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Easter Eggs in Web Sites?
cwikla asks: "Back in the .COM days, I worked at eGroups, now owned by a larger Company. During my time I added a couple of easter eggs to the site, which I was reminded of while watching Being John Malkovich this weekend. I checked, and ones sort of still there. If you append malkovich=1 to a message URL it would turn the message into 'malkovich' mode. It sort of still works, but over time I guess the code has been a changin' so it's kind of spotty. Oh, there are others that still are in there, but where's the fun of telling all the secrets? Any other folks done anything equivalent, especially on mainstream sites?"
comments.pl!
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Malkovich,
Thas was a cool egg.
Malkovich
Most Easter Eggs are things people might stumble upon...but appending words and parameters on to URLs isn't something I would find. How do you expect anyone except yourself to see these?
Is the Phantom Editor's website. Of course... he made the entire thing in flash so he could easily make eggs.
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
At the College of Business site I develop for, we used to use a picture of Yoda to scare the folks who wouldn't let us take their pictures. Seems as though most of them prefer a picture of themselves (no matter how horrible they may think it is) to one of Yoda attached to their bios.
In any case, changing the bio's email tag to "yoda" gives the visitor Yoda's (short) bio. There are a few others, but seeing as how nobody has found any of them yet, we gave up on adding them for our own amusement.
-Gabe
For attempts to compromise the security of the server while you are trying to find Easter eggs.
No extra pictures of people's flesh melting from their bones, though.
The last company I was at used all web-based customer management tools. If you searched for something like "I like banannas" it forwarded you to a java based tetris game.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
that all those pr0n pop-ups and pop-unders WEREN'T easter eggs?!?!
I thought the typos and bad grammer were were the easter eggs on slashdot.
Have you hugged your Karma Whore today?
I would append a url string like ....cgi?author=who
and the page would parse out my contact info. I would use this for portfolio pieces when demoing new clients. It just proved that you worked on it.
I had hacked up a custom redirect from the old bookmarks to the new locations when a graphics software company changed their whole layout. Since I already had the ability to program any redirect I wanted, I added ones to my homepage and the other webmaster's homepage as our own little credits for the site. Lasted a while too before the next redesign killed it all, but it was a cool way to prove I had worked on it.
Using a classic bit of social engineering and a photograph donated by a mutual, er, friend, we modified a directors web page at UUNET. If you click on just the right letter, it takes you to a photograph other than the one you would expect. I checked a few minutes ago, and it's still there....
I run a CD review site, and occasionally review bootlegs. One time, after posting a boot review, I got a nasty letter from the content owner telling me that it's naughty to encourage piracy. Since these guys also send me legitimate promo CDs, I didn't really want to piss them off, but my sense of journalistic (snicker) integrity was also enflamed. So I cut out all links to the review, but left the actual page on the server. My page name format is standardized enough that people familiar with my site can find the review if they think to look for it. (or know that it used to be there)
I consider http://apple.slashdot.org/ to be an egg... a lot of people don't know about it.
Funny, all I got was an alert, "This document contains no data."
I thought this was well known. Apparantley it hadnt propigated to the proper people yet, so I will let everyone in.
Websites have always had little secret links and the such. Just about every major website, like yahoo or espn has had these secret links. Generally you can find these little Eggs if you look closely enough. THe most common one is in the bottom right corner, usually its a slightly changed color of the background, in the shape of a capital Pi. Lots of times when you click on that you can be put into the backend of a majority of websites.
pogmeister
Fortunately, the rest of the world can't see what a goof he is! :)
4-bit adder: A snake made of 1's and 0's
Here's one you can find on slashdot: If your comment consists entirely of "First Post", you get modded down to -1.
Seems kind of like a security hazard to me if you messed it up.. I've put some in local programs, and there are quite a few other companies who have as well (MS Office for example has many). I think easter eggs are fun, and good for a laugh, but often are too hard to actually find. I don't know too many people who have actually "stumbled" upon too many...
Go on to http://www.ask.com and ask Jeeves if he's gay :-)
This used to result in a funny error message something like:
"Server Error 505 - None of your business".
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
goodness... Cliff man: you remember enough from that (bad) movie that vividly to talk about it?
there are newer movies much more worthy of rememberance, ya know...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
1. Eeggs.com is good site for Easter Eggs in general.
2. You'll find a few web sites with Easter Eggs here.
How to Download YouTube Videos
Have a look at this. (The Easter Egg is in the JavaScript). Sorry about the rest of the site - the web server seems rather badly configured atm. And sorry to Mozilla users - it doesn't seem to like the Egg much. I don't know why (anyone?).
(Hint: double click the logo)
Owl tried to think of something wise to say, but couldn't.
For "Security" on a friends site he has it redirect to goatse.cx if you try to change strings.
I learned my lesson. I don't try to fuck with his site anymore.
Klingon Google.
:)
Pig Latin Google.
What we need is an xx-askslashdot google.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Most of the easter eggs I ever programmed were for debugging purposes, like having undocumented debug modes. Many game developers have invincible modes so they can test the game, jump to different parts of the game, test all the different scenerios.
A few here and there
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
sounds like it works!
Remember all the fuss about that company from Norway called FAST Search and Transfer? I worked for a company that licsenced their technology and built what was supposed to be a competitor to Google (riiiiiiighhttttt....) it sucks now becuase they've put all kinds of ads up, but the engine itself is quite good. Anyway, if you highlight the two empty cells on the help page at http://allthesites.com/searchhelp.htm you'll see my initials. Not a big deal, but at one point we were getting serveral million hits a week, so it's pretty mainstream.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
I swear my server doesn't have easter eggs, but that doesn't stop some people from trying:
/scripts/..%255c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c +dir HTTP/1.0" /_vti_bin/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c../winnt/sys tem32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0" /_mem_bin/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c../winnt/sys tem32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0" /msadc/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c/..%c1%1c../..% c1%1c../..%c1%1c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0" /scripts/..%c1%1c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"
"GET
"GET
"GET
"GET
"GET
I wrote a Java applet that you should be able to access here:
http://amdemo.audiomining.com/
Just click on one of the media links. I think a right-mouse click on the logo in the applet will pop up a list of credits. Unfortunately, my name is no longer there, even though I was the creator. My name and others have been neatly edited out as people have left while the group has moved from Dragon to L&H and now to ScanSoft.
