted the label and the tag line "There is No Cabal" reappeared (later, and now commonly, abbreviated to "TINC"). Nowadays "the Cabal" is generally understood to refer to the NANA regulars.
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nano
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nano/nan'oh/ n.
[CMU: from `nanosecond'] A brief period of time. "Be with you in a nano" means you really will be free shortly, i.e., implies what mainstream people mean by "in a jiffy" (whereas the hackish use of `jiffy' is quite different -- seejiffy).
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nano-pref.
[SI: the next quantifier belowmicro-; meaning * 10^(-9)] Smaller thanmicro-, and used in the same rather loose and connotative way. Thus, one hasnanotechnology(coined by hacker K. Eric Drexler) by analogy with `microtechnology'; and a few machine architectures have a `nanocode' level below `microcode'. Tom Duff at Bell Labs has also pointed out that "Pi seconds is a nanocentury". See alsoquantifiers,pico-,nanoacre,nanobot,nanocomputer,nanofortnight.