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Programming IT Technology

Easter Eggs in Open Source? 476

Posted by Cliff from the hidden-messageg-and-gniksam-drawkcab dept.
David Symonds asks: "We've all known our fair share of easter eggs, in the form of hidden screens or messages that are activated by a certain keystroke sequence, or clicking on a certain pixel, and so on. Easter Eggs have been around for ages, from the old "xyzzy" command for "Colossal Cave" (a text-based adventure), to that move in International Karate (for the C64) which would cause your opponents pants to drop, to the various "about:..." entries in Netscape. My question is, are Easter Eggs a dying breed, and has anyone found any good ones in open source software?" I've always thought that the best Easter Eggs in Free Software was found in the comments of the source-code. What was your favorite easter-egg? I remember the secret room from the Atari 2600 Adventure game, mainly because I had found that one all on my own.
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Easter Eggs in Open Source? More

Easter Eggs in Open Source?

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  • Re:HP ScanJet 4P (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This must be a pretty common thing for hardware designers at HP... even the very earliest DeskWriter's (circa late-80's/early 90's?) can play music using one of the servo motors in the printer... you just have to know the magic PCL sequence and the format to send the "music". This tradition continued at least for a while. The last printer I know of that had the feature for sure was the DeskJet 855, although it still may be there in newer models as well.

    I saw it demonstrated in one of HP's labs where somebody sent the PCL sequence to several AppleTalk-connected DeskWriters simultaneously to serenade somebody with "Happy Birthday". Not only was it surprising (being networked printers and all) it was surprisingly loud and the last place you'd expect to hear "music" coming from. Everyone always assumed there was a speaker in the printer until it was explained that it was just the servo motor being commanded to step back and forth several thousand times a second, bringing it up into the audible range of human hearing...

  • Comments in code (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was working with some middleware, and found a six page long tirade about how "Dante's description of Hell was created for evil hardware makers that force developers to program for an 8-bit proprietary system". When I called the middleware vendor, I wasn't surprised to find that the developer had left. Note that is was published sample code.

  • Re:SimCopter (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This was something of a dare proposed by your friends at ®TMark (pronouced art-mark). See http://www.rtmark.com/simcopter.html [rtmark.com].

  • Re:Konami's Contra for the NES (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That was Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A B A Start

  • Re:My retina changes daily. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is this a Slashdot Easter Egg???
  • Woah cool, someone actually remember that great game! I think it also had other special dates
    like halloween and easter? but i m not quite sure :)

    woahhh woauahhh wowuauaa bouuhuuhuhuhuhhhh...(sounds familiar? ;-)

    ---

  • slashdot probably ran this a few months ago, but it's always a good laugh:

    http://www.gnu.org/fun/humor.html [gnu.org]

    Having worked on a VAX/VMS for two courses, my favorite one is The Varorcist [gnu.org] :)

    (After a few hours/days of work and a few cups of coffee, who needs easter eggs to start laughing at your computer/operating system/software?)

  • Hah! (Score:1)

    by volsung ( 378 )
    Even though I'm a big emacs fan, I had to laugh out loud at this post. :)

  • ?? (Score:1)

    by volsung ( 378 )
    Dude, you're goofy.

  • This egg was activated in the Amiga's Preferences dialog. If I remember correctly you had to click the buttons on the mice that were on-screen in a certain sequence, hold down a key combo, and insert or eject a floppy, at which point the message would show up in the title bar.
  • Actually the Apple easter eggs you're referring to existed in System 7.5-7.5.2 and 7.5.3-7.6.1, and had nothing to do with the Stickies application. The code was in the Text Clipping extension, the extension that it possible to drag text to the desktop to create a clipping file. The trigger was creating a clipping file of the words "secret about box", which could be done by typing the phrase into Stickies or any other application that supports drag editing, selecting the text, and dropping it onto the desktop or any folder.

    System 7.5 came with a Brick-Out game, which was replaced in System 7.5.3 by a photo of Apple's campus in Cupertino with a 3-D animated flag blowing in the breeze. You could change the speed and direction of the wind by moving the mouse around, and it was occasionally possible to rip the flag off the pole (at which point it would blow away). The graphics and possibly parts of the flag code were in the QuickTime Power Plug extension, which contained the PowerPC code for QuickTime. I never say the Brick-Out game so I don't know much about it.

    --

  • its fixed now. i think it was due to clusters of proxy servers.

    I mailed CowboyNeal, to no avail, but then checked the slash page on sourceforge, where there was a bug report.
  • Uh... i'd try that, but i'm not insane
  • BTW, any one know what happened to the C64 great programmers? Jeff Minter, Andrew Braybrook, Shaun Southern, Archer Maclean?

    Well, I know Jeff Minter's webpage is at http://myweb.magicnet.net/~yak/ [magicnet.net]
    --
    Email address is real.
  • It was "To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero".
  • And you can even moderate them.

    © Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp

  • Before I started the mainframe guys here came up with one. IBM had changed some device ID field from 1 byte to three bytes. (I'm not sure of all the details)

    The emngineers knew the girl who was assigned to test this change, and she is short. So when they sent the patch to use three byte fields to test they put in code, if the device Id was set to all 8s it out output an error: "Field too short, get taller tester." They finially removed it just before release, it was never discovered.