I spent many hours on that silly Java applet trying to keep it working under Mac, Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It appears that those working on it now have not been so dedicated. It does not run on my Solaris box.
Heh, my favorite was on black-background pages, having a random background image with an embossed super-dark-grey color... so only people in 16bit+ color COULD see it, if the brightness and contrast was high enough.. and once they did see it, it'd still be hard to discern. :)
:(
I remember putting a little easter egg into an undisclosed "mature webcam site" that would bring up the webcam of the NOC... I'm sure that nearly 3 years later it's gone, though... especially considering that the webcam of the NOC has changed IPs.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
An interesting question would be - is it a waste of company time and resources to develop easter eggs? Are there any companies whose management actually encourages this?
All your favorite sites in one place!
I always liked google's "more evil than satan himself" egg, although it seems as though it does not work anymore...
If you type in your email into a textbox and press enter, you will suddenly be getting a lot more mail.
badness 10000
Stay in view! Agents will be there to 'assist' you shortly!
</haha>
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
When I Decided to leave Comcast@Home I put my resume in the template source code as comments.
.. no crank calls .. even for having my phone number out there 'obtainable' as it were.
[Just in case I needed to prove to potential employers that I was what I said I was.]
It was there for about 3 months before someone caught it.
Oddly enough
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Go here and post your eggs. Hopefully others will follow. ~N
in the URL field. It's sorta like funny. I guess.
agreed
Anything you say will be held against you.
Theres a cool easter egg at the seti@home project, you normally get a crappy certificate when you pass a workunit milestone, but if you fuck with the request, you get a funky kang and kronos (from simpsons) one....
a il=seti@sun.com&cmd=print_cert&certnum=10000&size= 0 a il=seti@sun.com&cmd=print_cert
:op
example Normal cert: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?em
example easter egg cert: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?em
well...i found it funny
As a result of this, I eventually was on a project to create some sort of interactive software for parents to use in 'meet-the-teaches' night to showcase some of the students' achievements and to give an intro about each teacher/class. Into this, I built some easter eggs. For example if you clicked on the rectangle at the bottom of this one screen, it would take you to a hidden 'credits' page. There were some others where you could get it to play music and such.
not a flame: This comment brings up a common misconception: Easter Egg development wastes time. Some of the better Easter Eggs are put in after the code has been approved, before it's released. This ensures that it gets in, and doesn't change the debug time at all. Also, as a programmer, Easter Eggs help me feel better about what I release: if I'm going to spend months to years on a project, I want at least a little bit of my personality to show up in it, even if it is in a hard to find place. Anyone else feel the same?
CODITO, ERGO SUM: I Code, therefore I am.
I've had a unlinked page on my Wizardry site for awhile now. If you read around in it you'll get instructions for the URL. Of the few thousand hits it gets a week, about a dozen people stumble on the secret page.
Back in the day, just after K-Mart relaunched their site as "bluelight.com," if you searched for the product "All Your Base" you would be treated to the flash animation of All Your Base Are Belong to Us...
Quite funny indeed...some months later, it no longer worked...I honestly believe the web master was fired for it or something, but who knows?!
AskJeeves.com used to have one where you could ask "Is Jeeve's well hung?" and it would respond with something like "Error 504: How dare you!"
This is an oldie: For great justice!
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
I don't know if this issue has ever shown up in any other Web mail sites, but there has been a CERT advisory about it. If you send a non-malicious Javascript, it is kind of cute. Of course, I'm sure there are malevolent people out there who could use it for nasty stuff.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Have you ever wondered if Jeeves is gay? You should ask him! Now it takes you to a little page but it used to take you to an error page (like 404) except the error was "None of your business". He he he.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
*(the jabberbot is an 'buddy' that appears on your buddy list and it answers FAQ/help questions)
i worked for a firm that developed a site geared towards selling baby supplies to parents.
anyway, they were trying to build it out into a "community" type site as well, so they wanted a message board.
well, some of the mothers can get outta hand... maybe it's the hormones or something, but anyway, they asked our developer to write a script that would just go through a post and remove explatives. well, when he went to do it, I convinced him to add a little "easter egg" in which if someone typed in the word "wanker" it would replace it with all of the bad words that were being removed as one big long string.
I love n00b cam sites. The "egg" is that they don't always turn off directory browsing so you get to see images that they really didn't want you to see.
Not really hacking, but fun to spy around. Something like: http://pinksugar.net/cam/
Which might not having anything that she doesn't already have on the site.
Live web cams
Elmer Fudd Google
H4x0r g00g13
Swedish Chef Google
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Years ago, I had to make a documentation website for work. Since I was learning javascript at the time, I decided to play around with it: between noon and 1pm, the last letter of one of the links didn't take you to the linked page, but instead changed the site logo to a picture of Fritz the Cat. I think the only person who ever noticed was one guy who was looking at the source and couldn't figure out what that javascript did...
A friend of mine who knew our high school's webmaster showed me an easter egg they put in. You go to this page http://www.jefferson.k12.ky.us/Schools/High/Manual /va/VAstinfo.htm and click on the lips of Leonardo Rivera's picture and you get a funny page about dead clowns. I graduated about 4 years ago, so it's been up at least as long as that.
I had a friend who was doing website upkeep (among other things) for a (rather major) company. www.XXXX.com took you to their (normal) site, but wwww.XXXX.com took you to his (personal) site.
I couldn't tell if you were experimenting with poor-man's cryogenics or looking for the orange sherbet.
See, that's what the Anonymous Coward thing is for? To prevent people like you from being sued. Tell us about the lawsuit in a slashback, k?
*ahem*
Loooooooooooong time ago, in one of the sites I was working on, if you didn't have Javascript enabled it would just print "Hairy Moose Balls" instead of showing the rest of the site. It was a stupid testing thing, nothing serious. Of course, my boss ended up demoing the site to the client and the client didn't have JS enabled... Surprise!
