Ramblings of Narc

Here’s one that should be entertaining — a listing of all the acronyms I come across on a daily basis, along with my opinion (or other tidbits) on them:

• PHP — originally “Personal Home Page”, now the recursive acronym: “PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor”. Not too painful to use, given the alternatives.
• PERL — “Practical Extraction and Report Language”. AcronymFinder also lists “Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister”, which is reasonably accurate, from my experience with it.
• SQL — “Structured Query Language”. Not “Standard”. Unfortunately.
• SSH — “Secure SHell”. Uses SSL (see below). Very solid and reliable, in my experience.
• SSL — “Secure Sockets Layer”. A technology for implementing mostly-transparent secure data transfer.
• HTTP — “HyperText Transfer Protocol”. Stateless, Simple, and Stupid. Also, very useful.
• HTTPS — either “HTTP, Secure”, or “HTTP over SSL” (which, IMO, should be HTTP/SSL), depending on who you believe. See also HTTP, SSL (above).
• SFTP — “Secure File Transfer Protocol” (not to be confused with FTPS, which is actually FTP/SSL, and doesn’t have much traction in the real world), a service provided by (Open)SSH servers in addition to the shell service.
• AIM — “AOL Instant Messenger”. Crappy software, but with a third-party client like Pidgin is actually reasonable. See also AOL (below).
• AOL — “America OnLine”. Shitty company, well known for being asshole-ish towards its customers (known internally as “members”).
• Y!M — “Yahoo! Messenger”. Semi-crappy messenger service. Reasonably functional, though, and quite stable.
• GTalk — “Google Talk”. Another messenger service, this one built on Jabber/XMPP (see below) and made by Google, the “Don’t be evil” company. Not too evil.
• XMPP — “eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol”. An open standard for exchanging (instant) messages over an XML-like protocol. Speaking of which:
• XML — “eXtensible Markup Language”. I just love these X-acronyms, they always make me feel like I’m living in the future.
• IRC — “Internet Relay Chat”. Yes, people still use it. Some pretty awesome people, in some cases, as it turns out.
• APT — “Advanced Packaging Tool”. So far, the best package management tool I’ve seen. However, my experience is limited, so a grain of salt is recommended.
• PTS — “Pseudo-Terminal Slave”. What your SSH session spawns into: a terminal with no associated hardware (virtual or otherwise).

There are probably more I’ve missed, but these will do for the time being. How about you? What are the interesting/important acronyms that you work with every day?