    I accidently introduced one. Our product has a hot standby, and early on in the design someone came up with the idea that we should check out the hot standby every day to make sure it is really working. The issue was the cable from the backup controller to the hardware could break without being detected since it wasn't in use, and when the primary broke you had no controller. So I introduced code that would make it switch controllors once a day if configured to. Well marketing changed their minds on the need for this, and I set the default to off. But I forgot to tell those who wrote the configureation - they thought the default was on, and so in certina times it was possibal to activate a confiuration, which when the software doesn't see a value for this field sets it to the default (on) and tells my code to turn it on. QA never caught it, and since I never work with a configuration (that being the only configurable thing in my part of the system) I never caught it.

    Many of the engineers I work with agree with you, add known bugs. If QA finds 90% of them you can guess that QA found about 90% of the accidental bugs, if they find 5% then you tell QA to get back to work. The only problem is often fixing an intentional bug introduces a different acidental bug that may not be caught because you are mostly done with QA.

  • ...and don't forget warez.slashdot.org [slashdot.org] for your cool popular software that should be instantly recognizable. Get yours today before it gets slashdotted.

    I'm just waiting for mp3.slashdot.org to get started.
  • When you boot Redhat 6.2 for Sparc with a serial console, the following message shows up after the serial driver initializes:

    "And remember that cereal is a part of a good breakfast."

  • if you're running enlightenment, try typing
    'eesh -e "fx raindrops on"' in a terminal window.
    use 'eesh -e "fx raindrops off"' to turn it off :)
    --
    Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
    Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
  • Actually, neither of these are what I would call easter eggs; at least, not the first one.

    To quote from sudoers(5):


    insults: If set, sudo will insult users when they enter an incorrect password. This flag is off by default.


    A feature which can be turned on and off in the config file isn't really an easter egg in my book.

    As far as the "printer is on fire" message, there might be an argument for this one. I'm not clear on the specifics of this, but, basically, some printers are only capable of delivering one error message for any condition. If the kernel is talking to one of these, it has no idea if it is out of paper, jammed, whatever, so:

    else if (!(status & LP_PERRORP)) {
    if (last != LP_PERRORP) {
    last = LP_PERRORP;
    printk(KERN_INFO "lp%d on fire\n", minor);
    }
    }

    (drivers/char/lp.c, circa line 450, in 2.2.14)

    Fun, though. :)

  • My question is this: Can an easter egg still be exciting if all the mystery is taken out of it. If i can download the source, i can look for the egg that way, and although i may not bother to read it all, i'm sure somebody has read any given portion, and the eggs will all be ferreted out fairly quickly.

    There's an easter egg in Window Maker (a fairly obvious one). Go read the source and find it. It's not as easy as you think.

  • To continue the thread of embedded games and easter-eggs in console games:

    In the "Making of Lunar: Silver Star Complete" CD (in the full Playstation limited edition version) there is an easter-egg that--with a combination of button presses--starts up a multiplayer game of Pong.

    In "Tales of Destiny" (a Namco RPG for Playstation) there is a section in one of the towns that has the complete arcade version of "Tower of Druuaga". (Then again, Namco is downright infamous for in-references, and especially in "Tales of Destiny"--there are many super-deformed versions of characters from various Namco games in the background (chibi Jack2 (Tekken 3), chibi Heihachi (the Tekken series), a few other assorted characters from the Tekken series and Soul Edge) as well as some decidedly more obscure (to non-Japanese) sources--like the kitty from Namjatown (an amusement park Namco runs in Japan). For that matter, in Tekken 3 itself there is an in-reference to their amusement park chain--Xiao Yu's stage is in the middle of the Wonder Eggs amusement park (yes, Namco runs an entire CHAIN of amusement parks in Japan, rather like Paramount owns Kings Island and Carowinds and whatnot here in the States). :)

  • Not really an easter egg, because it was advertised on the box, but getting into it was just like any "real" easter egg... The Sega Genesis version of Pitfall Mayan Adventure contained an entire, fully playable, copy of the original Activision Pitfall game for the Atari 2600. To get into it, you had to play to a certain point in the game then do something particular. I forget the exact incantation, but it was really cool to see an old game entirely embedded inside a modern game.

    --Jim

  • The delight to easter eggs is derived from the same delight behind the real thing: the surprise of discovery. It's hard to hide a delightful surprise in open-source code without severely obfuscating the code.

    The other danger, of course, in a less-controlled open-source project is that the program will become more easter eggs than actual functionality. I don't see this happening with, say, Perl, which has a strong central clearinghouse for source code, but it could well happen with other projects that are controlled by a fairly large group. I know I'd hate to see an otherwise useful project for Linux or *BSD get bogged down due to source bloat and programmer distraction.

    Easter eggs have also changed through the years. They used to be fairly easy to get to, and they used to do fairly simple things. Excel's easter eggs, for example (last I checked, anyway) were getting completely out of hand, and it's (a) hard not to resent the code bloat in Excel as it is, and (b) it's so obscure to get to that I don't think anyone would have figured it out if it hadn't leaked out of Redmond.

