.\" tbl | *roff -ms .if n \{\ . ds -> \-> . ds em -- . ds 2m --- . ds 0 ' . ds fm ' . ds mu u .\} .if t \{\ . ds -> \(-> . ds em \(em . ds 2m \l'2m\(em' . if \w'\(2m' .ds 2m \(2m . ds 0 ` . ds fm \(fm . ds mu \(mu .\} .de QU \\$3\\*Q\\$1\\*U\\$2 .. .de IQ \\$3\\*0\\$1'\\$2 .. .de DF . in 0 . sp 0.7 . ne 2 . ft B \\$1 . ft R ' in 4n .. .TL GLOSSARY OF UKC JARGON .ND November 14, 1982 .AU Martin Guy, Mark Heaps A supplement to the glossary compiled by Guy L. Steele Jr., Raphael Finkel, Donald Woods, Geoff Goodfellow and Mark Crispin. Last updated on the 3rd of December 1987 .AE .LP .DF "BAG" n. 1. \*QTo have a bag on your head\*U is to be disgruntled, put out or confused, or to have a bee in you bonnet about something. 2.\ Device used to punish people who have committed an act of stupidity. Safeways brown paper bags are just the right size for this, snug enough for the smallest heads but large enough for such heads as those of PHW or even JD. .DF "BAKED BEANS" pl. n. Semi-edible product awarded to those who have committed acts of gross cybernetic or computational incompetence. Recipients normally find their reward in a brown paper bag in their pigeon-hole in the coffee room. [From The Goodies' running gag involving the phrase "Get it right!" and the pouring of baked beans over Tim Brooke-Taylor] .DF "CLOTH BAG" n. Receptacle into which bletcherous hardware or software should be placed prior to being shaken, boiled or thrown into the sea. The former implies that the victim is to be cleaned up and/or improved and the latter two that it should be thrown away. .DF "COLONEL SANDERS" A short-lived and unwelcome nickname for MG while he was working on the horrible, nasty, scrapey Sanders printers in 1984. .DF "COMMITTED PRETURNAL TEMPORAL INTERSTEX" n. That short interval of time before you index finger touches the return key, but when it is travelling fast enough towards it that there is nothing you can do to stop it. It is in this period that you usually realise that you are just about to delete all your files. .DF /DEV/SNAKE n. An extinct Unix device which used to kill anyone who read it or wrote to it. .DF "EARTH MOVERS" Term of abuse used by the Unix Support Group against the Hardware Group. .DF "FINGER UP ITS BUM" state. Waiting for a semaphore which will never be cleared. .DF GARDENERS Term of abuse used by the Hardware Group against the Unix Support Group. .DF GARDENING n. The ritual and tedious maintenance of computer software. The \*Qcpf\*U file transfer program is notorious for needing to be weeded. Within two weeks of its author leaving UKC it broke down. He came back and juggled it back into the air. As soon as he had gone it ground to a halt again. It needed not so much gardening as frequent and vigorous prodding and kicking. Continually growing log files are another cause for gardening. .LP The best programs need no gardening. ALI's programs tend to auto-garden, others have specific weeding programs which run at night. \*QNewsweed\*U and \*Qmailweed\*U, both now defunct, spring to mind. .DF GOOBY n. A small unit, typically the smallest distance by which one may move on a device. The Canon has 240 goobies per inch whereas the Laserjet has 300 gpi. The Sanders printer has 960 gpi horizontally but 288 gpi vertically. However, the Sanders horizontal inch is not the same length as the Sanders vertical inch, neither of which appear to bear much relation to the Imperial inch. This could be accounted for by time dilation effects if the Sanders were travelling downwards at roughly 1/3 the speed of light. Perhaps it could be arranged. .DF GRUBBLY (usu. interrogative) \*QShall we go and eat?\*U .DF "HEAD UP ITS BUM" state. Refers to a program in an unplanned endless loop. .DF "MAY I GRUNT" anag. of \*QMartin Guy\*U, purveyor of fine optimised anagram-searching programs. Talk about being bitten by your own offspring! .DF "METASYNTACTIC VARIABLE" n. Made-up word used in place of a word when either a specific word is not required (eg.\ \*QHow do I declare FOO as an array of function pointers?\*U) or when the correct word does not come to mind, in the hope that the recipient will know what you mean. Witness the following exchange: .QS \*QWhat option do I give to the gronxfiz program to make it floogle?\*U Why, the blorchnificate option, of course. Isn't it obvious??? Well, that's the obvious answer, and I did try it, but when I pipe the output of \*Qgronxfiz\*U through \*Qkranfungle\*U it can't handle the extra plorniquats and dumps core, leaving my terminal in yillruction mode. Now; how can I get properly floogled output without causing kranfungle to vountiplake? Hmm... I think I encountered a similar problem when sending the output of \*Qblognort\*U to \*Qkranfungle\*U. The fix was a kludge, but what I did was run it all as a sub-grofnit of rugnificate. Be careful to give the frimboogle option to rugnificate, or it'll leave the terminal in the frungix discipline. This is especially dangerous if you have a multiplexed greelymond running in the background. Frobnicate and enjoy. .QE .DF "ODD HACK" mispron. Affectionate term for PC's \*QAdhoc\*U RPC mechanism. .DF "OINK, FLAP, OINK, FLAP" onomatopoeia. The sound made by a flying pig. .br In formal reasoning systems, it has long been established that a false statement implies every possible statement, including those which are themselves entirely false. The only implicator of a false statement can be another false statement. .LP Example: .QS Assertion: FTP will finished soon. .br Response: Oink, flap, oink, flap. .QE .DF PINK adj. Formal, applicative, rigorous, unnecessarily orthogonal. There are a multitude of "pink" processors. The PDP-11 is fairly rosy in its outlook, but the one usually singled out for its particular "pinkness" is the Nat.\ Semi 32016 (or 16032 or whatever they call it this week...). The 68K, having distinct address and data registers, is not very pink, the Z80 hardly at all, and the 6502 is so un-pink it's positively fascist. .LP Leaving aside KRC, Miranda etc, BCPL strikes me as being a bit pink, as its one object is the machine word (or arrays of them). Occam seems vaguely egalitarian in its ways, but Ada (surprise, surprise) is a raving Macarthyite! .DF PINKOES abuse. Theoretical Computer Science mob. .DF "PLASTIC PIG" n. Term used by LAN group for SEEL "Transring 3000" ring kit. .DF RTFM abbr. Read The Manual. .DF "TEA WITH BRIAN" n. The fate of evil hackers who get caught is to be invited for tea with the Director of the Laboratory. Apparently nobody ever felt like drinking their tea, so it is no longer provided. It is therefore now \*Qvirtual tea\*U. .DF "TOKYO SECOND" The manual for a certain Japanese printer claimed that it could print at X characters per second, however the best it could manage in Purley was Y cps. The only rational explanation for this phenomenon is that the \*Qsecond\*U spoken of in the manual is in fact the Tokyo second, an interval of time substantially longer than the Purley second. .DF WOMBAT n. Small furry metasyntactic marsupial. .in 0 .LP Thanks to the other occupant of S06 for help, encouragement and advising me to omit the entries on SMOKELESS HOBGOBLIN and A URINE VESSEL.