Friday 4 March 2011

Escape From The Cubicle


Last year I had found myself becoming increasingly bored at work.  My less than glamorous job provides me with 10 minute intervals of time with nothing to do but stare at a computer screen.  Having ruined my interest in websites like reddit and slashdot by spending an unholy amount of time sifting through ffffuuuuuu comics and cat captions on the former and becoming frustrated with the inability of the latter to provide enough material to last me the entire day.  I decided to plot my escape from cubeland.  Not an easy task but not insurmountable either.  Probing the walls of my prison, I soon discovered that taking the direct route was out of the question.  The system that I use runs off a network drive and does not allow one to install any software without Herr Administrator's approval.  My access to the command line has also been removed and with it the limited supply of native tools I had at hand.  Through the long drudge of days chained to my desk by that manacle of a headset I slowly hatched a plan.  Gathering the required information by word of mouth and Google searches and testing it's feasibility in the evenings, eventually it came together.  My captors, out of necessity, had not disabled Java on our workstations.  Overlooked at first, the significance of this suddenly dawned on me.  A new world of Java applications opened up to me!  My first breakthrough came when I discovered shellinabox, allowing me to access the command line on my Linux box at home discreetly within a web browser.  Frustrated with it's sluggish interface, I grew more daring.  Soon I had a cloud9 server running at home and I was able to afford myself the luxury of an ide.  I still had to compile and execute my code through shellinabox and it was painful to watch it stutter across the screen.  As the months passed I became sure that what I was doing was either being ignored or completely missed.  Now I've thrown all my chips in, I now happily ssh into my system using mindterm and am even brazen enough to leave the jar file sitting in my network storage.  Life has never been so good.  My next steps?  Perhaps I will serve a webpage and devise a way to port my code to Java and embed it in the page so that I can work on graphical projects.  If this helps anyone out of a similar predicament, let me know.  I'll be glad to have helped someone.

15 comments:

  1. yes java can cause some probleme sometimes

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  2. Java applications is not stables applications around

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  3. Ughh where to begin with Java lol.

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  4. Haha this is awesome, glad you're keeping busy!

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  5. where's ricky gervis and stephen merchant when u need them

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  6. i COMPLETELY agree with the getting bored with repetitive websites.

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  7. I wish I could do this aha!

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  8. don't get caught man, you'll get canned for sure! try wanking in the bathroom at work if you're bored and need a thrill.

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  9. Totally agree! Followed!
    alphabetalife.blogspot.com

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  10. Tkae a look at Inferno. I use it at my networking swiss army knife. It's nice for piercing firewalls.

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  11. I work, scratch that, almost live in a cubicle too :/

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  12. uff sounds like helll
    know what you mean about getting bored by the web
    used to be amazing and never get bored but i guess there is always something to do in a PC :)

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