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DRECNET /drek´net/ n.

[from Yiddish/German ‘dreck’, meaning filth] Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking protocol used in the VMS community. So called because DEC helped write the Ethernet specification and then (either stupidly or as a malignant customer-control tactic) violated that spec in the design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible. See also connector conspiracy.

secondary damage n.

When a fatal error occurs (esp. a segfault) the immediate cause may be that a pointer has been trashed due to a previous fandango on core. However, this fandango may have been due to an earlier fandango, so no amount of analysis will reveal (directly) how the damage occurred. “The data structure was clobbered, but it was secondary damage.” By extension, the corruption resulting from N cascaded fandangoes on core is ‘Nth-level damage’. There is at least one case on record in which 17 hours of grovelling with adb actually dug up the underlying bug behind an instance of seventh-level damage! The hacker who accomplished this near-superhuman feat was presented with an award by his fellows.

regexp /reg´eksp/ n.

[Unix] (alt.: regex or reg-ex)

1. Common written and spoken abbreviation for regular expression, one of the wildcard patterns used, e.g., by Unix utilities such as grep(1), sed(1), and awk(1). These use conventions similar to but more elaborate than those described under glob. For purposes of this lexicon, it is sufficient to note that regexps also allow complemented character sets using ^; thus, one can specify ‘any non-alphabetic character’ with [^A-Za-z].

SEX /seks/

[Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n.

1. Software EXchange. A technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then. Today, SEX parties are popular among hackers and others (of course, these are no longer limited to exchanges of genetic software). In general, SEX parties are a Good Thing, but unprotected SEX can propagate a virus. See also pubic directory.

hakspek /hak´speek/ n.

A shorthand method of spelling found on many British academic bulletin boards and talker systems. Syllables and whole words in a sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters the names of which are phonetically similar or equivalent, while multiple letters are usually dropped. Hence, ‘for’ becomes ‘4’; ‘two’, ‘too’, and ‘to’ become ‘2’; ‘ck’ becomes ‘k’. “Before I see you tomorrow” becomes “b4 i c u 2moro”. First appeared in London about 1986, and was probably caused by the slowness of available talker systems, which operated on archaic machines with outdated operating systems and no standard methods of communication.