    Now, perhaps in a strong-clearinghouse type of project, the clearinghouse might opt to maintain one bit of code that isn't immediately open source---at least, not until the next significant release (as deemed by the clearinghouse). That code would control both how the easter egg is accessed and what it is, and as soon as it's changed, the old version is released.

    It's sort of an odd way to look at open source, I realize, but it would provide an environment that provides for the delight of easter eggs, and also not let them get too much out of control.

    Just a thought.

  • It was John Romero's head on a stake. Perhaps an omen of things to come?


    Bad Mojo [rps.net]
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I'm just glad that I'm a porn connoisseur, or else I wouldn't have know what a "fluffer" is and gotten myself in trouble.
  • Not that many people read code so the comments are effectively hidden. Not that many people sit around trying strange key combinations or decompiling executables so the closed source easter eggs are hidden. When I think of "Easter Egg", I just think of a pleasant surprise that is not immediately obvious. Perhaps the type of easter egg that would be found in open source is fundamentally different. After all, the source code sort of IS the point n'est pas?
  • I got a win 95 machine at work from someone. One day I was messing around typeing random things in, and I happened to type 'loadlin'. It started up this weird easter egg called linux.

  • There was one easter egg in version 1.0.x of The GIMP [gimp.org], introduced in 1998 by Adam D. Moss. It was rather hard to find because you had to use the DB Browser and see that one plug-in registered itself as "plug-in-the-egg" but did not appear in any of the menus. If you tried to invoke this procedure, it would display some pretty animations on your screen.

    But a few weeks after this was added, it was taken out of hiding in the developer's version of the GIMP (versions 1.1.x), where it registers itself as Filters->Toys->The Egg. As Adam wrote when the hidden plug-in was revealed, I guess we need a new easter egg for version 1.2...

  • > Extra credit: Can anyone name the historical significance of this particular tune?

    Not like I knew, but google is always on standby with 4000 Linux machines to help. I found this [korova.com] right away.

    --
  • Better yet, here [vortex.com] it is in an audio link.

    --
  • Kewl! I've got a 2600 and a copy of combat at home (picked it up at a car boot sale in London a coupla years back for 30 quid!). I'll give that one a try!

    "Give the anarchist a cigarette"
  • That was a damn fine one.

    We made up all sorts of fun variations on the game. Kamikazee mode where the first one through each door won, no matter what it took to get through first. Defender mode where you won by saving your brother from getting shots, a la the secret service where you take the bullets. I think we had a couple others that were fun too.

  • I think I saw something in the slashdot code that submits this story every April 1. I don't know why it's showing up today, though.

    (nb: I'm kidding)

  • A virus, for the Amiga, which would step the heads (3 1/2") to play a song, and in the process throw them irrevocably out of alignment.
  • on the Mac.

    Make 5 boxes, select one, "command+shift+option+k" repeat with the other boxes.

    Does this work with other OSes anyone?

  • There are several EEs in BeOS (check the BeOS Bible for an incomplete list). The one I'm fond of is that just about any exotic keystroke-mouseclick combination on the browser's "About" box brings up a pop-up window with the message "Stop looking for an easter egg. There isn't one."
  • GNOME is full of easter eggs

    well 3

    1: April 1st, Wanda the fish will die

    2: Triple click the right mouse button on the panel tab in the control centre, and a new tab will appear with a GEGL [gegl.org] waving.

    3: Type GNOME on the About GNOME program and the logo changes to the sqeaky gnome toy, and it sqeaks when you click it.

    Thats all.
  • Here's a place you can start. [prunepatch.org]

    I don't know how up to date it is. You can set them up yourself. It's not hard.

    --
  • Nope, I'm certain it was piss. I was quite surprised when I stumbled on it. We had been typing in various obscenties etc... of course, and when we got to piss, it asked for a direction. So, we went about pising on things until we got to a guard.
  • It's another cheat, but what the heck...

    Also Ultima 2, I think. We discovered that you could do other command, and type is piss or urin (only took 4 letters) on a guard, and it would charge you 100 gold, and the guard would disappear. The guards were normally invincible.
  • Well, you take your average egg, boil it for (I believe) on the order of 15 minutes, pull it out, cool it, dry it, and color it, usually using dyes or paints or some such. And, provided it's fairly close to the Easter holiday, Voila! You have an Easter Egg. :)

    I think they're defining an easter egg as being a snippet of code that requires the user to use the program in an unusual way in order for it to be seen. So, if they have to enter a bizarre sequence of keystrokes at a place where keystrokes aren't normally called for, I'd call it an egg.
  • Actually, the reason why the guy was fired was because he wrote a time-triggered event where at one time, there would be HUNDREDS of guys kissing.

    This "Egg" even made national news, and Maxis offered to take the games back for replacement. Why they didn't just put "rated T for Teen" labels on the package instead is left to the ages. :)
  • With open source, however, its another story. One of the goals of programming is to develop small, fast, and tight code that leaves as small a footprint as possible. Of course there are numerous examples of bloat ware out there (how many times have you heard "Damn, excel 97 is enormous.. must be because of the flight simulator they included!"), in open source there is no reason why someone should make more bloat than necessary. In other words, with all the talent that is developing open source projects, why should a space-waster make its way in?

