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

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.