The Kahuna-Gordon Messages: Part 12 - The Way of the Jungle

ALPHARETTA, Georgia -- A few months ago, Professor Gordon and Kahuna had yet another of their notorious conversations. This time, it became a highly unorthodox discussion about microarchitecture, implicating flora and fauna in a manner that would have been frowned upon by Subrata Dasgupta, author of that definitive work, The Design and Description of Computer Architectures^[1].

This is a work of utter buffoonery and certainly not intended to be an affront to Professor Dasgupta, without whose works, Kahuna would have been a lesser clown.

Read on to find out what would happen if large clowns left unsupervised, designed processors.

Gordon : In other news, my daughter is attempting 
         speech synthesis.
Kahuna : Again? X-(
Gordon : Indeed.
Gordon : She executes for{int i=1; i<=10; i++} quite
         regularly, especially whilst climbing 
         stairs. 
Kahuna : #@$@%@!@#@!$%#$% 
Gordon : What, you prefer VB? X-( 
Kahuna : I'd prefer if you didn't teach your 
         daughter to code at this age X-( 
Gordon : Heh heh, be thankful it wasn't MOV AX,0 etc
         :-P
Kahuna : I will perform an LDIR[2] on your person 
         by Z80 assembly X-(
Gordon : Now, now, now.
         HALT.
Kahuna : RSET.
Gordon : JNZ LAKE X-(
Kahuna : LD CACTUS.
         PUSH CACTUS.
Gordon : [GUFFAW]
Kahuna : Heh heh.
Gordon : That would probably have caused a cache 
         miss X-(
Kahuna : You think?
Kahuna : I can just imagine not finding the cactus 
         in main memory and a foray into the Arizona
         desert X-(
Gordon : Exactly.
Kahuna : This would incur a delay of several clock
         cycles X-(
Gordon : You could attempt a prefetch X-(
Kahuna : Are you suggesting that I cache cacti to 
         avoid going off-chip?
Gordon : Well the branch prediction may compensate.
Kahuna : If it predicts the wrong branch, it might 
         fetch redwoods. This could cause large 
         scale caching problems X-(
Gordon : I see your locale is en-US X-(
Kahuna : Indeed. Flagstaff, AZ to be precise.
Gordon : If your locale was en-ZA you might have 
         fetched a baobab.
Kahuna : #$@#$@#$ You will note said baobab caches 
         water X-(
Gordon : Indeed, large amounts of it too.
Kahuna : So you're suggesting we replace the L2 with
         a baobab?
Gordon : This is a possibility, yes.  You might 
         attract vultures, though.
Kahuna : Said vultures could introduce pipeline 
         stalls.
Gordon : In local news a clown zoo had lost its 
         vulture and was issuing instructions to 
         notify police if [we] saw a vulture flying
         by X-(
Kahuna : Yes, all we need now is a vulture flyby X-(
Kahuna : I wonder why they never thaught [sic] 
         processor design in this manner.
Gordon : Judging by that last sentence they'd have 
         been too busy checking spellings X-(
Kahuna : I will lock you up in baobab if you're not
         careful. "A very large, hollow boab [sic] 
         south of Derby, Western Australia was used 
         in the 1890s as a lockup for Aboriginal 
         prisoners on their way to Derby for 
         sentencing. The Boab Prison Tree still 
         stands and is now a tourist attraction."[3]
Gordon : You appear to have branched X-(
Kahuna : It was just a look-aside during translation
         X-(
Gordon : Someone should buffer you.
Kahuna : A staging latch could be used for this
         purpose X-(
Gordon : That's quite static.
Kahuna : Well as long as it's fast enough.
Kahuna : You will note it takes a large CF to 
         explain microarchitecture in terms of 
         cacti, baobabs and vultures X-(
Kahuna : By Subrata Dasgupta X-(
Gordon : Indeed. A hyena or two will add some 
         flavor.
Kahuna : I was thinking of a fossa.
Gordon : Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Don't remind me of that
         clown X-(
Kahuna : Indeed. That book was hideous X-(
Gordon : To this day I have no idea what he was 
         trying to say X-(
Kahuna : Indeed. The sentences were so long that you
         lost track of the subject and the predicate
         when you got to the end.

Professor Dasgupta's perfectly structured, elegantly mathematical English was lost on undergraduates desperately short of cache memory to buffer the entirety of his statements. Screaming and gnashing of teeth was not uncommon during CS301.

