May 15, 2003
Ob-
/ob/ pref.Obligatory. A piece of netiquette acknowledging that the author has been straying from the newsgroup's charter topic. For example, if a posting in alt.sex is a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing particularly to do with sex, the author may append ‘ObSex’ (or ‘Obsex’) and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual erotic act. It is considered a sign of great winnitude when one's Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings.
Obfuscated C Contest
n.(in full, the ‘International Obfuscated C Code Contest’, or IOCCC) An annual contest run since 1984 over Usenet by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but working) C program; various other prizes are awarded at the judges' whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b) breathtaking works of art, and (c) horrible examples of how not to code in C.
This relatively short and sweet entry might help convey the flavor of obfuscated C: /* * HELLO WORLD program * by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985 * (Note: depends on being able to modify elements of argv[], * which is not guaranteed by ANSI and often not possible.) */ main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)"; (!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c)); **c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);}
Here's another good one: /* * Program to compute an approximation of pi * by Brian Westley, 1988 * (requires pcc macro concatenation; try gcc -traditional-cpp) */ #define _ -F<00||--F-OO--; int F=00,OO=00; main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO() { _-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_ }
Note that this program works by computing its own area. For more digits, write a bigger program. See also hello world.
The IOCCC has an official home page at http://www.ioccc.org/.
obi-wan error
/oh´bee·won` er'@r/ n.[RPI, from off-by-one and the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in Star Wars] A loop of some sort in which the index is off by
1. Common when the index should have started from 0 but instead started from
2. A kind of off-by-one error. See also zeroth.
Objectionable-C
n.
Hackish take on Objective-C
, the name of an
object-oriented dialect of C in competition with the better-known C++ (it
is used to write native applications on the NeXT machine). Objectionable-C
uses a Smalltalk-like syntax, but lacks the flexibility of Smalltalk method
calls, and (like many such efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining
the Right Thing without actually doing so.
obscure
adj.
Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to imply total
incomprehensibility. The reason for that last crash is
obscure.
The
find1
command's syntax is obscure!
The phrase moderately obscure implies that something could
be figured out but probably isn't worth the trouble. The construction
obscure in the extreme is the
preferred emphatic form.
octal forty
/ok´tl for´tee/ n.
Hackish way of saying I'm drawing a blank.
Octal 40
is the ASCII space character, 0100000; by an odd
coincidence, hex 40 (01000000) is the
EBCDIC space character. See
wall.
off the trolley
adj.Describes the behavior of a program that malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually crash or abort. See glitch, bug, deep space, wedged.
This term is much older than computing, and is (uncommon) slang elsewhere. A trolley is the small wheel that trolls, or runs against, the heavy wire that carries the current to run a streetcar. It's at the end of the long pole (the trolley pole) that reaches from the roof of the streetcar to the overhead line. When the trolley stops making contact with the wire (from passing through a switch, going over bumpy track, or whatever), the streetcar comes to a halt, (usually) without crashing. The streetcar is then said to be off the trolley, or off the wire. Later on, trolley came to mean the streetcar itself. Since streetcars became common in the 1890s, the term is more than 100 years old. Nowadays, trolleys are only seen on historic streetcars, since modern streetcars use pantographs to contact the wire.
off-by-one error
n.
[common] Exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such as by
starting at 0 when you should have started at 1 or vice-versa, or by
writing < N
instead of <= N
or vice-versa. Also applied to giving
something to the person next to the one who should have gotten it. Often
confounded with fencepost error, which is properly a
particular subtype of it.
offline
adv.
Not now or not here. Let's take this discussion
offline.
Specifically used on Usenet to
suggest that a discussion be moved off a public newsgroup to email.
ogg
/og/ v.[CMU]
1. In the multi-player space combat game Netrek, to execute kamikaze
attacks against enemy ships which are carrying armies or occupying
strategic positions. Named during a game in which one of the players
repeatedly used the tactic while playing Orion ship G, showing up in the
player list as Og
. This trick has been roundly denounced by
those who would return to the good old days when the tactic of dogfighting
was dominant, but as Sun Tzu wrote, What is of supreme importance in
war is to attack the enemy's strategy, not his tactics.
