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

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.

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

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.