Gordon : Indeed, perhaps it was trying to explain 
         TLBs X-(
Kahuna : I think the whole book was a corrupted TLB.
Gordon : [GUFFAW]
Gordon : You're suggesting bad SRAM by Hyundai.
Kahuna : I'm suggesting that Dasgupta got his 
         pipelines a twist. It's a good thing he 
         didn't teach surgery for instance X-(
Kahuna : Argggggggggghhhhh! You will examine.
Gordon : BTBOTP, he looks like Cuthbert Calculus.
Gordon : He's in the Institute of Cognitive Science 
         of all places X-(
Kahuna : He's written a novel as well X-(
Gordon : Oh? X-(
Kahuna : Just imagine reading that X-(
Gordon : Perhaps that's what we had in the library 
         X-(
Kahuna : He's written more than one. Probably no one
         understood it. Or more likely, survived to
         tell the tale.
Gordon : [GUFFAW]

In all fairness, the most boring book of all time is Michael J Earl's Management Strategies for Information Technology^[4]. A bane of college students everywhere, the slim volume with its characteristic dark blue cover is known to induce coma with a single page. But, we digress.

Gordon : Perhaps he may have a chance now that 
         Sidney Sheldon is out of the way X-(
Kahuna : Yes, the general public is itching to read
         about his description of how staging 
         latches help during prefetch X-(
Gordon : :-P
Kahuna : You can almost feel the suspense when he
         describes a pipeline stall X-(
Gordon : You appear to be a great fan of his works.
Kahuna : Yes, I still remember the chapter on 
         microcode X-(
Kahuna : It took me years to get over it.
Gordon : Heh, heh.

The next day, buffoonery continued.

Kahuna : Zap() Clobber()
Gordon : Vulture()
Kahuna : A deceased wildebeest will sort you out.
Gordon : Assault with carcass? X-(
Kahuna : Indeed.
Kahuna : Good lord: "A group of vultures is 
         occasionally called a venue in literature. 
         When circling in the air, a group of 
         vultures is called a kettle."[5]
Gordon : A kettle? By Russell Hobbs X-(
Kahuna : Indeed X-(
Gordon : And literature? By S Dasgupta X-(
         What form of literature has references to
         vultures? X-(
Kahuna : Indeed.  Said clown would have described 
         the venue of vultures attending the 
         processor in quite unnecessary detail X-(
Kahuna : However, I'm still not quite clear what 
         role these vultures play in the 
         microarchitecture. Garbage collection? X-(
Gordon : Garbage collection.
Kahuna : And you propose to use elephants to manage 
         the data bus? Especially if your TLB 
         predicts we need a redwood.
Gordon : For data compression, yes.
Kahuna : Who's going to fetch the data? X-(
Gordon : Carrier pigeons.
Kahuna : Carrier pigeons? X-(
Gordon : Do you have a better suggestion? X-(
Kahuna : Let me get this right: we have pigeons
         bringing in the data from off-chip storage,
         then there's a ring of elephants around the
         baobab who stomp on the incoming data to
         compress it?
Gordon : Yes, and vultures cleaning up any 
         leftovers.
Kahuna : This compression appears to be lossy X-(
Gordon : The hyenas take care of interrupts.
Kahuna : By howling?
Gordon : Yup.
Gordon : Unless you get laughing hyenas, that is.
Kahuna : In which case? X-(
Gordon : They laugh.
Kahuna : This might annoy the elephants X-(
Gordon : This is all taken care of by the lions 
         manning the control bus.
Kahuna : Oh, there are lions as well? X-(
Gordon : Yes. This worries you?
Kahuna : No, I'm just wondering how the data is
         decompressed.
Gordon : That's a patented process.
Gordon : I forgot to mention the zebras that provide
         disk striping.
Kahuna : No doubt the elephants blow the compressed 
         data back up
Gordon : I cannot comment on that.
Kahuna : You're attempting to hide a patently lossy
         compression method X-(
Kahuna : These zebras operate on RAID 1+0 or 5?
Gordon : 1+0.
Kahuna : These are high-performance zebras, BTBOTP.
Gordon : Indeed.
Kahuna : Is there a secretary bird in this 
         architecture?
Gordon : How did you guess?
Kahuna : Someone has to provide a clock signal X-(
Gordon : Er no, that's the cuckoo.
Kahuna : And pray tell what the secretary bird does?
Gordon : The secretary bird handles the storage
         abstraction layer.
Gordon : You just hand over the data and it's filed 
         on any available medium.
Kahuna : And the underlying zebras handle 
         redundancy?
Gordon : Exactly.
Gordon : And then there're the fireflies that read
         optical media.
Kahuna : X-( Yellow-ray technology?
Gordon : Er no, they were genetically modified to 
         glow blu(e). We try to adhere to standards 
         wherever possible.
Kahuna : There is no such standard X-(
Gordon : Haven't you heard of Blu-ray? X-(
Kahuna : I believe they're still bitching over that 
         and HD-DVD X-(
Gordon : Indeed; however, Blu-ray seems to be 
         winning.
Kahuna : Your alliances are noted X-(
Kahuna : We will need some adders to man the FPU.
Gordon : Did I mention we use water from the baobab 
         for cooling?
Kahuna : Er no, but I would imagine this to be 
         sensible.
Kahuna : Doesn't this architecture need monkeys?
Gordon : No they're unpredictable.
Kahuna : Yes, we wouldn't want this to become like
         parliament.
Gordon : I will now abscond for a bit to pay the 
         rent.
Kahuna : Why not hand it over to the secretary bird?