    I'm not at all convinced. Some of the things out of the IOCCC [ioccc.org] are amazingly small, so they don't cause code-bloat, and amazingly dense, so that you could never work out what they do by reading the source. Perfect for open-source easter eggs. My favourite is this [ioccc.org].

  • After trying to emulate the linux shutdown message for a text adventure I was writing I was poking through the source code for init and friends and discovered that if your username is 'tyler' and the system is being rebooted you get an additional "Going down Mr Tyler?" as well as the normal 'System is going down for a reboot now' message. :)
  • My favorite Egg was the +30 lives for Konami's Contra on the NES. It was something like, up-up-down-down-left-right-A-B-start. Although not open source, it helped to pass an otherwise impossible game.

    Of course that's a cheat, not an easter egg.
  • for the IIci, it was 9/20/89 (the day it was introduced). The IIfx's was sometime in March 1990. There's a Macintosh application floating around that lists literally hundreds of Apple Easter Eggs in everything from the system software for the IIgs to the Newton to the Apple Fax Modem to MPW. Astounding stuff in some cases.

    BTW, if you want to know the names of the people to blame for the office assistant, follow the instructions for this [eeggs.com] Easter Egg. It worked on the office computers here.

  • great site!

    I particulary like <a href="http://www.eeggs.com/items/906.html">this one</a>
    ---
  • Of course, you haven't denied cheating either...
  • I worked like a slave to get the 2Market home shopping CD for the Mac out in time for the Christmas shopping season a few years ago. The start of the project was delayed but the ship date could not be.

    Right at the end of the project a coworker put in an easter egg where if you clicked on his name in the about box, you'd see a full-screen photo of him holding his newborn child. This was in the first 2Market CD in November of '94

    He showed me this and I asked to add myself. When you clicked on my name, you'd get a recording of me saying "Hi Mom", then giving instructions to search for something in the product search.

    We'd already screwed with the search keywords so that searching for certain terms resulted in product matches that were somehow funny. I think if you searched for "Mike" you got a spy camera. I think nearly everyone on the project has a product associated with their name that they got to choose themselves.

    The easter egg wasn't discovered until after a quarter million CD's were pressed. Even if they could afford to re-press them, there wasn't time.

    The result of this was that I was assigned the special job of ensuring that this never happened again at Medior.

    Medior was later acquired by America Online and renamed AOL Productions. I think it's since been shut down.

    The fellow who assigned me the special task of ensuring no more easter eggs were programmed into our products was Barry Shuler, who is now some bigwig at AOL and is pictured here [cnet.com] in a CNet article.

    2Market happened just as the web was just beginning, before there was a significant amount of e-commerce. I think we did a really good job, and I was impressed with how well everyone pulled together to ship the product. I think the user experience of shopping from the CD was much better than shopping via a 28 or even a 56 kbaud modem, which is still what most people have.

    But it didn't last long, I think competition from the Internet put it out of business. I think some kind of CD/Internet hybrid, where bulk content like sound files and multimedia movies of product demos on a CD, interacting with a web site to get live content and updated prices would be pretty cool.

    Mike

    Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow
  • Yes, it was a line from Willy Wonka, but my signature contributes it to it's original author. That's where Willy got it from.

    Brad Johnson
    --We are the Music Makers, and we
    are the Dreamers of Dreams
  • Do the following in MS Excel '97:
    1) in Excel open a blank work sheet
    2) press F5 and type X97:L97 in the REFERENCE box, then click OK
    3) now hit your tab key once (you should end up in cell M97 )
    4) press CTRL and SHIFT while clicking once on the CHART WIZARD icon (the one at the top with the blue-yellow-red bar chart)
    (Accelerate with the left mouse button, and decelerate with the right mouse button. Hit Esc to exit. Don't miss the part about the nachos.)
  • Good! Then I'm not the only one who does this!

    I have to write up "ops procs" (Operations Procedures) for anything I assign to our Ops staff, and usually they skip the "definition of terms" and go right to the "type this, type that".

    I've started putting restaraunt reviews in the definitions, just to see who's paying attention.

    Meow
  • Just for the record, I know what it's referring to. I'm just questioning how an Easter Egg is defined.

  • it has to be the first one I found without being told it was there.. in doom2, on the final level, the hidden area with an impaled developer that you can only get to by using the noclip cheat and walking into the the middle of the boss monster :)

    # human firmware exploit
    # Word will insert into your optic buffer
    # without bounds checking

  • I've only seen it once or twice, and it was YEARS ago, when Linux was less stable. (Even then, you had to be doing something dangerous to see this...)

    The Linux kernel would say "Aiieeeee!" and complain about not being able to access code-pages or something like that...

    You could just tell that the coder figured, "If it ever gets this bad, the kernel is fscked... might as well be up-front about it..."

    Just one more reason why I love Linux...

