Glossary of common terms

(n.) A searing e-mail or newsgroup message in which the writer attacks another participant in overly harsh, and often personal, terms. Flames are an unfortunate, but inevitable, element of unmoderated conferences.

(v.) To post a flame.

source

Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it's unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.
In addition to wasting people's time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail. However, some online services have instituted policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers.

There is some debate about the source of the term, but the generally accepted version is that it comes from the Monty Python song, "Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam" Like the song, spam is an endless repetition of worthless text. Another school of thought maintains that it comes from the computer group lab at the University of Southern California who gave it the name because it has many of the same characteristics as the lunchmeat Spam:

Nobody wants it or ever asks for it.
No one ever eats it; it is the first item to be pushed to the side when eating the entree.
Sometimes it is actually tasty, like 1% of junk mail that is really useful to some people.

source

"Martinized" was originally a patented dry cleaning process by a North American firm. Now it refers to a similar process occurring when the moodle chief developer thoughtfully checks over code submitted for inclusion in the next updated version.

Work In Progress.

WebDAV stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning" and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol which allow users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers.  WebDAV is sometimes shortened to DAV.

Since at least 1998, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups have published RFCs on WebDAV and related issues. These publications are considered specifications for versioning, access control, searching, and ordering of resources. Many of the specifications have been implemented in software that is present in many open source and commercial offerings.

See webdav.org for more information. Also, search the web for articles about WebDAV in the popular computing press.

The Lesson module in Moodle allows a series of pages to be entered. Each page can have a question at the end, and depending on the answers a student gives can lead them to any other page. (discussion)

PostgreSQL is a full-featured open-source database with many enterprise features, including:

• Support for database transactions
  
• Strong support for SQL-92 standard
• Native external interfaces for ODBC, JDBC, C, C++, PHP, Perl, TCL, Python and Ruby
• Referential integrity
• Internal functions can be written in C, C++, Java, Perl, TCL, Python, Ruby, PHP and PL/PgSQL
• Insert/Update/Delete Triggers
  
• Inheritance
• Unicode
  
• Extensible data types
• Indexes on functions

PostgreSQL scales well into large multi-user environments, where the application has significantly intermixed reading and writing activity.

See http://www.postgresql.org/ for more information.

This is an add-on or extension for the Firefox browser that adds a variety of tools useful for web developers manipulating HTML and CSS.

It is available from Mozilla Update though the most recent version is usually available from the author's website

Highly recommended.