Sometime later...

Gordon : Douglas()
Kahuna : Gah.
Kahuna : Did you go off-chip? X-(
Gordon : Yes, I was peripheral.
Kahuna : I must ask the lions not to leave you to 
         your own devices.
Kahuna : On that note, I will swap myself out.
Gordon : To hibernate?
Kahuna : Indeed.
Gordon : Someone should shut you down if you ask me.
Kahuna : Bah, you've been trying for years.

Wait, there's more!

Kahuna : Hyena.laugh() elephant.stomp()
Gordon : By PKZIP.
Kahuna : At least PKZIP has a known inverse function
         X-(
Gordon : :-P
Gordon : When was the last time you recovered 
         anything squashed by an elephant then?
Kahuna : I haven't; this is why I'm waiting to see 
         your patent X-(
Gordon : Heh, heh, heh.
Kahuna : Your whole architecture could fall apart 
         X-(

On that ominous note, we take your leave. Gordon's new architecture will be detailed in the Jungle Book, coming soon to CS301 near you. Naturally, no flora or fauna was harmed in the course of this production.

^[1] Dasgupta, S. 1984 The Design and Description of Computer Architectures. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
^[2] LDIR (LoaD, Increment, Repeat) is a block-transfer instruction in Z80 assembly which can rapidly copy a block of memory from one location to another. More information available here.
^[3] Wikipedia: baobab.
^[4] Earl, M. J. 1989 Management Strategies for Information Technology. Prentice-Hall, Inc.
^[5] Wikipedia: vulture.

Blatant Plummet in Quality

WATFORD, United Kingdom -- BNN have been called in exclusively to perform an impartial review of Kahuna's (Big) last post which, for those of you that have been residing in another planet, is UQ32. This is the 32^nd in a series of extremely hilarious, but true quotes made by members (and some non-members, but close acquaintances) of the Circus.

However, this rendition of UQ is blatantly below the standard of the usual postings and in all fairness, an extremely poor attempt at what promised to be quality keyboardmanship.

Our critics at BNN have been shocked by the current release primarily because Darth Teddy makes only a single appearance whereas it is blatantly obvious that in a 3 month lull that he would have had a UQ series dedicated to himself. If our faithful readers look back on the UQ series they will see that DT plays a vital and extremely humorous part in proceedings, making it a blissful read for all concerned. In UQ32 we are talking bottom of the barrel as some material never before even thought to have been worthy of consideration have also been published. Shocking.

We will stop our review now as it is too painful to continue. In summary, we feel that the quality of UQ32 is well below par and a re-assessment will be made on UQ33 to see if it comes back to the quality that we have come to know and love.

Thank you come again.

Unquotable Quotes - Part 32

Your face probably scared the mailer daemon.

— Kahuna to the Baroness, on why her photograph was not delivered by email.

I have always been intrigued with the correlation between scanning cats and one's own illness.

— Kahuna to Gordon, on Computed Axial Tomography.

Apparently the monkeys have already started putting up banners to welcome you back.

— The Baroness to Kahuna, on a proposed expedition to the Yala.

It is the first time that I've seen a groom with hair longer than the bride's.

— Gordon to Kahuna, taking a dim view of the Hobbit's hairdo at his nuptials.

I spilt orange juice on the laptop; it's fried.

— Gordon to Kahuna, declaring sinister deeds with a little help from his offspring.

I suggest you get one of those spill-proof baby bottles for yourself.

— Kahuna, taking Gordon to task for causing a flood.

The keyboard on this thing seems to be made with chewing gum: it requires about 10 kPa to trigger a key.

— Gordon to Kahuna, bellyaching about his replacement laptop.

And the Seagate drive is as noisy as a squirrel on a tin roof.

— Gordon to Kahuna, dismissing the decibel as the preferred unit of measure for hard drive acoustics.

I casually mentioned that I was a university lecturer in IT and she toned it down.

— Gordon to Kahuna, admitting that he threw his considerable weight about to silence a luser.

We speak only Australian.

— Huggles to Kahuna, declaring an Australian-only policy.

Palayang ado.

— Kahuna, resorting to the native language to suggest that Huggles should stick his policy down under.

I have fetishes you wouldn't even dream of.

— Huggles to Kahuna, admitting his penchant for obsessions.