    --jd

    >> Q: What do computers have in common with air conditioners?
    >> A: They both stop working when you open windows
  • Wait a minute, let me get this straight...

    You found the secret room in Atari's Adventure all by yourself? Without any help or hint that there was an Easter Egg there?

    To do this you had to:
    1) Haul the bridge around inside the Black Castle.
    2) Set it down and walk through a wall.
    3) Pick it up and try a different wall.
    4) Repeat, repeat, repeat.
    5) Do this everywhere else too in the game because you wouldn't "know" there was a secret in the Black Castle.
    6) Do it all again because that magic "key" is only 1 pixel wide
    7) Eventually have the idea to walk through the end wall in the main corridor to end up in the magic room.

    With all due respect Cliff, I doubt it.

    --
    dman123 forever!

  • The entire game of NetHack never ceases to surprise me. (And when you read the source, it gets even weirder!)

    There are enough bizarre, hidden things in that game to make almost any other adventure game look incredibly shallow in comparison.

  • Amiga was originally the successor to Atari ST, but Commodore bought it. To see what the developers had to say about it:
    1. Load Amiga Workbench and several applications. Click in the background.
    2. Holding Alt+Shift+F1 through Alt+Shift+F10 produces a credit in the status bar at the top of the screen.
    3. While still holding Alt+Shift+F1, eject a disk. "The Amiga, born a champion."
    4. Reinsert the disk. On Amiga OS 1.2 and earlier, a subliminal "We made Amiga, they fscked it up." (This is why you run other apps, so multitasking lets you actually see the message.) On Amiga OS 1.3 and later, "Still a champion" after Commodore found out about it.
    5. Thank you William Poundstone for
    6. Biggest Secrets.
  • It wasn't Tetris® because I haven't seen it on Tetris.com [tetris.com], the place for all licensed Tetris products (anything else using the trademark is illegal [slashdot.org]. However, it may have been a drop-in replacement like Tetanus, Quadra, Bedter, or the one that comes with some distributions of GNU Emacs (Alt+x tetris RET).
  • This one had the first easter egg I ever encountered.

    You had to find three grey dots hidden in the walls of certian rooms. If you gathered all three together, you could walk through a special wall that lead to a room with the easter egg. If you didn't have the three dots, you'd just see another (empty) room.

    I think the easter egg had the names of the programmers, but don't quote me on that.

    Shortly after finding this, I proceeded to tourture the machine with a screwdriver...and "programmed" a few new games.

  • VAX/VMS V5.5, on my MicroVAX 3100...

    $ MAKE :== $SYS$SYSTEM:TECO32 MAKE
    $ MAKE LOVE
    Not War?
    *


    LONG LIVE TECO! ^_^
  • what is the best easter egg of all time? None other than the dopefish [dopefish.com]!! It has become bigger and bigger ever since its first appearance in Commander Keen. It was last seen in the Well of Wishes in quake 2...or so i think.
  • I had a Mac 2Ci that when booted up on a specific date would show a photograph of the development Team. I'd sure like to see a photo of the guy who wrote that @#$* paperclip in office.
  • i think the easter egg in fallout 2 takes the cake. it was an actual in-game item called an easter egg, and looked like (you guessed it) an easter egg. it was hidden behind a shelf in the basement of some store and the entrance to the basement itself was hidden as well. to pick it up you had to click on one specific pixel.

    in the item description, it said something to the effect of "congratulations, you've found an easter egg." the egg did absolutely nothing. i thought it was a great tongue in cheek addition to what was an amazing (and hilarious) RPG.

    Power Corrupts
  • My favorite easter egg was in the home version of Mortal Kombat 2. If you played 200 games in a row in two player, you and a friend would get to play a round of Pong.
  • The only one I know of (other than the already-mentioned WindowMaker egg) is the well-know egg in OpenDeskbar [opendeskbar.org]:

    Hold down control, alt, and shift on the left side of the keyboard and press the be menu button. The menu should have an extra submenu that's called "Window Decor". Pressing one of "BeOS", "Windows 98", "MacOS", or "Amiga" will allow you to change your window borders.

    There's also some funny stuff in the Be header files, such as the functions is_computer_on() and is_computer_on_fire(), as well as the list of platforms, including the Z80 and the Timex Sinclair.

  • Open Eggs (Score:3)

    by bjb ( 3050 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:49AM (#1005622) Homepage Journal
    While easter eggs are cool things, when they're from open source projects I think someone is going to complain.

    When you find something in a closed source product (say Excel 97) its a neat thing. However, you have no control over the decisions made at Microsoft, so you accepted it with a smile.

    With open source, however, its another story. One of the goals of programming is to develop small, fast, and tight code that leaves as small a footprint as possible. Of course there are numerous examples of bloat ware out there (how many times have you heard "Damn, excel 97 is enormous.. must be because of the flight simulator they included!"), in open source there is no reason why someone should make more bloat than necessary. In other words, with all the talent that is developing open source projects, why should a space-waster make its way in?

    I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I enjoy eggs and I like to see them, with open source projects, you're only going to increase the size of the code (and possibly the complexity too, in hiding it) to add the eggs. If we're trying to prove to the world that open source is a better alternative, then why not try to streamline it as much as possible?

