The New Hacker's Dictionary

561

Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything outside the focus area is missed. See also [6725]hack mode and [6726]larval stage, although this mode is hardly confined to fledgling hackers.

---

Node:heartbeat, Next:[6727]heatseeker, Previous:[6728]heads down, Up:[6729]= H =

heartbeat n.

1. The signal emitted by a Level 2 Ethernet transceiver at the end of every packet to show that the collision-detection circuit is still connected. 2. A periodic synchronization signal used by software or hardware, such as a bus clock or a periodic interrupt. 3. The `natural' oscillation frequency of a computer's clock crystal, before frequency division down to the machine's clock rate. 4. A signal emitted at regular intervals by software to demonstrate that it is still alive. Sometimes hardware is designed to reboot the machine if it stops hearing a heartbeat. See also [6730]breath-of-life packet.

---

Node:heatseeker, Next:[6731]heavy metal, Previous:[6732]heartbeat, Up:[6733]= H =

heatseeker n.

[IBM] A customer who can be relied upon to buy, without fail, the latest version of an existing product (not quite the same as a member of the [6734]lunatic fringe). A 1993 example of a heatseeker was someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, went out and bought Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile benefits unless you have a 386). If all customers were heatseekers, vast amounts of money could be made by just fixing some of the bugs in each release (n) and selling it to them as release (n+1). Microsoft in fact seems to have mastered this technique.

562

---

Node:heavy metal, Next:[6735]heavy wizardry, Previous:[6736]heatseeker, Up:[6737]= H =

heavy metal n.

[Cambridge] Syn. [6738]big iron.

---

Node:heavy wizardry, Next:[6739]heavyweight, Previous:[6740]heavy metal, Up:[6741]= H =

heavy wizardry n.

Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or experience of a particular operating system or language or complex application interface. Distinguished from [6742]deep magic, which trades more on arcane theoretical knowledge. Writing device drivers is heavy wizardry; so is interfacing to [6743]X (sense 2) without a toolkit. Esp. found in source-code comments of the form "Heavy wizardry begins here". Compare [6744]voodoo programming.

---

Node:heavyweight, Next:[6745]heisenbug, Previous:[6746]heavy wizardry, Up:[6747]= H =

heavyweight adj.

[common] High-overhead; [6748]baroque; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Esp. used of communication protocols, language designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum generality and/or ease of implementation has been pushed at the expense of mundane considerations such as speed, memory utilization, and startup time. [6749]EMACS is a

563

heavyweight editor; [6750]X is an extremely heavyweight window system. This term isn't pejorative, but one hacker's heavyweight is another's [6751]elephantine and a third's [6752]monstrosity. Oppose `lightweight'. Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in the compound `heavyweight process'.

---

Node:heisenbug, Next:[6753]Helen Keller mode,

Previous:[6754]heavyweight, Up:[6755]= H =

heisenbug /hi:'zen-buhg/ n.

[from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite differently.) Antonym of [6756]Bohr bug; see also [6757]mandelbug, [6758]schroedinbug. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from uninitialized auto variables, [6759]fandango on core phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc [6760]arena) or errors that [6761]smash the stack.

---

Node:Helen Keller mode, Next:[6762]hello sailor!,

Previous:[6763]heisenbug, Up:[6764]= H =

Helen Keller mode n.

1. State of a hardware or software system that is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.e., accepting no input and generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or some other excursion into [6765]deep space. (Unfair to the real Helen Keller, whose success at learning speech was triumphant.) See also [6766]go flatline, [6767]catatonic. 2. On IBM PCs under DOS, refers to a

564

specific failure mode in which a screen saver has kicked in over an [6768]ill-behaved application which bypasses the very interrupts the screen saver watches for activity. Your choices are to try to get from the program's current state through a successful save-and-exit without being able to see what you're doing, or to re-boot the machine. This isn't (strictly speaking) a crash.

---

Node:hello sailor!, Next:[6769]hello wall!, Previous:[6770]Helen Keller mode, Up:[6771]= H =

hello sailor! interj.

