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Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

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Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#33

Post by relwin »

incanus77 wrote: post #6
vzaliva wrote: post #5

That reminded me: Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR ( Terminate and Stay Resident ) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.) My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my c…

I recall playing an 80s-ish submarine (WW2?) game with a "spreadsheet mode".

That's probably Gato (1984): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gato_(video_game)

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#35

Post by loxs »

huijzer wrote: post #27
jama211 wrote: post #26

Isn’t it just smarter to clear your actual build folder and then rebuild it with a script? Bonus points if you limit resources to it so it takes ages? That way if they ever actually look closely, they’ll see it’s the REAL work you’re supposed to be doing that’s building, and you’ll never get in trouble

If I was a boss and saw someone being busy building Rust all day I would offer a faster computer.

Win-win I guess :D

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#36

Post by wruza »

hakaneskici wrote: post #29
vzaliva wrote: post #5

That reminded me: Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR ( Terminate and Stay Resident ) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.) My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my c…

Creative use case for a TSR :) The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :) When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.

Some mouse drivers used an upper ascii range (less used) and rendered 4 “arrow” cursor parts into it over 4 chars over which the cursor ought to be. And then replaced those 4 chars on screen temporarily. As a result you had a fully pixel-perfect cursor in text mode.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#39

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

keyle wrote: post #37

Someone please make one that makes your computer looks like it's locked up for ransomeware, and see your stakeholder's face. Priceless.

It already exists as a scam on the web. A web page that pretends to be your locked desktop, and goes into fullscreen automatically. On top of it you have a scary warning telling you to call a phone number to fix that.

Old people fall for it easily, and don't know that you can hit F12 or something to go into window mode and close it. I had to "fix" that virus a few times recently.

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