The Helos Whirled

They gave me a job since my references matched
And offered some pointers with no strings attached:
“You gotta print what they say, no questions asked,
Like the helos that whirled in the bygone past.”

I wanted a workout so I offered them cash,
But the table, it turned, was covered in trash.
So they put out the call, “Paging Miss Handler,”
It's her intense routine that really rams your core.

She knew right away that I wanted a present,
Looked down her nose at my privilege, unpleasant.
She climbed up a tree and said “This is crazy,
It's all packed away like a chain-store with daisies.”

But the softies just said “Oh, 's routine”
'Cause they were the ones to maintain the machines.
It might take a while but I'd surely get buff
And if I had zero left then I'd done just enough.

---

The above is my entry in the poetry dice challenge for this week to write a poem on the theme of “Memories” inspired by these dice:

If you're wondering WTF this poem has to do with memories, allow me to explain: My first career was as an engineer in the microprocessor industry, where one of my focus areas was the memory subsystems of microprocessors, so I found it amusing to think of “memory” in those terms rather than what you'd traditionally expect to find in a poem.

This poem is written from the perspective of a print function: it is getting passed a memory pointer to a string which it is supposed to print out, just like the print functions in the “Hello, World” programs that every beginning programmer starts with. Since the processor running the function would like to execute quickly it hopes that when it follows the pointer it will be able to read the location from the cache. But no such luck! Not only is the line not in the cache, its virtual memory translation isn't even available because the page tables have been “trashed” by the OS and marked “page not present”. Because it “missed” the translation the page handler gets automatically invoked so that the appropriate information can be loaded into RAM (or the “core” memory, to get a bit retro), and then set the “present” bit in the page table. The page handler runs at a more privileged level than the user-function that called it, it parses the tree-like structure of the page tables and determines that the information isn't currently in memory: it's been stored to disk, apparently on some daisy-chained interface like SCSI. This isn't that surprising to software, an OS routine simply needs to read the information from the disk and put it in memory, which is a normal part of how the OS maintains the operation of the computer. Once that's all done the function will have its input in a memory buffer. And, since it's a function written in a C-like language it's using a null-terminated string: it should just keep printing characters from the starting memory location it starts at until it reads a location that's zero, i.e. the null that indicates the string is over.

The dice references: The speech balloon is in the idea of printing (saying) whatever you're given as input. The earth is in “Hello World” (or “helos whirled”, since I wanted the reference to be a little off-kilter). The book (with its pages) and the hand are the page handler, which gets implicitly called (the cell phone). It traverses the tree of the page table data structure. Core memory used magnetism to store bits of data. The tepee is a tent, in tents → intense (this one is a real stretch). The flower is in the daisy-chained storage device.

I don't know if this poem is great art, but I amused myself by trying to write it from this perspective. My initial impulse was to be even nerdier and more focused on the cache hierarchy and other microarchitectural features inside a microprocessor, but the dice images worked better at a slightly higher level of abstraction.