Occasional West Coast equivalent of [6772]hello world; seems to have originated at SAIL, later associated with the game [6773]Zork (which also included "hello, aviator" and "hello, implementor"). Originally from the traditional hooker's greeting to a swabbie fresh off the boat, of course. The standard response is "Nothing happens here."; of all the Zork/Dungeon games, only in Infocom's Zork 3 is "Hello, Sailor" actually useful (excluding the unique situation where ---knowing--- this fact is important in Dungeon...).

---

Node:hello wall!, Next:[6774]hello world, Previous:[6775]hello sailor!, Up:[6776]= H =

hello, wall! excl.

See [6777]wall.

---

Node:hello world, Next:[6778]hex, Previous:[6779]hello wall!, Up:[6780]= H =

565

hello world interj.

1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/Unix universe. 2. Any of the minimal programs that emit this message. Traditionally, the first program a C coder is supposed to write in a new environment is one that just prints "hello, world" to standard output (and indeed it is the first example program in [6781]K&R). Environments that generate an unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require a [6782]hairy compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered to [6783]lose (see [6784]X). 3. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an entrance or requesting information from anyone present. "Hello, world! Is the LAN back up yet?"

---

Node:hex, Next:[6785]hexadecimal, Previous:[6786]hello world, Up:[6787]= H =

hex n.

1. Short for [6788]hexadecimal, base 16. 2. A 6-pack of anything (compare [6789]quad, sense 2). Neither usage has anything to do with [6790]magic or [6791]black art, though the pun is appreciated and occasionally used by hackers. True story: As a joke, some hackers once offered some surplus ICs for sale to be worn as protective amulets against hostile magic. The chips were, of course, hex inverters.

---

Node:hexadecimal, Next:[6792]hexit, Previous:[6793]hex, Up:[6794]= H =

hexadecimal n.

Base 16. Coined in the early 1960s to replace earlier `sexadecimal', which was too racy and amusing for stuffy IBM, and later adopted by the rest of the industry.

569

[IRC] Fortuitous typo for `hint', now in wide intentional use among players of [6834]initgame. Compare [6835]newsfroup, [6836]filk.

---

Node:hired gun, Next:[6837]hirsute, Previous:[6838]hing, Up:[6839]= H =

hired gun n.

A contract programmer, as opposed to a full-time staff member. All the connotations of this term suggested by innumerable spaghetti Westerns are intentional.

---

Node:hirsute, Next:[6840]HLL, Previous:[6841]hired gun, Up:[6842]= H =

hirsute adj.

Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for [6843]hairy.

---

Node:HLL, Next:[6844]hoarding, Previous:[6845]hirsute, Up:[6846]= H =

HLL /H-L-L/ n.

[High-Level Language (as opposed to assembler)] Found primarily in email and news rather than speech. Rarely, the variants `VHLL' and `MLL' are found. VHLL stands for `Very-High-Level Language' and is used to describe a [6847]bondage-and-discipline language that the speaker happens to like; Prolog and Backus's FP are often called VHLLs. `MLL' stands for `Medium-Level Language' and is sometimes used half-jokingly to describe [6848]C, alluding to its `structured-assembler' image. See also [6849]languages of choice.

570

---

Node:hoarding, Next:[6850]hobbit, Previous:[6851]HLL, Up:[6852]= H =

hoarding n.

See [6853]software hoarding.

---

Node:hobbit, Next:[6854]hog, Previous:[6855]hoarding, Up:[6856]= H =

hobbit n.

1. [rare] The High Order BIT of a byte; same as the [6857]meta bit or [6858]high bit. 2. The non-ITS name of [6859]vad@ai.mit.edu (*Hobbit*), master of lasers.

---

Node:hog, Next:[6860]hole, Previous:[6861]hobbit, Up:[6862]= H =

hog n.,vt.

1. Favored term to describe programs or hardware that seem to eat far more than their share of a system's resources, esp. those which noticeably degrade interactive response. Not used of programs that are simply extremely large or complex or that are merely painfully slow themselves. More often than not encountered in qualified forms, e.g., `memory hog', `core hog', `hog the processor', `hog the disk'. "A controller that never gives up the I/O bus gets killed after the bus-hog timer expires." 2. Also said of people who use more than their fair share of resources (particularly disk, where it seems that 10% of the people use 90% of the disk, no matter how big the disk is or how many people use it). Of course, once disk hogs fill up one filesystem, they typically find some other new one to infect, claiming to the sysadmin that they have an important new project to complete.