The New Hacker's Dictionary

brain fart // n.

The actual result of a braino, as opposed to the mental glitch that is the braino itself. E.g., typing dir on a Unix box after a session with DOS.

brain-damaged // adj.

1. [common; generalization of 'Honeywell Brain Damage' (HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in Honeywell Multics] adj. Obviously wrong; cretinous; demented. There is an implication that the person responsible must have suffered brain damage, because he should have known better. Calling something brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is unusable, and that its failure to work is due to poor design rather than some accident. "Only six monocase characters per file name? Now that's brain-damaged!"

2. [esp. in the Mac world] May refer to free demonstration software that has been deliberately crippled in some way so as not to compete with the product it is intended to sell. syn. crippleware.

brain-dead // adj.

[common] Brain-damaged in the extreme. It tends to imply terminal design failure rather than malfunction or simple stupidity. "This comm program doesn't know how to send a break -- how brain-dead!"

braino /bray'no/ n.

syn. for thinko. See also brain fart.

branch to Fishkill // n.

[IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities] Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See jump off into never-never land, hyperspace.

bread crumbs // n.

1. Debugging statements inserted into a program that emit output or log indicators of the program's state to a file so you can see where it dies or pin down the cause of surprising behavior. The term is probably a reference to the Hansel and Gretel story from the Brothers Grimm or the older French folktale of Thumbelina; in several variants of these, a character leaves a trail of bread crumbs so as not to get lost in the woods.

2. In user-interface design, any feature that allows some tracking of where you've been, like coloring visited links purple rather than blue in Netscape (also called 'footrinting').