However,
the traditional answer to the newbie question What does ogg
mean?
is just Pick up some armies and I'll show you.
2. In other games, to forcefully attack an opponent with the expectation that the resources expended will be renewed faster than the opponent will be able to regain his previous advantage. Taken more seriously as a tactic since it has gained a simple name.
3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the
drain on future resources. I guess I'd better go ogg the problem
set that's due tomorrow.
Whoops! I looked down at the map
for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car.
old fart
n.Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable frequency by (esp.) Usenetters who have been programming for more than about 25 years; often appears in sig blocks attached to Jargon File contributions of great archeological significance. This is a term of insult in the second or third person but one of pride in first person.
on the gripping hand
In the progression that starts On the one hand...
and
continues On the other hand...
mainstream English may add
on the third hand...
even though most people don't have
three hands. Among hackers, it is just as likely to be on the
gripping hand
. This metaphor supplied the title of Larry Niven
& Jerry Pournelle's 1993 SF novel The Gripping Hand
which involved a species of hostile aliens with three arms (the same
species, in fact, referenced in juggling eggs). As
with TANSTAAFL and con, this
usage became one of the naturalized imports from SF fandom frequently
observed among hackers.
one-banana problem
n.
At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine
administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on the
operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is
frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys
can be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana
problem is simple; hence, It's only a one-banana job at the most;
what's taking them so long?
At IBM, folklore divides the world into
one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures have different
hierarchies and may divide them more finely; at ICL, for example, five
grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house
sysapes is said to be two bananas and three grapes
(another source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes
However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and
ISO
). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the
manufacturers to send someone around to check things.
See also Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
one-line fix
n.Used (often sarcastically) of a change to a program that is thought to be trivial or insignificant right up to the moment it crashes the system. Usually ‘cured’ by another one-line fix. See also I didn't change anything!
one-liner wars
n.A game popular among hackers who code in the language APL (see write-only language and line noise). The objective is to see who can code the most interesting and/or useful routine in one line of operators chosen from APL's exceedingly hairy primitive set. A similar amusement was practiced among TECO hackers and is now popular among Perl aficionados.
Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this: (2=0+.=T∅.|T)/T←ιN
Here's a Perl program that prints primes: perl -wle '(1 x $_) !~ /^(11+)\1+$/ && print while ++ $_'
In the Perl world this game is sometimes called Perl Golf because the player with the fewest (key)strokes wins.
ooblick
/oo´blik/ n.[from the Dr. Seuss title Bartholomew and the Oobleck; the spelling ‘oobleck’ is still current in the mainstream] A bizarre semi-liquid sludge made from cornstarch and water. Enjoyed among hackers who make batches during playtime at parties for its amusing and extremely non-Newtonian behavior; it pours and splatters, but resists rapid motion like a solid and will even crack when hit by a hammer. Often found near lasers.
Here is a field-tested ooblick recipe contributed by GLS:
1 cup cornstarch
1 cup baking soda
3/4 cup water
N drops of food coloring
This recipe isn't quite as non-Newtonian as a pure cornstarch ooblick, but has an appropriately slimy feel.
Some, however, insist that the notion of an ooblick recipe is far too mechanical, and that it is best to add the water in small increments so that the various mixed states the cornstarch goes through as it becomes ooblick can be grokked in fullness by many hands. For optional ingredients of this experience, see the Ceremonial Chemicals section of Appendix B.
op
/op/ n.1. In England and Ireland, common verbal abbreviation for ‘operator’, as in system operator. Less common in the U.S., where sysop seems to be preferred.
2. [IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on IRC, not limited to a particular channel. These are generally people who are in charge of the IRC server at their particular site. Sometimes used interchangeably with CHOP. Compare sysop.
open
n.
Abbreviation for ‘open (or left) parenthesis’ —
used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. To read aloud the LISP
form (DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1)) one might say: Open defun foo, open
eks close, open, plus eks one, close close.
open source
n.