    Still, I'm waiting to find that egg in KOffice that lets me play pac-man in my spreadsheet.

    --

  • transmeta's web site? (Score:3)

    by boinger ( 4618 ) <boinger@@@fuck-you...org> on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:45AM (#1005623) Homepage
    It was silly, but the "there are no tyops on this page" in the comments of transmeta's not-yet-there website was great.

    okay, so it's not software or open source. so sue me; it's what I thought of.

  • Easter egg in older GCC versions (Score:3)

    by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @09:54AM (#1005624) Homepage

    So, you want an open source easter egg?

    The GNU C compiler used to have an interesting easter egg: at one point, the ANSI C draft (it wasn't finalized yet) said that the effect of #pragma was undefined. At the time, GCC had no pragmas; RMS didn't like them because you couldn't use a pragma in a macro.

    So the easter egg was this: if your code contained a #pragma, gcc would attempt to launch a game of rogue or hack. If it couldn't find either program on your system, it would print a message reading "You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different".

    See this link [uu.net] for more details.

  • Re:Doom 2 (Score:3)

    by Zoid ( 8837 ) <zoidctf@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:55AM (#1005625) Homepage
    Doom 2 had a funny one: at the very end of the game, if you weren't cheating, you had to make it to an elevator in the center of the room and shoot at a hole across the room once the elevator was as high as it would go. If you were cheating, and I couldn't beat the game without doing so, you could get into the little chamber you were shooting at. Inside was (I think) John Carmack's bloody head on a stake.

    Actually, it was John Romero's head. You can tell by the hair. :)

    It was funny--the head even had pain animations so it would scream when you damaged it.

    Another easter egg in Doom2 was the sound that played when you entered the final room that had the hole where you had to shoot into (and damage the head). The sound was some bizarre language being spoken. If you take the sound sample and reversed it, you'll find it's Romero with lots of heavy reverb saying, "To win the game you must kill me, John Romero."

  • So. (Score:3)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @09:18AM (#1005626)
    > If you take the sound sample and reversed it, you'll find it's Romero with lots of heavy reverb saying, "To win the game you must kill me, John Romero."

    Ah-ha! Now we know that the "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" from the latest Microsoft scandal wasn't really the password to a backdoor, but just part of an unfinished easter egg!

    --
  • Heh.

    *cough*. Obviously, there should just be single, large "easteregg.lib.so" that people could install or not when they set up the system.

    Any app that wanted to do an easter egg could just dynamically link to the lib. This would have several advantages:

    - reduce code bloat in apps, yet provide a very large library of cool easter eggs.

    - Easter eggs could be themeable under Gnome and KDE.

    - It would be possible to upgrade easter eggs without modifying applications

    - Make it possible to abstract the easter egg functionality - for example, on a machine with X, a fancy graphical easter egg could be displayed, but on a console, a simple message could be printed like "If you had X, you would see the really cool easter egg here... Congratulations".

    - Debian users could just "apt_get eastereggs", and RPM people could "rpm -i eastereggs" for maximum convenience.

    - A useful set of files to know:
    /usr/doc/HOWTO/HOWTO-EasterEgg
    /etc/easteregg.conf
    /var/log/easteregg/found

    - Each Linux distribution could customize the easter eggs without modifying the source of all the included apps.

    - Other advantages are left as an exercise to the reader.

    (Just kidding. Sort of.)


    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

  • Defined as (Score:3)

    by Devil Ducky ( 48672 ) <slashdot@devilducky.org> on Wednesday June 14, 2000 @03:32AM (#1005628) Homepage
    "The term 'Easter Egg', as we use it here, means any amusing tidbit that creators hid in their
    creations. They could be in computer software, movies, music, art, books, or even your watch."

    As copied and pasted from http://www.eeggs.com/ [eeggs.com] and if you can't trust them to define an easter egg who can you trust?

    Devil Ducky

  • Re:Here's one for you: (Score:3)

    by ucblockhead ( 63650 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @10:38AM (#1005629) Homepage Journal
    Yes, but it clearly does not work. I had a whole case of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in my refridgerator, and it still reported it "not found".

    I demand an update from the Enlightenment team immediately.

  • Frogger for the Atari 400.. (Score:3)

    by technos ( 73414 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:44AM (#1005630) Homepage Journal
    They used commodity cassettes for some copies due to production underrun early on. Of course, this meant they had extra space on the cassette. What to do? Six and a half minutes of the Frogger game music, and someone saying 'Goodnight'.

    What I'd like to know is who the hell was whacko enough to play back the entire Frogger program cassette in a audio tape deck.

  • XYZZY wasn't an Easter Egg! (Score:3)

    by NaughtyEddie ( 140998 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:40AM (#1005631)
    It was part of the game, scrawled (ISTR) on the wall in a cave, and essential to the game's completion.

