light pipe n.
Fiber optic cable. Oppose copper.
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lightweight adj.
Opposite of heavyweight;
usually found in combining forms such as `lightweight
process'.
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like kicking dead whales down the beach adj.
Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First
popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting
work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSes. "Well, you
could write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like
kicking dead whales down the beach." See also fear and loathing.
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like nailing jelly to a tree adj.
Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp. one in
which the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent
slipperiness in the problem domain. "Trying to display the
`prettiest' arrangement of nodes and arcs that diagrams a given
graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because nobody's sure what
`prettiest' means algorithmically."
Hacker use of this term may recall mainstream slang originated
early in the 20th century by President Theodore Roosevelt. There
is a legend that, weary of inconclusive talks with Colombia over
the right to dig a canal through its then-province Panama, he
remarked, "Negotiating with those pirates is like trying to nail
currant jelly to the wall." Roosevelt's government subsequently
encouraged the anti-Colombian insurgency that created the nation
of Panama.
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line 666 [from Christian eschatological myth] n.
The notional line of source at which a program fails for
obscure reasons, implying either that somebody is out to
get it (when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves
to be so gotten (when you are not). "It works when I trace
through it, but seems to crash on line 666 when I run it." "What
happens is that whenever a large batch comes through, mmdf dies
on the Line of the Beast. Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer
size."