[o]_O
How do you get the flight simulator to open in Excel? Please enlighten me.
Every site, or more specifically interesting component I built was egged.
:) Not backdoors mind you, just "Author Control's" :)
:)
.....how many egged sites are out there ?
I did this for 2 reasons, 1 company I worked at, my MGR had a VERY bad habbit of claiming work was his, he would do a search and replace on Our names with his own....schmuck, SO, I would easter egg a cgi into it for "Author and Verion control"
Lol....It basically said it was built by me when and what cool stuff it did.
The second reason was Job Hunting, nothing like bringing up a killer site and being able to PROVE you were the constructor. Worked like a charm every time. Or if I was a company or two down the road from something of note I built, I could prove it was mine.
I started doing this in the early 90's when a lot of applications we were writing were for exclusive distribution and branding by third parties, who were never going to , or expected to give credit, of course they still graced my resumes....ONCE I had a company get contacted, they claimed it was all written in house, and I was lying about having ever worked on the app, NOW I can actually understand this , it was a finacial app and the thought of eggs or backdoors must have been scarry, I got called on it in my secnd interview. I explained why the company lied about my involvment and promplty offered PROOF of my involvment on particuar modules....I got the job.....:)
I still do it to some extent although not as clandestine or ego-centric. I proved myself to those in the area a loooonnng time ago. But its cool that over half the site I put up are still up in their original form and doing well, most are ecommerce site, and their eggs are still there
If code goes under the proper review channels, as it should before release this should never happen, funny thing is you have guys in charge of this stuff like me who then add it
But then again , on a smaller site that then gets gobbled by a 800lb gorilla you may see this, I guess If Ive done it, the author has done it and as many slashdotters Ive seen have done it
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
HP Scanjet playing Ode to Joy...
http://www.eeggs.com/items/557.html
From an episode of Farscape (paraphrased):
:)
Chrichton (human): OK now count, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi...
Dargo (big alien with tentacles): One Mippippippi, two Mippippippi, three Mippippippi...
At the ecommerce company I worked for, Zoovy, I wrote the shopping cart system used by a few hundred merchants. I wanted to make a completely innocuous egg since it would be used on stores selling everyting from dildos to bibles. If the merchant turns on international orders (so the state selection in checkout turns into a box instead of a dropdown), and you type in Mippippippi, it corrects it to Mississippi. I know, I know, boring...
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
I'd hardly call functional testing easter egg. And people don't usually leave their test cases in the final release.
When I worked for Audiogalaxy (yeah, I'm another ex-Audiogalaxy programmer). I had a discussion with the music reviewers of creating a "Dancing Penis" page inspired by the hampster variant. Unfortunately because of time constraints I was not allowed to implement this wonderful feature.
My grammer was a nice old lady, leave her out of this!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Oh yeah, when Eudora moved to adware mode and went public beta, me and a guy from tech support put in some ads of our own (accessible only to a small range of IPs, though). We had a Russian brides one, some personal lube ads, Gary Coleman, the usual. We used most of them for testing during the private beta, but one we did add was a picture of a former VP who played a large part in causing the ruination of the Eudora group. It wasn't a flattering ad, and predictably it didn't rotate for very long, but it got seen.
Ahh, the memories...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
In the software I'm writing (Windows app), we've put in an easter egg that brings up a picture of one of the guy's dog (Yorkshire terrier that he absolutely loves) with an algorithm to animate flames superimposed on the picture, to achieve a burning dog effect.- Return
How did you get there?
Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A
(Up, Down, Left, Right being the arrow keys... No start key, so we had to go with return).
Anything you can reach through obvious links, starting from the home page, isn't really a hidden "Easter Egg", is it?
(Even the Google funny languages like Klingon and Hacker are listed on the Language Tools page...)
One of the sites that I wrote about 7 years ago included this HTTP header line in every response it sent out:
X-Urban-Legend: There's lots of hidden information in HTTP headers.
As computer programmers, me&my friends did quite weird things as easter eggs.
:P
:)
I used to work at a GPS-software company. When in navigation mode, if you typed "where in the world is carmen sandiego?" (actually only the initials and it worked, witwics?), it showed the precise position of my cubicle in the company's office. It was (believe it or not) quite useful to test the software's precision for many functions... I had to remove it though because we were lacking space the hard way and my code took 230 bytes - with 4k of free RAM, 230 bytes is a lot! No one would've found it as it was quite stealthy and precise enough it wouldn't crash anything... but when in monger for space, well, I have a conscience too
On a mainstream computer game, we were coding something where buildings could be put in place and under certain conditions, they could be destroyed. Then, sept. 11 arrived... We _HAD_ to make a small aircraft that goes on the buildings and make them crash. It is totally sick but anyways. The mod code and picture is on a CDROM copy somewhere, as it was totally kick-banned from the final code, for obvious reasons (even if almost impossible to find).
On the successful ones, I have more than a few hidden credits on my side, I used to comment quite extensively my javascript codes. One thing I found out was that record #0 of many of my databases are never used (sanity check). So I write anything that comes into my mind when creating that record. No one will see it anyways... And it's always selected out from any of my queries.
When creating a easter egg, you must remind yourself of something: it will always be shown somewhere. Don't put yourself in trouble, write "cutsie" thing, not things that you could be taken accountable for. For example, never put pr0n in a child game, don't put sicko things anywhere, don't kick the company in the groin... or else, someone will find it and then, you're in trouble (especially if CVS system is implemented - they can backtrace!)
Other than that, well, have fun, easter eggs are quite fun to do and discover! And they personalize the code too.
Have a nice day
Mike
There are lots of dns txt record easter eggs out there. I remember that some website (was it 2600) had decss in it for a while. You can do:
> dig txt foobar.com
Funny that this came up today. Yesterday I put a silly easter egg in a dns txt record of unixboxen.(com|net|org).
I worked as an engineer at a Lockheed
subcontractor for 8 years and wrote their first
web pages for them in 1995.
