Easter Eggs in Open Source?

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.

Comments

Open Eggs

[bjb]

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?

[boinger]

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

[JoeBuck]

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 for more details.

Re:Easter egg in older GCC versions

[ajs]

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

Re:Doom 2

[Zoid]

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.

[Black Parrot]

> 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!

--

Re:Open source isn't a good easter-egg environment

[Azog]

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

[Devil Ducky]

"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/ and if you can't trust them to define an easter egg who can you trust?

Devil Ducky

Re:Here's one for you:

[ucblockhead]

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..

[technos]

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!

[NaughtyEddie]

It was part of the game, scrawled (ISTR) on the wall in a cave, and essential to the game's completion.

Doom 2

[falloutboy]

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

[Fishstick]

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!

[slothbait]

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

[Black Art]

In the documentation for GLIBC 2.0.6 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.

Re:Web Based Easter Eggs?

[JamesKPolk]

Slashdot has the hidden discussions.

The best one ever

[Shoeboy]

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

[Seth Cohn]

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!

What is an Easter Egg without the Mystery?

[drenehtsral]

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.

Easter Eggs Considered Essential

[dsplat]

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

[Ledge Kindred]

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

[goingware]

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

[_xeno_]

You gotta love the Tacohell easter egg in /. (http://slashdot.org/tacohell)!

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

Easter Egg Archive

[YASD]

There's a collection of easter eggs at the Easter Egg Archive. It lists a couple for Linux and one for gcc.

------

DVD Easter Eggs

[Ka0s64]

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

[philj]

This site (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!

Here's one for you:

[Mr. Penguin]

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?

[MaximumBob]

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?"

Re:How do you define an Easter Egg?

[pugugly]

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 . . .

Easter eggs in technical docs

[ebh]

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.

HP ScanJet 4P

[33C]

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.