The New Hacker's Dictionary

1162

[Cambridge] Used to denote frustration, usually at amazing stupidity. "I stuck the disk in upside down." "Weeble...." Compare [14585]gurfle.

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weeds n.

1. Refers to development projects or algorithms that have no possible relevance or practical application. Comes from `off in the weeds'. Used in phrases like "lexical analysis for microcode is serious weeds...." 2. At CDC/ETA before its demise, the phrase `go off in the weeds' was equivalent to IBM's [14589]branch to Fishkill and mainstream hackerdom's [14590]jump off into never-never land.

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weenie n.

1. [on BBSes] Any of a species of luser resembling a less amusing version of [14594]B1FF that infests many [14595]BBS systems. The typical weenie is a teenage boy with poor social skills travelling under a grandiose [14596]handle derived from fantasy or heavy-metal rock lyrics. Among sysops, `the weenie problem' refers to the marginally literate and profanity-laden [14597]flamage weenies tend to spew all over a newly-discovered BBS. Compare [14598]spod, [14599]computer geek, [14600]terminal junkie, [14601]warez d00dz. 2. [Among hackers] When used with a qualifier (for example, as in [14602]Unix weenie, VMS weenie, IBM weenie) this can be either an insult or a term of praise, depending on context, tone of voice, and whether or not it is applied by a person who considers him or herself to be the same sort of weenie. Implies

1163

that the weenie has put a major investment of time, effort, and concentration into the area indicated; whether this is good or bad depends on the hearer's judgment of how the speaker feels about that area. See also [14603]bigot. 3. The semicolon character, ; (ASCII 0111011).

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Weenix /wee'niks/ n.

1. [ITS] A derogatory term for [14607]Unix, derived from [14608]Unix weenie. According to one noted ex-ITSer, it is "the operating system preferred by Unix Weenies: typified by poor modularity, poor reliability, hard file deletion, no file version numbers, case sensitivity everywhere, and users who believe that these are all advantages". (Some ITS fans behave as though they believe Unix stole a future that rightfully belonged to them. See [14609]ITS, sense 2.) 2. [Brown University] A Unix-like OS developed for tutorial purposes at Brown University. See [14610]http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs167/weenix.html. Named independently of the ITS usage.

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well-behaved adj.

1. [primarily [14614]MS-DOS] Said of software conforming to system interface guidelines and standards. Well-behaved software uses the operating system to do chores such as keyboard input, allocating memory and drawing graphics. Oppose [14615]ill-behaved. 2. Software that does its job quietly and without counterintuitive effects. Esp. said of software having an interface spec sufficiently simple and well-defined that it can be

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used as a [14616]tool by other software. See [14617]cat. 3. Said of an algorithm that doesn't [14618]crash or [14619]blow up, even when given [14620]pathological input. Implies that the stability of the algorithm is intrinsic, which makes this somewhat different from [14621]bulletproof.

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well-connected adj.

Said of a computer installation, asserts that it has reliable email links with the network and/or that it relays a large fraction of available [14625]Usenet newsgroups. `Well-known' can be almost synonymous, but also implies that the site's name is familiar to many (due perhaps to an archive service or active Usenet users).

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wetware /wet'weir/ n.

[prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or software. "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers." 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system's hardware or software. See [14629]liveware, [14630]meatware.

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1165

whack v.

According to arch-hacker James Gosling (designer of [14634]NeWS, [14635]GOSMACS and Java), to "...modify a program with no idea whatsoever how it works." (See [14636]whacker.) It is actually possible to do this in nontrivial circumstances if the change is small and well-defined and you are very good at [14637]glarking things from context. As a trivial example, it is relatively easy to change all stderr writes to stdout writes in a piece of C filter code which remains otherwise mysterious.

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whack-a-mole n.

[from the carnival game which involves quickly and repeatedly hitting the heads of mechanical moles with a mallet as they pop up from their holes.] 1. The practice of repeatedly causing spammers' [14641]throwaway accounts and drop boxes to be terminated. 2. After sense 1 became established in the mid-1990s the term passed into more generalized use, and now is commonly found in such combinations as `whack-a-mole windows'; the obnoxious pop-ip advertisement windows spawned in flocks when you surg to sites like Geocities or Tripod.

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whacker n.

[University of Maryland: from [14645]hacker] 1. A person, similar to a [14646]hacker, who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities. Whereas a hacker tends to produce

1167

[XEROX PARC] This phrase expands to: "You have just used a term that I've heard for a year and a half, and I feel I should know, but don't. My curiosity has finally overcome my guilt." The PARC lexicon adds "Moral: don't hesitate to ask questions, even if they seem obvious."

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wheel n.

[from slang `big wheel' for a powerful person] A person who has an active [14661]wheel bit. "We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives." (See [14662]wedged, sense 1.) The traditional name of security group zero in [14663]BSD (to which the major system-internal users like [14664]root belong) is `wheel'. Some vendors have expanded on this usage, modifying Unix so that only members of group `wheel' can [14665]go root.

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wheel bit n.

A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some restricted operation on a timesharing system, such as read or write any file on the system regardless of protections, change or look at any address in the running monitor, crash or reload the system, and kill or create jobs and user accounts. The term was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes called `wheel mode'. This term entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites). See also [14669]root.

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White Book n.

1. Syn. [14682]K&R. 2. Adobe's fourth book in the PostScript series, describing the previously-secret format of Type 1 fonts; "Adobe Type 1 Font Format, version 1.1", (Addison-Wesley, 1990, ISBN 0-201-57044-0). See also [14683]Red Book, [14684]Green Book, [14685]Blue Book.

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whitelist n.

The opposite of a blacklist. That is, instead of being an explicit list of people who are banned, it's an explicit list of people who are to be admitted. Hackers use this especially of lists of email addresses that are explicitly enabled to get past strict anti-spam filters.

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whizzy adj.

(alt. `wizzy') [Sun] Describes a [14692]cuspy program; one that is feature-rich and well presented.

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wibble

[UK, perh. originally from the first "Roger Irrelevant" strip in "VIZ" comics, spread via "Your Sinclair magazine in the 1980s and early 1990s"] 1. n.,v. Commonly used to describe chatter, content-free remarks or other essentially meaningless contributions to threads in newsgroups. "Oh, rspence is wibbling again". 2. [UK IRC] An explicit on-line no-op equivalent to [14696]humma. 3. One of the preferred [14697]metasyntactic variables in the UK, forming a series with wobble, wubble, and flob (attributed to the hilarious historical comedy "Blackadder"). 4. A pronounciation of the letters "www", as seen in URLs; i.e., www.[14698]foo.com may be pronounced "wibble dot foo dot com" (compare [14699]dub dub dub).

The ancestral sense of this word is reported to have been "My brain is packing it in now. I give up. Tilt! Tilt! Tilt!"

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WIBNI // n.

[Bell Labs: Wouldn't It Be Nice If] What most requirements documents and specifications consist entirely of. Compare [14703]IWBNI.

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widget n.

1. A meta-thing. Used to stand for a real object in didactic examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it that the original widgets were