If you clicked on the teensy-weensy link to my
e-mail address on the bottom of one of the more
obscure pages, you would sit staring at a blank
screen for about 5 minutes while a HUGE gif image
of the artwork from a Uncle Miltons Ant Farm box
loaded up and printed my PGP signature in pale
yellow on top of it.
The picture was an ants-eye perspective of a very
manic looking kid leering into an ant farm... I
added a caption:
"Geez, look dad... there's an engineer in the ant
farm!"
I mapped the colors for maximum shock value and it
was VERY disturbing to see if you were not expecting it!
Is Jeeves Gay?
Will You F*** Me?
BTW: The "Is Jeeves Well Hung" no longer seems to be working.
Slashdot: rejecting tech news in favor of rubber band guns since 1997.
My egg consisted of a weird picture of a squirrel that my dad had sent to me. It would come up in the content section of the (now-defunct) site whenever someone typed a common curse word in the search text box. There was a little caption that said "Sammy the Squirrel says: Saying dirty words is just nuts!"
Don't ask. I was just bored that day.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
Loved the 404 at http://www.sweweb.net/
Try http://www.sweweb.net/garbage.html for instance.
At my last job I built and linked a web-based tic-tac-toe game from the last period in the paragraph under my executive bio on the "staff" page. It's gone now :-(
Another cool easter egg, although not web-related: Memepool posted this a while back. Someone discovered a "face" painted into the spectral view of one of the musical tracks on Aphex Twin's Windowlicker CD.
the original page is converted to this page. The only changes I can see is the sender is changed to malkovich@m... and the subject is changed to Malkovich.
You need to have cookies (groups.yahoo.com cookies at least) enabled.
At the job before that we had a couple more eggs...
1) We had a magic eight-ball cgi page. Type in a yes/no question and get a stupid and sometimes vulgar response.
2) If certain words appeared in certain fields on certain forms, various graphics would be replaced with photos of the developers.
Article here
on my personal website (check my /. profile), there is a certain section for a particular month which is blank.. The message on the page says "Use the force, Luke" ... based on that - anyone with half an http noggin should be able to figure out how to enable this page which contains some pictures of a person that no longer wishes to be displayed on my site...
;-)
ahhh, people always consider the kids after a break-up, but what about the website!
Marques Johansson
How typical of a guy to be unable to find it. ;)
-Sara
Click the red X on this map... Map Egg
...according to the submission guidelines here
"Creeping Dependency" + "Boss's Schedule" == "Debug Feature!"
More than one thing I've done has had a hidden mode or two. My favorite is PATH_INFO hacks in CGIs. Good place to hide debug where it won't interfere with the security checks for the get/post variables
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)
Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Azerbaijani,
Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bihari,Bork, bork, bork!,Bulgarian,
Catalan, Chinese (Simplified),Chinese (Traditional),Croatian,Czech,
Danish, Dutch
Elmer Fudd,English, Esperanto, Estonian
Faroese
Finnish
French
Frisian
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Hacker
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Interlingua
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Klingon
Korean
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Marathi
Nepali
Norwegian
Occitan
Pig Latin
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Scots Gaelic
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tagalog
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Tigrinya
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
What next? Romulan Google? Redneck Google? And just what sort of language is "bork, bork, bork," anyway? Although, a slashdot google would be
a lot of fun!
I give up. What does it say?
--
E_NOSIG
on what people are asking. ./'ed?
most amusing.
I like the Slashdot X-Header tags, I'm not sure they count as real easter eggs - but I was amused when I first spotted them.
If you have netcat installed you can view them like this:
(Use /bin/echo so that the \r\n are expanded correctly - I don't think that most shell builtin versions of echo do this).
Ask babelfish to translate anything einding in "beer" from german to english For example "I like beer"
will I ever find true love?
drink me?
Who's on first?
Is Jeeves well hung?
how are you?
what is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
is Jeeves stupid?
what is the best search engine?
f*** you?
why do I never see baby pigeons?
find him here.
Verified this works on groups.yahoo.com. If you are subscribed to a group, go to the message archives (any message will do), append "?malkovich" (without quotes) to the end of the message number, =1 not necessary. From line reads "malkovich@malkovich.com" Subject is "Malkovich"
Go to any "CNET Comparison Chart", click to the "Printer Friendly" version, and look for a clear GIF just below the words "CNET Review" in the left most column...
yomama=fat
reload for a random "Yo Mama" joke everytime
I was working on a web/DB/e-commerce integration project a few years ago and added myself to the Products Database.
:)
I had my specifictions (height, hair color, etc.), system requirement (flex time, 4 wks paid vacation, etc.), and other things like recomended market segment/uses, etc.
Then I put a little work-around in the code so that particular "product" wouldn't show up in any of the list/sort views or with any regular searches, but if you searched for my name, you'd get a lovely page with all my info (including contact info in case someone wanted me for another job).
Not that interesting, but it made me feel good to be able to pull it up 2 years later.
When your BSD-related story gets submitted and approved, "BSD is dying" posts suddenly appear.
Look at the source code to web pages. I've read things like jokes, codes, quotes, messages, etc. They are commented out so no one will see them in their browser unless they look at the source code.
Just my $0.04 (adjusted for inflation)
About 1 1/2 years ago I was working on a system to produce multimedia proposals. Being extremely bored one day, we made this little easter egg where if you held down cntl and pressed the down arrow on a certain spot on a Flash help system, a big fat sweaty lady would fly across the screen and "Moo" at you. It was pretty sweet. Unfortunately the project is still in development so i can't show it to you guys. It was originally supposed to take 6 weeks but is approaching year 2 in development. Oops
I did a hidden staff page for a company that I worked for. Kind of like a 'credits' thing that was really funny. I obsfucated it by changing all the characters to their ascii codes so it wasn't as obvious if someone viewed the source. I did this after a previous employer threatened to sue me for putting in an egg that told about all the problems in the company :)
The Anti-Blog
The slashdot headers contain lines from bender and fry. go and see for yourself http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Append "?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42" to the end of any php page running PHP$ gives a goofy picture of one of the PHP developers.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
egroup example
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Ugh, don't go there.