[common; also adj. open-source] Term coined in March 1998
following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source
under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and
redistribute, the code. The intent was to be able to sell the hackers'
ways of doing software to industry and the mainstream by avoiding the
negative connotations (to suits) of the term
free software
. For discussion of the
follow-on tactics and their consequences, see the Open Source Initiative
site.
operating system
n.[techspeak] (Often abbreviated ‘OS’) The foundation software of a machine; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications. The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around its host machines. Hacker folklore has been shaped primarily by the Unix, ITS, TOPS-10, TOPS-20/TWENEX, WAITS, CP/M, MS-DOS, and Multics operating systems (most importantly by ITS and Unix). See also timesharing.
operator headspace
[common] More fully, operator headspace error
. Synonym
for pilot error — a dumb move, especially one
pulled by someone who ought to know better. Often used reflexively.
optimism
n.What a programmer is full of after fixing the last bug and before discovering the next last bug. Fred Brooks's book The Mythical Man-Month (See Brooks's Law) contains the following paragraph that describes this extremely well:
All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially
attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the
hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus
on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers
are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection
process works, the result is indisputable: This time it will surely
run,
or I just found the last bug.
.
See also Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology.
Oracle, the
The all-knowing, all-wise Internet Oracle rec.humor.oracle, or one of the foreign
language derivatives of same. Newbies frequently confuse the Oracle with
Oracle, a database vendor. As a result, the unmoderated rec.humor.oracle.d is frequently cross-posted
to by the clueless, looking for advice on SQL. As more than one person has
said in similar situations, Don't people bother to look at the
newsgroup description line anymore?
(To which the standard response
is, Did people ever read it in the first place?
)
Orange Book
n.The U.S. Government's (now obsolete) standards document Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard 5200.28-STD, December, 1985 which characterize secure computing architectures and defines levels A1 (most secure) through D (least). Modern Unixes are roughly C2. See also book titles.
oriental food
n.Hackers display an intense tropism towards oriental cuisine, especially Chinese, and especially of the spicier varieties such as Szechuan and Hunan. This phenomenon (which has also been observed in subcultures that overlap heavily with hackerdom, most notably science-fiction fandom) has never been satisfactorily explained, but is sufficiently intense that one can assume the target of a hackish dinner expedition to be the best local Chinese place and be right at least three times out of four. See also ravs, great-wall, stir-fried random, laser chicken, Yu-Shiang Whole Fish. Thai, Indian, Korean, Burmese, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular.
orphaned i-node
/or´f@nd i:´nohd/ n.[Unix]
1. [techspeak] A file that retains storage but no longer appears in the directories of a filesystem.
2. By extension, a pejorative for any person no longer serving a useful function within some organization, esp. lion food without subordinates.
orthogonal
adj.
[from mathematics] Mutually independent; well separated; sometimes,
irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to
describe sets of primitives or capabilities that, like a vector basis in
geometry, span the entire ‘capability space’ of the system and
are in some sense non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in
architectures such as the PDP-11 or
VAX where all or nearly all registers can be used
interchangeably in any role with respect to any instruction, the register
set is said to be orthogonal. Or, in logic, the set of operators not and or is orthogonal, but the set nand, or,
and not is not (because any one of
these can be expressed in terms of the others). Also used in comments on
human discourse: This may be orthogonal to the discussion,
but....
OS
/O·S/1. [Operating System] n. An abbreviation heavily used in email, occasionally in speech.
2. n. obs. On ITS, an output spy. See OS and JEDGAR in Appendix A.
OS/2
/O S too/ n.The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Often called ‘Half-an-OS’. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers — the design was so baroque, and the implementation of 1.x so bad, that three years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping for it on the fingers of two hands — in unary. The 2.x versions were said to have improved somewhat, and informed hackers rated them superior to Microsoft Windows (an endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning with faint praise). In the mid-1990s IBM put OS/2 on life support, refraining from killing it outright purely for internal political reasons; by 1999 the success of Linux had effectively ended any possibility of a renaissance. See monstrosity, cretinous, second-system effect.