I have to recalibrate the Tomahawk.

— Gordon, on his pressing need for Kahuna's current location.

Application of Vaseline would have severely impacted the diffraction grating.

— Kahuna, learning that Gordon's offspring had manifested with a DVD-R and a tub of Vaseline.

Your daughter may be attempting to destroy a second laptop with a well-greased DVD-R.

— Kahuna, cautioning Gordon of weapons of mass diffraction.

She is attempting to override her ACL for objects on the table.

— Gordon to Kahuna, on his offspring's efforts to access his tablespace and engineer a second flood.

She didn't take too well to the 403 error and has left.

— Gordon to Kahuna, noting the result of revoking tablespace privileges.

She is currently transmitting wail packets on the broadcast address.

— Gordon to Kahuna, reporting further consequences of his actions.

C9 27 55 2A A7 30 B1 30 89 99 D5 0F 51 0A AA 98.

— Kahuna, laying claim to his own 128-bit integer after the AACS encryption key controversy.

Your emotions are not parsed by this channel; you will switch to approved channels.

— Gordon, taking Kahuna to task for expressing an unsupported emotion [ =)) ] on MSN Messenger.

It seems that lawrencium has no known uses, just like you.

— Kahuna, taking an elementary jab at Vandoofus.

It has a half-life of 216 minutes: just like you, if I get my hands on you.

— Vandoofus, resorting to radioactive decay to deal with Kahuna.

They take being "The World's Local Bank" very seriously; in this part of the world, it appears to be the bullock cart.

— Kahuna to Gordon, on HSBC taking two weeks to deliver a security token.

Clowns build faster processors and Microsoft builds slower software; thus is equilibrium attained.

— Kahuna's Balance of Molasses.

I am mucking about with the Seven Cores, the RSX and the Holy SIXAXIS.

— Gordon to Kahuna, swearing by a most unholy trinity.

My august personage shall stand no besmirching by thy vile lies, varlet!

— Bartus Maximus to Kahuna, redeeming his role as the Bart of San Francisco.

I'm not; this is gross photoshopping by that damned Katussa.

— Bartus Maximus to Gordon, denying that his tongue was seeking intercourse with a nearby ear as suggested by damning evidence obtained by Kahuna.

I shall send you a little effigy of myself that you can pay homage to.

— Bartus Maximus to Kahuna, on diversifying into the ornament and figurine business.

Hello, my name is E. Bunny and I am insatiable.

— Darth Teddy, confirming Kahuna's worst suspicions.

A Q minor is a C major with an intercontinental delay.

— Vandoofus, explaining the newly discovered minor scale to Kahuna.

I've always believed in government of Kahuna, by Kahuna for Kahuna.

— Kahuna to Gordon, unveiling His manifesto.

I loathe stuff with an X in them unless there's three.

— Gordon's Triple-X Principle.

Intercontinental Cacophony in Q Minor

NASHVILLE, Tennessee -- A conference call was misused under the auspices of Kahuna yesterday in an attempt at synchronized playing of the guitar between continents.

Sources familiar with the situation said that Darth Teddy in Watford and St Vandoofus in New York had rendered various pieces of music including Tears in Heaven and La Bamba while Kahuna listened from his lair in Panadura, Sri Lanka. The Bear had played an electric guitar while His Holiness strummed an acoustic version. It is understood that the duo were highly taken up with the impromptu concert and are exploring future collaboration in the form of a band, provisionally named Finger. The name is Vandoofus's tamer version of the original proposed by Darth Teddy, a self-confessed expert in form of digital manipulation envisaged.

Speaking with KNN this morning, Kahuna denied that He accompanied the duo with a foghorn, but admitted that in hindsight, He regretted instigating the conference. Kahuna revealed that Darth Teddy had become quite a nuisance to the general public since getting his paws on an electric guitar. He added that St Vandoofus had been mucking around with musical instruments for more than a decade and was mostly tolerated as long as he didn't sing. It is understood that the holy one was wont to perform in a hitherto unknown key à la Cacofonix.

KNN also learns that the musically-inclined Bartus Maximus, firmly ensconced at his Three Guitars Ranch in San Francisco also showed interest in yesterday's proceedings and had threatened to join the next session. The latex magnate was playing a round of golf in his boxers and was not immediately available for interview.

In an obligatory potshot at Professor Gordon, the arch-technologist was not available for comment, having disabled non-essential life functions to better integrate with his newly acquired Sony PlayStation 3. Analysts believe this to be tell-tale evidence of a widening rift with Redmond.

The title of this post was proposed by St Vandoofus who said that the guitar rendition sounded as if it had been keyed in the Q minor scale, also discovered yesterday.

KNN will play the developing situation by ear with mufflers on standby.