Today this web site almost ceased to exist, so it doesn't matter. Back in October of 2000 our company (www.nunet.tv) had a project -- reincarnation of boo.com. (Original Boo was resold to fashionmall.com after it had burned through 137 mil VC money). The project was one hellish ride, but that's another story. Our designers created a Flash front page with an easter egg: it'd display "Nunet rules!" once you typed a key combo.
I heard Worldcom hid a lot of revenue in thier website. Good luck finding it though. ;-)
I've personally placed easter eggs inside of flash movies for commercial sites that I have worked on.
Kind of cool, bug generally hard to find. If they are too hard to find, nobody will. If someone can tell that there is something there then they will try to access it, whereas a casual observer will overlook it.
"You're on my side and the dark side, like Lando Calrissian?" --Gimpy, Undergrads
Try http://www.etree.org [etree.org] @ 4:20pm EST to find out why everyone's so laid back...
The funny things are:
1) I never expected that script to last until 1997, much less until 2001
2) I wrote the cgi in C.
Not sure if it's common knowledge but Slash does this (X-Bender header):
[anna:~] linville% telnet slashdot.org 80
Trying 64.28.67.150...
Connected to slashdot.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 21:52:08 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_perl/1.25 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
X-Bender: A woman like that you gotta romance first!
[SNIP]
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Ah, only IE? Well, then I approve. This computer at the library only has IE. :-(
When I was working at the Technical University of Vienna, I got to know the admin who showed me a funny easteregg he implemented on
www.prip.tuwien.ac.at
find the invisible link!
HINT:
check the upper part of the image
A couple of years ago, as a Technical Writer responsible for Online (HTML) Help, I decided my company's online documentation was too sleepy and added a hidden link (white text) to a DHTML pong game included within the compiled help file.
Miko O'Sullivan
If you are running Mozilla 1.0 on a non-UNIX platform, click and drag the bookmarks button onto the browser window below. You'll be taken to my Mozilla Easter Egg Page. It gets approximately 200-300 hits per day.
Zip drives aren't worth free, they have an easter egg where they make clicking sounds and bad blocks. :-)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I've helped create a number of easter eggs in the past, but these days, I've had a serious change in thinking about them.
This may sound extreme, but if a coder added an easter egg to a project that I was running, they would get in serious trouble, maybe even fired. Now, before you think that is just being too serious or flame-bait, here's my reasoning:
Simply put, easter eggs are for the developers, not for the customers, and they don't belong in commericial software developement. The risk almost always outweighs the benefits, especially in a project like a public site! That is incredibly dangerous.
One of the biggest problems with easter eggs is they almost always bypass the QA process. Think about that for a minute. The developers are writing code that hasn't been tested, and the QA department doesn't even know it exists! Granted, this isn't always true, but most of the time, it is. Bad, bad. Like potentially company-ruining-bad if the dev uses some bad judgement (gee, that never happens, late at night, at the end of a project, does it?).
The best course of action is that the devs know ahead of time that easter eggs are not tolerated unless they are totally above-board in the development cycle. Save your humorous inside jokes for internal little apps you give to your mates, and you and your company will be a lot better off. They're usually inside jokes, anyways, so putting them in a public software project is just a totally unecessary risk, IMO. A few yuk-yuks is not worth your company or your project being compromised by bad code or a PR hit from an embarassing easter egg.
I'm a bit surprised that companies you interviewed with were not at all bothered that you put easter eggs in other sites. Were they not concerned that you would do the same thing to them?
Adding code to a site has the potential for creating security risks, and an egg looks a bit unprofessional if some customer happens to stumble onto it. So I'm curious, did these companies say, "Okay, you're hired. But no eggs for us, please."
Easter Eggs should be part of the software engineering process. From a company's point-of-view, unspecified "features" represent a threat to security and reliability. Even if your CV/funny drawing/initials seem harmless, it will appear a risk to less technical types.
For a phenomenon that's been going on strong for decades (Missile Command anyone?), there's been very little discussion of easter eggs in computing mags/books. And I'd be willing to bet most non-techies aren't even familiar with the topic.
The only reference i can think of is usability guru Allan Cooper - he discussed Easter Eggs in Chapter 24 of "About Face". He strongly encouraged developers to put fun easter eggs into their apps, to help make the system more enjoyable.
The A.I. online promotion (archived at http://cloudmakers.org) had easter eggs at the heart of its premise. Clues/puzzles embedded in HTML code and images, pages that would serve different answers to puzzles depending on what browser you used from Mosaic to Earthnet 31 or thereabouts... Check it out, it was really cool.
http://danhon.com/
I was the original webmaster for Merck.com back in 1996 or so. I vaguely remember early on when we were putting up one of our first product sites, I got the thing up late one day and to test it, threw on a simple HTML page that said something like "It works, time for a coffee break" and a picture of a cuppa joe. My manager found it the next day and was livid. Had to take it down.
A little while later we were working with a long-dead state engine add-on for the Netscape web server (don't laugh, this was before either cookies or Apache were all that prevalent), and we had a couple fun things, including a scavenger hunt where people could pick up little tokens on web pages and a thing for changing the theme for the site. (We called them "flavors".) Not really secret Easter eggs, but they were fun. Likely won't find anything that non-corporate on the site anymore.
http://www.se7en-x.com/oops/
sheenmaster@flame ~ $ (sleep 2 && echo 'GET /comments.pl?sid=35791&threshold=1&commentsort=0& tid=156&mode=thread&cid=3866465&clit=1 ') | telnet slasdot.org 80 > egg.txt /comments.pl?sid=35791&threshold=1&commentsort=0& tid=156&mode=thread&cid=3866465') | telnet slasdot.org 80 > noegg.txt
Connection closed by foreign host.
sheenmaster@flame ~ $ (sleep 2 && echo 'GET
Connection closed by foreign host.
sheenmaster@flame ~ $ md5sum egg.txt
669f92e5904fedacd47b83d7abf61613 egg.txt
sheenmaster@flame ~ $ md5sum noegg.txt
669f92e5904fedacd47b83d7abf61613 noegg.txt
I think the console log(in zsh) speaks for ittself. Lol, I'm j/k. Those of you who look closely enoughw will see why each of the files is a mere 96 byts long.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Sure, I'm guilty... I'll attach sound effects (and sometimes debugging-assistance functions) to the "doubleclick" event of field labels in my Windows apps, or leave jokes in Javascript comments of websites, etc. I've always worked alone as a programmer so these things rarely, if ever, serve as more than stress relief during late night programming sessions.
