The Wondering Minstrels: Telnet Song -- Guy L Steele, Jr
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Telnet Song -- Guy L Steele, Jr
(Poem #1419 ) Telnet Song There is a program called TELNET to get to another CPU.<br>Control up-arrow is the escape; it's doubled to send it through,<br>and "quit" is control up-arrow Q.
A hacker once used TELNET to get to another CPU.<br>He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type<br>control up-arrow Q.
Instead the hacker used TEL-NET to get to another CPU.<br>He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type<br>control up-arrow [at i-th time, repeat 2^i times]<br>Q.<br>[repeat verse n times; the choice of n is free]
The hacker soon got bored with this, and wanted to get back.<br>He sighed, and started the exponential popping of the stack:
The hacked flushed the TEL-NET to the most distant CPU:<br>He couldn't log out until he had killed them all,<br>counting up powers of two: he typed<br>control up-arrow [at i-th time, repeat 2^(n-i+1) times]<br>Q. [repeat n times]
Whew!
The hacker's eyes were bloodshot; his fingers, black and blue;<br>He wanted to log out and and go home to bed, and sleep for a day or two.<br>He typed L O G O U T ... carriage return ...
The hacker was on a network with only twenty CPU's.<br>But if he had telnetted to them all,<br>he would not yet be through with typing<br>control up-arrow [repeat 7 times]<br>Q!<br>-- Guy L Steele, Jr<br>Note: This was written after an article by Donald E. Knuth, titled "The<br>Complexity of Songs":<br>D.E. Knuth, 'The Complexity of Songs', Communications of the ACM 27 (4)<br>pp. 345--348, April, 1984 (repetitions indicated; the song is only sung<br>correctly if the appropriate number of repetitions is used)<br>Some comments: Strictly speaking, the song is not part of the article;<br>it was appended afterwards. The composer and lyricist is Guy L. Steele,<br>Jr. The melody has a certain haunting quality that is quite hard to<br>convey in ASCII text. I don't know whether it has ever been played. The<br>composer has email, so it shouldn't be too hard to find out.<br>-- http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00222.html
(Sitaram points out that that last bit is a dig at Knuth's refusal to use<br>email. :))
2^i is 2*2..*2 [i times], e.g. 2^5 = 2*2*2*2*2 = 32
I've explained the maths behind the song in a postscript (it gets long)
Two of the more delightful aspects of hacker culture [see links] are an<br>abundant and enthusiastic creativity, and a strong sense of play.<br>Unsurprisingly, these have combined to produce a large body of verse,<br>ranging from esoteric in-jokes to catchy and accessible song parodies, and<br>even some genuine "poetry". There is a marked, qualitative difference from<br>poems like yesterday's, though - this is not a case of poets embracing the<br>brave new world, but rather the denizens of that world embracing verse, a<br>look from the inside rather than from the outside. (There is a significant<br>overlap with science fiction fandom's filk music, not least because so many<br>fans are hackers and vice versa, but the two are nonetheless different<br>genres).
Today's song is definitely one of the classics of the genre, and not just<br>for its distinguished (if you'll forgive the understatement) authors -<br>Kunth's notion of song complexity has an irresistible combination of<br>quirkiness and serious academic value, and Steele's song highlights the<br>fun factor while providing a good intuitive grasp of Knuth's point. And<br>while the verse itself isn't as clever as some of the others out there, it<br>has a nicely hypnotic rhythm that fits the "trapped in an exponential loop"<br>nature of the song.
martin
[Links]
"Hacker" is used throughout in the original sense of the word - see<br>http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
[broken link] http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/lectures-good/node2.html for some idea of<br>what is meant by "the complexity of songs".
[broken link] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=ANDERS.90Jun7131354%40mago.uio.no lists<br>chords for the song
Biography of Steele:<br>[broken link] http://www.sls.csail.mit.edu/~hurley/guysteele.html<br>and of Knuth:<br>http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Knuth.html
The Jargon Files:<br>http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/
And a great collection of computer-related songs:<br>http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/fullindex.html
[PostScript]
A little digression into mathematics:
There is a program called TELNET to get to another CPU.<br>Control up-arrow is the escape; it's doubled to send it through,
An 'escape' is a character that sends the *next* character not to the<br>current session but to the one below it in the stack. So, say our intrepid<br>hacker logged in to machine A, telnetted to B, and from B telnetted to C
His stack now looks like this: [hacker -> C -> B -> A]. Anything he types<br>gets executed by...