OSS
Written-only acronym for Open Source Software
(see
open source). This is a rather ugly
TLA, and the principals in the open-source movement
don't use it, but it has (perhaps inevitably) spread through the trade
press like kudzu.
OT
[Usenet: common] Abbreviation for off-topic
. This is
used to respond to a question that is inappropriate for the newsgroup that
the questioner posted to. Often used in an HTML-style modifier or with
adverbs. See also TAN.
out-of-band
adj.[from telecommunications and network theory]
1. In software, describes values of a function which are not in its ‘natural’ range of return values, but are rather signals that some kind of exception has occurred. Many C functions, for example, return a nonnegative integral value, but indicate failure with an out-of-band return value of −1. Compare hidden flag, green bytes, fence.
2. Also sometimes used to describe what communications people call shift characters, such as the ESC that leads control sequences for many terminals, or the level shift indicators in the old 5-bit Baudot codes.
3. In personal communication, using methods other than email, such as telephones or snail-mail.
overclock
/oh´vr·klok´/ vt.
To operate a CPU or other digital logic device at a rate higher than
it was designed for, under the assumption that the manufacturer put some
slop into the specification to account for
manufacturing tolerances. Overclocking something can result in intermittent
crashes, and can even burn things out, since power
dissipation is directly proportional to clock
frequency. People who make a hobby of this are sometimes called
overclockers
; they are thrilled that they can run their
CPU a few percent faster, even though they can only tell the difference by
running a benchmark program. See also
case mod.
overflow bit
n.1. [techspeak] A flag on some processors indicating an attempt to calculate a result too large for a register to hold.
2. More generally, an indication of any kind of capacity overload
condition. Well, the Ada description was
baroque all right, but I could hack it OK until they
got to the exception handling ... that set my overflow bit.
3. The hypothetical bit that will be set if a hacker doesn't get to
make a trip to the Room of Porcelain Fixtures: I'd better process an
internal interrupt before the overflow bit gets set.
Crunchly and the overflow bit.
(The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 73-07-29)
overrun
n.1. [techspeak] Term for a frequent consequence of data arriving faster than it can be consumed, esp. in serial line communications. For example, at 9600 baud there is almost exactly one character per millisecond, so if a silo can hold only two characters and the machine takes longer than 2 msec to get to service the interrupt, at least one character will be lost.
2. Also applied to non-serial-I/O communications. I forgot
to pay my electric bill due to mail overrun.
Sorry, I got
four phone calls in 3 minutes last night and lost your message to
overrun.
When thrashing at tasks, the next
person to make a request might be told Overrun!
Compare
firehose syndrome.
3. More loosely, may refer to a buffer overflow not necessarily related to processing time (as in overrun screw).
overrun screw
n.[C programming] A variety of fandango on core produced by scribbling past the end of an array (C implementations typically have no checks for this error). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the array is static; if it is auto, the result may be to smash the stack — often resulting in heisenbugs of the most diabolical subtlety. The term overrun screw is used esp. of scribbles beyond the end of arrays allocated with malloc3; this typically trashes the allocation header for the next block in the arena, producing massive lossage within malloc and often a core dump on the next operation to use stdio3 or malloc3 itself. See spam, overrun; see also memory leak, memory smash, aliasing bug, precedence lossage, fandango on core, secondary damage.
owned
1. [cracker slang; often written 0wned
] Your condition
when your machine has been cracked by a root exploit, and the attacker can
do anything with it. This sense is occasionally used by hackers.
2. [gamers, IRC, crackers] To be dominated, controlled, mastered.
For example, if you make a statement completely and utterly false, and
someone else corrects it in a way that humiliates or removes you, you are
said to have been owned
by that person. When referring to
games, I own0r UT GOTYE
means that one has mastered Unreal
Tournament, Game of the Year Edition to such a level that even the hardest
AI characters are mere lunchmeat, and that no ordinary mortal player would
even receive a point in competition. There are several spelling variants:
0wned, 0wn0r3d, even pwn0r3d. Hackers do not use this sense.