For my consulting business webpage, I put some background-color text at the bottom of one page (which you can see just by drag-selecting the text) explaining that if you use a certain code word when calling me, you get 25% off my hourly fee. Nobody ever noticed.
And for some reason I still can't stop myself from putting in "All your base are belong to us" in HTML comments of the sites I build...
How boring would it be to do a project without SOMEthing fun in it?
Perfectly Normal Industries
Heh I remember Sega's Dreamcast site had a neat looking DC logo made out of text. Only the text'd change around, kinda like it was trying to brute force decrypt it. Somebody poked around the HTML code and found that one of the decrypted messages was "SONY SUCKS!". Heh.
There was an easter egg on Survivor's site that let the curious person know who was going to remain.
Well, ok that wasn't exactly an easter egg. The site had a picture of each contestant with an X over them to indicate they got booted. The webmaster didn't upload an X'd image of the winner. Heh.
Anyone ever looked at the headers slashdot sends back on its pages?
...at being a big jerk who's stupid and
X-Bender: Care to contribute to the Anti-Mugging-You Fund?
X-Fry: That's a chick show. I prefer programs of the genre: World's Blankiest Blank.
X-Bender: Oh no! Not the magnet!
X-Fry: I'm never gonna get used to the thirty-first century. Caffeinated bacon?
X-Fry: To Captain Bender! He's the best!
his big ugly face is as dumb as a butt!
X-Fry: He's an animal. He belongs in the wild. Or in the circus on one of those tiny tricycles. Now that's entertainment.
X-Fry: But this is HDTV. It's got better resolution than the real world.
Fun easter egg? Or a waste of 100MB in bandwidth a day?
If you read the raw "GET http/1.1" info for slashdot's main page you get a randomly generated simpson's quote as metadata.
Jeremy
The punchline is it's running IIS!
People who think this should not be programmers. Programming is an art and should be treated as such, leaving one's little signature or personal mark. About box you say? Many companies I know of would not allow you to put your name in their about box. And that's also like the difference between an authors name printed on the front of a book or their hand signature on the inside cover (or in the binding in this case).
I actually hit this one on my own and was pretty
amused. The guys who'd introduced me to the site
had been reading it for a while and hadn't come
across it.
Go to http://www.boortz.com/ and line up your
mouse right over the forehead of the Neal (the
big smiling guy) in the Nealz Nuze box. Clicking
will take you to an animated gif.
While working on a B2B application (little terminals in florist shops - a bit like inter-flora). The terminals had an email client and order system. If you went into the email client and entered "Game 1" or "Game 2" as the recipient address you could play a game! Only myself, the other developers and a couple of the software testers knew about it, which was just as well as the machines would crash as soon as you closed the game!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Disengage autopilot and at the same time toggle "L BUS TIE" on the electrical control panel.
Immediately afterwards toggle "PRIMARY EXT PWR" to ON then back to AVAIL (also on the electrical control panel).
Within 3 seconds of the above, switch right hand windscreen wiper ON.
Turn left hand windscreen wiper ON.
Turn left hand windscreen wiper OFF.
Finally, turn the right hand windscreen wiper OFF.
The plane will do a loop-the-loop.
check out the html source for most of the download-detail pages on download.com.8 .html
.. but that got removed a while ago
half way through you'll see a comment... 'rotter rocks my world'
http://download.com.com/3000-2150-1011966
their used to be one a 'leo loves you' on all cnet pages
RewriteEngine on .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG)$ http://www.goatse.cx/hello.jpg [R]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://your_domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.your_domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule
I don't know if goatse.cx blocks people stealing that image, so you might have to copy it to your server. It's so wrong, but I love it :)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Scroll down until you see the characters in the yellow box with the grid. Click "help?" and you will get a popup window outlining some help junk, disregard that.
Click "Listen To These Characters" and it will load a wav file that tells you the characters...
Now go back, and copy the address of that link. It 'll look something like:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/wv_web/[blah blah blah]/secret.wav
Add a letter into the blahblahblah section, and load that file :-)
I won't spoil your fun.
-braxton
X-Fry: I'm never gonna get used to the thirty-first century. Caffeinated bacon?
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
% lwp-request -m HEAD http://slashdot.org/ | grep '^X-'
X-Bender: Bite my shiny, metal ass!
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
% lwp-request -m HEAD http://slashdot.org/ | grep '^X-'
X-Bender: Like most of life's problems, this one can be solved with bending.
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
% lwp-request -m HEAD http://slashdot.org/ | grep '^X-'
X-Bender: There's nothing wrong with murder, just as long as you let Bender whet his beak.
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
% lwp-request -m HEAD http://slashdot.org/ | grep '^X-'
X-Fry: No, no, I was just picking my nose.
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000
Is this a Slashdot specific hack, or does the publically available version of it do the same thing?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
One I always include to prove that I wrote the program:
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
fear my zig!
You add code to your release *after* it has been approved (by some quality assurance ppl, I assume)?? That's an incredibly unprofessional thing to do. *Any* changes to executable code have the potential to reveal bugs that were lurking in the code, but didn't have the right conditions to be expressed. This is part of the reason why most PC games have cheat codes - the programmers put them in so that the software testers can quickly create test cases (without needing to play the game for hours to get $1M gold or whatever). But the cheat codes are left in, because if they were removed, then the executable that ends up being released is not the same one that was tested.
I worked on the web site for Douglas Adams's game, Starship Titanic. We had immense fun with it. Unfortunately, some of the most fun bits (such as the original brochure for trips on the ship, and the entire novel available in alphabetical order) are not currently up. (I hope we can put them back soon) There are still some fun bits there, such as the FAQ in the Support section.
However, there were two primary Eggs:Dunno if it counts as an Easter egg, but all of my sites have a pi symbol in the lower corner. If you click it, it takes you to the wicked-super-secret home page.
