Array in a manger... holiday-themed code quiz!

These are some of the fun questions/answers I found on Whatis.com, plus a few of my own. Can you guess them all? (Answers below)

Questions:

1. If Saint Nick ate them all in one night, he might need extra RP (reindeer power) to get that sleigh airborne! On the Internet, it's a small text file a Web server sends to your browser.

2. A gift almost everyone likes to receive? Yes! It's a storage area where files that have been requested are contained so they don't have to be downloaded each time.

3. In a North Pole context, this is an extremely seasonal worker. In communications, it's a type of electromagnetic field that has a frequency much lower than the frequencies of signals typically used.

4. Challenging for holiday travel, it also describes a Web page in which the primary content has a fixed width in pixel and assumes a left margin alignment.

5. Does Martha Stewart decorate her house with these for the holidays? On the Internet, this word describes a Web site or blog that is updated frequently.

6. People usually remember the words to this part of a Christmas carol. Won't you join in? In audio production, this is one of the two standard audio effects defined by the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI).

7. Does the magnetic stripe on your card wear thin this time of year? Well, negative or positive, in physics it's a characteristic of a unit of matter that expresses the extent to which it has more or fewer electrons than protons.

8. If all the stars at the top of all the decorated trees in your neighborhood could communicate with each other, what would you have? (Hint: this is also the term for a local area network in which all nodes are directly connected to a common central computer.)

9. Migratory birds -- and disenchanted humans -- often fly south this time of year to avoid this type of weather. In a computer context, however, it's a system for archiving data such as business records and reports to one or more optical disks in a compressed but easily retrievable format.

10. Ebenezer Scrooge saw three of them. Hint: This software product can clone the entire contents of a hard disk to another computer's hard disk.

11. Santa wears one of these to keep his head warm, but it's also the name of the leading software company that assembles open source components for the Linux operating system and related programs into a distribution package.

12. Santa wears two of these to protect his feet from all that snow. And once this process finishes loading your computer's operating system, it's ready for you to run applications.

13. A thick pair of these will keep YOUR feet warm! If your proxy server uses this protocol it can accept requests and forward them across the Internet.

14. You can get all kinds of these attached to your presents or dropped in your mailbox during the holidays, and some even have gifts inside! In your computer, these circuit boards can provide expanded capability to a computer.

15. You never want this to happen to the treats you leave for Santa! But you also don't want this modification of the answer to Question #1 by a cyber-attacker to happen to you either.

Answers: 

1. COOKIES - information that a Web site puts on your hard disk so that it can remember something about you at a later time.
2. CACHE (pronounced CASH) - a place to store something temporarily in a computing environment.
3. ELF (extremely low frequency) - an electromagnetic field having a frequency much lower than the frequencies of signals typically used in communications. You are exposed to these fields whenever you are near electrical appliances of any kind.

4. Information and Content Exchange (ICE) is an XML-based standard protocol for electronic business-to-business (B2B) asset management.

5. EVERGREEN is a term used by some ad agencies to describe a site that's updated on a daily or other frequent basis.

6. CHORUS adds a swirling property to a sound that it is applied to, thickening the sound. A digital signal processing (DSP) algorithm that combines digital delays and at least one low-frequency oscillator (LFO) produces the chorus effect.

7. CHARGE is a characteristic of a unit of matter that expresses the ratio of electrons to protons. 

8. A STAR NETWORK is a local area network (LAN) in which all nodes are directly connected to a common central computer. Every workstation is indirectly connected to every other through the central computer. In some star networks, the central computer can also operate as a workstation.
9. COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk) is a system for archiving data to one or more optical disks in a compressed but easily retrievable format.
10. GHOST is a software product from Symantec that can clone the entire contents of a hard disk to another computer's hard disk or to storage media, automatically formatting and partitioning the target disk.
11. RED HAT is a leading software company in the business of assembling open source components for the Linux operating system and related programs into a distribution package that can easily be ordered and implemented.
12. To BOOT (as a verb; also "to boot up") a computer is to load an operating system into the computer's main memory or random access memory (RAM).
13. "SOCKS" is a protocol that a proxy server can use to accept requests from client users in a company's network so that it can forward them across the Internet. Socks uses sockets to represent and keep track of individual connections. The client side of Socks is built into certain Web browsers and the server side can be added to a proxy server.
14. An expansion CARD is circuitry designed to provide expanded capability to a computer.
15. COOKIE POISONING is the modification of a cookie by an attacker to gain unauthorized information about the user for purposes such as identity theft.

Rachel Smyth is a Full-stack Developer at STATIONHEAD. She eats, sleeps and breathes code in New York City. Just kidding, she never sleeps. You can find her on twitter as @RachelScodes or at a meetup for female alumni of her bootcamp (the FA of GA).