  • Doom 2 (Score:3)

    by falloutboy ( 150069 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:43AM (#1005632)
    Doom 2 had a funny one: at the very end of the game, if you weren't cheating, you had to make it to an elevator in the center of the room and shoot at a hole across the room once the elevator was as high as it would go. If you were cheating, and I couldn't beat the game without doing so, you could get into the little chamber you were shooting at. Inside was (I think) John Carmack's bloody head on a stake.

  • Re:Doom 2 (Score:3)

    by Fishstick ( 150821 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @10:28AM (#1005633) Journal
    There's at least one in Quake2 that I remember, you drop through some acid-slime stuff and swim through a crack in the wall hidden in the shadow, when you emerge there is a bunch of cool stuff to see, including a picture of romero and his ferrarri (or whatever).

    Of course the other one that everyone always sees is the 'hall of id' at the end of the game where you see rotating pictures of the staff and go down a tunnel to see the 'tank' dude making out with a couple of 'iron-maiden' demon/cyber/hellbitch things. Ugh!

  • Windowmaker! (Score:4)

    by slothbait ( 2922 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:51AM (#1005634)
    Atleast for a while, Windowmaker would pop up a window with a smily face and play music if you clicked in some special way on the "about" box.

    I never would have known this, if I hadn't been digging through the source, looking for something else. Ah...the joys of open source.

    I never have gotten it to trigger, though. I think you have to compile with a special option for all the bells and whistles. I kind of like Easter Eggs, though...

    --Lenny

  • Unusual Error Codes in GLIBC (Score:4)

    by Black Art ( 3335 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:51AM (#1005635)
    In the documentation for GLIBC 2.0.6 [gnu.org] you will find the following weird error conditions:

    Macro: int ED
    The experienced user will know what is wrong.

    Macro: int EGREGIOUS
    You did what?

    Macro: int EIEIO
    Go home and have a glass of warm, dairy-fresh milk.

    Macro: int EGRATUITOUS
    This error code has no purpose.

  • The best one ever (Score:4)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:49AM (#1005637) Homepage
    This one was totally cool. It required MS SQL Server 6.5, SMS 2.0 and perfmon. Basically, you installed SQL and then SMS. Then you open perfmon and have it display CPU activity. When you do, you'll see the easter egg (a red line at 100% since one of the SMS components gobbles all your cpu and renders the machine useless.)
    They removed this easter egg in SMS 2.0 sp1. Pity, as it was pretty cool, and you triggered it whether you wanted to or not!

    --Shoeboy
    (former microserf)

  • Re:HP ScanJet _5_P (Score:4)

    by Seth Cohn ( 24111 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @09:31AM (#1005638)
    It's the 5P, not the 4P

    It's the one with the green scan button in the front.

    And YES, this is the coolest hardware easter egg ever.

    Music made by moving the scan head back and forth and the whine of the motor plays the notes.

    Amazing!
  • My question is this: Can an easter egg still be exciting if all the mystery is taken out of it. If i can download the source, i can look for the egg that way, and although i may not bother to read it all, i'm sure somebody has read any given portion, and the eggs will all be ferreted out fairly quickly.
    The other option would be to hide them by obfuscation, but i think that is a fairly irresponsible thing to do in a case where other people actually have to put up with your source. Now on the other hand, they could still be thrown in there to amuse users. Most of the pieces of software i use, honestly, i don't ever read through the source, i just build it and install it. I guess i'd still get a kick out of those then, but i think i'd go and read the code for the egg anyway.
  • Here's the current encarnation of that code from cccp.c:
    #if 0
    /* This was a fun hack, but #pragma seems to start to be useful.
    By failing to recognize it, we pass it through unchanged to cc1. */

    /* The behavior of the #pragma directive is implementation defined.
    this implementation defines it as follows. */

    static int
    do_pragma ()
    {
    • close (0);
      if (open ("/dev/tty", O_RDONLY, 0666) != 0)
      • goto nope;
      close (1);
      if (open ("/dev/tty", O_WRONLY, 0666) != 1)
      • goto nope;
      execl ("/usr/games/hack", "#pragma", 0);
      execl ("/usr/games/rogue", "#pragma", 0);
      execl ("/usr/new/emacs", "-f", "hanoi", "9", "-kill", 0);
      execl ("/usr/local/emacs", "-f", "hanoi", "9", "-kill", 0);
    nope:
    • fatal ("You are in a maze of twisty compiler features, all different");
    }
    #endif

  • Easter Eggs Considered Essential (Score:4)

    by dsplat ( 73054 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:46AM (#1005641)
    How can we possibly compete if open source spreadsheets don't credit their programming team via an obelisk that you have to find via the carefully hidden flight simulator built into the thing? Oh, wait, we might actually just put their names prominently on the project web site, and in the README or NEWS file, or provide a documented way to find information about the project.

    </sarcasm>

  • Good Easter Eggs (Score:4)

    by Ledge Kindred ( 82988 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:50AM (#1005642)
    If there are any open-source developers out there reading this article, please put some more easter eggs in your code that cause pants to drop. That's the kind of thing end-users really like...