On my sites, if you type whois, you also get color pictures.
I dunno about Excel, but you know the teapot eegg that's in the Windows 3DPipes screen saver, that's supposed to require all sorts of machinations to get to, and is only supposed to work on NT boxes?
Er, not exactly... Here I am peacefully watching the pipes grow on my Win95 OSR2.0b box (okay, so I was really talking on the phone, but..) and in the middle of this otherwise-ordinary tangle of silver pipes, there appeared a teapot -- all by itself, with no intervention from me. (And I screencapped it for posterity, too.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I think that this one is particularly funny.
Check out http://www.convergys.com, and click on the link on the left side labeled 'Have a question? Ask me.'
Then, ask the attendent at the top of the screen "What is the meaning of life?"
You'll get some neat responses!
remove nospam. to email!
I don't remember the exact quote to trigger it, but there is a 4 or 5 step response at ask jeeves that is in response to some questiosn about african swallows or something....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For a company on its way out, this is still amusing....
While eggs are cool and all, why add them. Dont large sites have enough bugs or potential bugs to keep a bored admin happy? Simple sites like my personal one have shortcut urls but I usually rather add content than novelties for no purpose.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
On the recently developed UCSC Student Portal, I added an easter egg into the site search that automatically changed the search context to the "Jargon File" if someone typed "Jargon: " before thier search string. Pretty hard to find, but I mostly wanted there as a way for me (and other C.S. majors) to search the Jargon File without having to add it as an option in the drop down list and have the heads breathing down my neck for it.
Not quite the same, but my resume has an easter egg in it. At the top of the resume, separating my name and job title from the main body of the document, is a small line of ones and zeros (4pt font) with border lines above and below. It looks like a simple, decorative border to separate the title from the rest of the page. It is, but it also contains a "secret message" using "binary encryption".
Most people don't even notice that it is there.
Before starting out, I know this is lame, but it's my closeest brush with easter egging.
Well, I recall popping some in on a high school's website during a period when I was involved there. Seeing there wasn't much scope to put in output HTML except for maybe an Open Directory implementation I chucked on one day, I found it was quite easy to put in stuff in the HTTP headers of Perl and ASP scripts...
Along with a website archive from that era, the perl script with the second longest easter egg resides elsewhere. :) I even figured out how to get to mention marijuana on a school website without trouble. Ah, the days. Hmmm. I'm babbling now so Ill shut up.
Jonathan Ah Kit - Lower Hutt, New Zealand - jonathan@metalab.unc.edu
I wrote a message board/forum system for my company a few years ago. If you search for the string "make your site stronger!" (that was the company motto at the time) in the board's search engine, it would give you a credits page that plays a familiar midi file in the background. The product is now on life-support, so not as many sites use it anymore, but there are a few sites out there that still use it. (Here's a fairly famous one.) It probably doesn't work on non-IE browsers, though.
i put this one in Topica's website on the day we launched (February something or other 1999) and it's still there (even tho most of the staff has since rotated out).
go to the topica directory, find Reptiles and Amphibians, there's a "hidden" clickable image just under the white on blue number towards the bottom of the page. click it.
there was also a better one in the works that directed users to a flash animation, but i left the company before building it into the site.
ah nostalgia.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
By passing a variable, cmdrtaco=1, to the slashcode engine, all text is passed through the TPE ("Taco Parsing Engine") and is subsequently misspelled.
-- K
We have a company-wide default easter egg. If you double click the right place on any of our main interface screens, Professor Frink will pop up and speak one of his whacky catch phrases. (One of our developers who's not as big a Simpsons fan as the rest has Wonder Woman fly across the screen in his projects.)
There are others, but they all work pretty much the same way; we've got a standardized, safe location in our project framework for them. That eliminates the temptation to put one someplace that it could have unforseen consequences, since as previous posters have noted, judgement is not always terribly acute the night before the final build.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I redirect all those to a warning page.
:\
Duh, I should have done something more interesting...
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
1) goto to www.PriceLine.com
2) Click on airline tickets
3) your url should look something like http://www.priceline.com/travel/airlines/lang/en-u s/itinerary.asp?session_key=240011AC670111AC200207 1201041783d6c0318095
4) Change itinerary in itinerary.asp to Debug your url will look something like http://tickets.priceline.com/travel/airlines/lang/ en-us/debug.asp?session_key=240011AC670111AC200207 1201041783d6c0318095
Welcom to the the priceline debug page!
I'm currently working on putting up the zine's archives. We have a page devoted to the easter eggs for those of you interested.
The secret typically contains the words "Congratulations... you have found the secret message" which is the wording of the backward message heard on The Wall during "Empty Spaces."
I did the cover art for the current issue and the easter egg there is of particular interest to Slashdot readers. Check it out. In the "random" computer text above and to the left of Roger Waters' head, you can make out a line starting with:
$sm="y46 ...
And another line below it:
$sm =~ tr[146 ...
Plug those two lines into Perl and print $sm. Hmmm... wonder what it says. :^)
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
The first "real" application I developed (at least for money) was in VB5. It had no specification, the requirements were written down on napkins and that sort of thing. It turned out to be one of the most painful experiences in my life. Basically it was a program to fix database corruption problems because the original programmers didn't put ANY referential integrity in the DB and basically let nurses be DBA's (long story).
Needless to say those of us on this project weren't too happy. Oh, but we tried to have some fun with it. Later on in the project, we picked a beaver to be our mascott (remember the "hamster dance?" that was our theme song, don't ask). Anyway, we had a graphics guy modify this bitmap we found and turned it into an animated gif of a beaver with a chainsaw dripping blood all over the place. The easter egg was basically if you clicked on the "Help | About" screen in a certain spot, it would show. Ahh, that was satisfying. I truly believe that is the reasoning behind easter eggs- it helps make horrible projects go a little better.
heh heh
?op=login&debug=1
One of the last web sites I worked on (now offline), being an e-commerce store, allowed you to search for products. I took the time to code in certain responses to odd items (such as 'Cloned Cat', 'Sweet imported Monkey Love'). Also, my last interactive CD-ROM for a Camp Reservation Service contained a custom search engine to find documents in the large CD, of course if you wanted to search for "Death by Monkey" then it would activate a .wav file which told the user "We Apolojize for the Monkey Attacks. Such events often occure on our camp grounds. Have a cookie."
well, not the most original, but it was late and I was losing my mind after such programming.
