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zap 1. n. Spiciness. 2. vt. To make food spicy. 3. vt. To make someone 'suffer' by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.) See zapped. 4. vt. To modify, usually to correct; esp. used when the action is performed with a debugger or binary patching tool. Also implies surgical precision. "Zap the debug level to 6 and run it again." In the IBM mainframe world, binary patches are applied to programs or to the OS with a program called 'superzap', whose file name is 'IMASPZAP' (possibly contrived from I M A SuPerZAP). 5. vt. To erase or reset. 6. To fry a chip with static electricity. "Uh ohI think that lightning strike may have zapped the disk controller." |
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zapped adj. Spicy. This term is used to distinguish between food that is hot (in temperature) and food that is spicy-hot. For example, the Chinese appetizer Bon Bon Chicken is a kind of chicken salad that is cold but zapped; by contrast, vanilla wonton soup is hot but not zapped. See also oriental food, laser chicken. See zap, senses 1 and 2. |
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zen vt. To figure out something by meditation or by a sudden flash of enlightenment. Originally applied to bugs, but occasionally applied to problems of life in general. "How'd you figure out the buffer allocation problem?" "Oh, I zenned it." Contrast grok, which connotes a time-extended version of zenning a system. Compare hack mode. See also guru. |
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zero vt. 1. To set to 0. Usually said of small pieces of data, such as bits or words (esp. in the construction zero out). 2. To erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories, where 'zeroing' need not involve actually writing zeroes throughout the area being zeroed. One may speak of something being logically zeroed rather than being physically zeroed. See scribble. |
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zero-content adj. Syn. content-free. |
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Zero-One-Infinity Rule prov. "Allow none of foo, one of foo, or any number of foo." A rule of thumb for software design, which instructs one to not place random limits on the number of instances of a given entity (such as: windows in a window system, letters in an OS's filenames, etc.). Specifically, one should either disallow the entity entirely, allow exactly one |
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