    -=-=-=-=-

  • secret about box in first PCI Power Macs (Score:4)

    by goingware ( 85213 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @09:43AM (#1005643) Homepage
    If you opened a drag-and-drop aware text editor on a Macintosh running the first few systems available for the first PCI Power Macintoshes (7500, 8500, and 9500) - I think these were 7.5.3 and 7.5.4 and maybe 7.5.2, then typed "secret about box", selected the text with your mouse and dragged it to the desktop, the creation of the clipping file with that text would start an easter egg.

    It was a really nicely done one with a photo of the courtyard inside the Infinite Loop engineering complex at Apple, and superimposed on the photo (and apparently in the center of the courtyard) was a reflective flagpole with a flag of an iguana with an electrical power plug on his tail.

    The flag waved, responding to the blowing wind, and reflections of the courtyard and the waving flag appeared on the flagpole. You could change the direction of the wind with your mouse and by moving your mouse just right you could cause the wind to blow the flag off the flagpole so it fell to the ground (not visible below the frame).

    It was extremely well done and apparently was custom coded just for that purpose. It didn't use any of the 3D api's in the mac, the 3d was handrolled. I don't think it used 3d hardware accelleration in the graphics card, I don't think those models had 3d hardware accelleration.

    Also there would be scrolling credits at the bottom of the screen, in a couple of the systems you'd see my name (Michael D. Crawford) listed among them. I was very proud to be there.

    Mike

    Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

  • Slashdot Easteregg (Score:4)

    by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:42AM (#1005644) Homepage Journal
    You gotta love the Tacohell easter egg in /. (http://slashdot.org/tacohell [slashdot.org])!

    Well, OK, maybe that isn't REALLY an easter egg...

  • Easter Egg Archive (Score:4)

    by YASD ( 199639 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:55AM (#1005645)
    There's a collection of easter eggs at the Easter Egg Archive [eeggs.com]. It lists a couple for Linux and one for gcc.

    ------

  • DVD Easter Eggs (Score:4)

    by Ka0s64 ( 200106 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:48AM (#1005646)
    While Easter Eggs may not be as prevalent recently, I have been happy to find many Easter Eggs placed on DVD's. My personal favorite is the Evil Menu on the Austin Powers 2 DVD. Easter Egg hunters should checkout "http://www.dvdeastereggs.com/easter_eggs.html" for some cool easter eggs.

  • Good Easter Eggs Site (Score:5)

    by philj ( 13777 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:42AM (#1005647)
    This site [eeggs.com] (www.eegss.com) has a big list of them! My favourite one was the doom-style thing in one of the M$ Office applications - It had a shrine to Bill Gates in it!
  • Though it's not actually an easter egg, you can see it when configuring the source for Enlightenment. While all of the stuff is rolling by, you'll see it say
    checking for large quantities of bass_ale in refridgerator...not found
    checking for large quantities of any_ale in refridgerator...not found
    Then it says you need to get more ale!

    Also, when compiling Eterm, you'll see a message like this:

    checking for life_signs in kenny...not found
    oh my god! you killed kenny! you bastard!

    Not really an easter egg, but definately worth a laugh.

    Brad Johnson
    --We are the Music Makers, and we
    are the Dreamers of Dreams

  • How do you define an Easter Egg? (Score:5)

    by MaximumBob ( 97339 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:47AM (#1005649)
    Yeah, I was kind of wondering about that, myself. How do you define an Easter Egg? I mean, for a second, I was thinking that, say, the wooden cup hidden in one of the backgrounds in The Secret of Monkey Island was an Easter Egg. (you know the one -- you look at it and it says, "This is the cup of a carpenter.") But upon further reflection, that's really more of a joke. Same with the move that makes the guy's pants fall down, or Xyzzy. What exactly qualifies as an Easter Egg?

    That's one of those great questions like, "Am I pretty much just stealing from my employer when I'm pontificating about these things on the clock?"

  • Easter eggs in technical docs (Score:5)

    by ebh ( 116526 ) <ed@NosPAm.horch.org> on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:59AM (#1005650) Journal
    Slightly offtopic, I know, but I was once reviewing a document for a serial-port driver or some such. As these things usually are, it was page after page of mind-numbing detail about hardware registers, state graphs, interrupt handlers and the like. About 3/4 of the way in, the author described yet another hardware register, which had three or four bit fields of varying length. One of them was called "EAD - Earn a Dollar".

    Being the naive newbie engineer I was back then, I went in and asked him what that was, and he promptly handed me a dollar. He said he had put that in just to see if anyone would read that far.

  • Re:How do you define an Easter Egg? (Score:5)

    by pugugly ( 152978 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @11:58AM (#1005651)
    That's one of those great questions like, "Am I pretty much just stealing from my employer when I'm pontificating about these things on the clock?"

    Only if your employer pays you for thinking about a coding problem when you're in the shower.

    This has been a test of the Slashdot Broadcast Network . . .

  • HP ScanJet 4P (Score:5)

    by 33C ( 197722 ) on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @08:48AM (#1005652)
    My Favorite Easter Egg :

    On the HP ScanJet 4P SCSI :

    • Set the SCSI ID to 0(zero).
    • Power down the machine
    • Power it back up holding down the "scan" button.

    It will proceed to play "Ode to Joy" using variations in the scan-head motor speed.

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