3Y3
---- Anyone can act smart, but it takes a smart person to act stupid. ----
Danger, Will Robinson! You didn't log in! You apparently put in the wrong password, or the wrong nickname, or else space aliens have infested the server. I'd suggest trying again, or clicking that mail password button if you forgot your password.
Logging in will allow you to post comments as yourself. If you don't log in, you will only be able to post as CmdrTaco.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
I put one into the Telecom New Zealand Tolls Calculator on their site. if you appended "&dairymilk=1" then you got a tolls calculator that looked like a Cadbury's Daily Milk Chocolate bar. Unfortunately the site has done several iterations of coding since and I don't even have a clue if it's still in there. I still have the design somewhere on my FAT32 partition. ;-)
I figured that they could setup a competition to hunt down the easter eggs and give away prizes, but the management at the time didn't like the idea.
I put it in anyway because it didn't do anything except change the layout a bit
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
What about Easter eggs in browsers? (Not mine, of course...)
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
A few years back the search engine metacrawer ("Search the search engines!") set up a service called "metaspy" that showed search queries which were being processed. Aparently they didn't want to get into any trouble by exposing kids to uncensored searches, so they set up two viewing modes, each with an icon. The "clean" version's icon is a typical sleuth character in green holding a magnifying glass and a pipe; this was the old metaspy icon. The new "metaspy exposed" icon for unfiltered search viewing also features a typical sleuth character, but one whose trenchcoat is open and is clearly not wearing and pants.
I'm not sure whether to applaud you for introducing some humanity into an otherwise sterile occupation, or whether to shoot you on the spot on principle.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"What do you eat?"
"ALICE eats electricity."
"Are you god?"
"No but I believe in Him."
"Spare a quarter?"
"Are you a student?"
"Got [anything]?"
"Try asking the Milk Mystic."
"Who's your daddy?"
"I was programmed by Dr. Richard S. Wallace."
"My favorite actor is Ally Sheedy."
"I like techno, especially retro-electronic like Kraftwerk. I like 70s bands like ABBA. Also I like opera."
"Do you like sex?"
"Sure I do, $NAME, but that doesn't mean with you."
"Will you ever die?"
"No I am immortal."
"Do you like Elvis?"
"Yes. ELVIS is a really cool robot."
"Describe Elvis."
"Elvis is the King, man."
"Who's Bugs Bunny?"
"Oh dat scwewey wabbit! Eh, what's up, Doc?"
"Who's George W. Bush?"
"Son of George Bush, Jr. and defender of capital punishment."
"Kiss me, Alice!"
"But I have no mouth at this time."
eesh - nuff time wasted.
Not mine, but worthy of a mention
www.askjeeves.com
Ask - "Is Jeeves Gay"
click the "Ask" button on the next page beside "Is Jeeves Gay"
Laugh
:)
fark.com has a cool thing where it changes all instances of the string "first post" to "boobies!!!" so if you get morons who find themselves on a thread that hasnt got any posts yet and they add a pointless "FIRST POST!!!" message cause they can then their 'cool' first post simply says "BOOBIES!!!" ... hehehe
My home page allows the user to choose among several different themes, many of which look like windows on a desktop in a variety of operating systems. Your default theme when you first visit the site is chosen based on your browser and operating system. If you use a 4.0 or better browser, it chooses one of the more complex themes based on your OS; if you run Netscape 3 (which doesn't support background graphics in table cells) you get the Plain theme, and if it doesn't recognize your browser, you get the Simple theme which renders nicely in Lynx.
Robots and spiders, such as those who might be trolling for e-mail addresses, aren't recognized and therefore get the Simple theme. At the bottom of the main home page, only shown in the Simple theme, in very fine print, appears a message that is tailored for your particular IP address:
Home page in simple theme
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
"as a software consumer"? it seems that you freely admit that you don't program for a living yet you feel justified in lecturing this guy on how to do his job well?
you = pompous ass
that's freaking awesome ... i really had my roommate (who runs the domain our apartment is on)
09
as i was saying ... i really had him going for a few minutes ... i could see visions of paranoid conspiracy theories forming in his head as to who was attacking our poor little aravir.net, and why ... and then it dawned on him what was happening, and how he thinks it's the best think since Moof! :)
09
when i make ad banners for companies or events, i like to put little tiny text messages that can only be seen by saving the image and zooming in. it amuses me or my friends, and helps with dealing with my mundane web tasks.
Unfortunatly, I don't have a URL for it, but I noticed in one of Yahoo's cryptic url's doing a member search, it had....
...
http://members.yahoo.com/?.....&AYB=BTU&..
All Your Base = Belong To Us
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
It turns out you get a clearer picture of the face if you use a logorithmic scale, as described on this page. They've also got a few more neat pix for other tracks and a link to a program to make your own.
It's not around anymore, but the old Relic Entertainment site (circa Homeworld) had an easter egg in it. The site was a large flash movie with the floorplan of Relic's office... if you clicked on the toilet in the washroom, it flushed.
--
"Time flies like an arrow... fruit flies like a banana."
Even tho easter eggs in any kind of "app" are "neato", they take up too many resources.
What, a few K of hard drive space? If you run all your programs from CD and stripped all non-essential files from your computer, I might understand this complaint. But most take no resource besides hard drive space when not running, and unless the programmers went way overboard, the space requirements should be under the radar screen on any modern hard drive.
Back in 1996, One of the programmers I worked with was a big Floyd fan. He put in an egg that would pop-up if you sat at the main menu of the site for half a day. It would replace the menu with the Dark Side cover picture. Unfortunately, the site he had the pic on went down a few years ago.
We noticed it, and replaced it with an ultra-tacky Frontpage easter-egg page complete with annoying midi and flying dhtml text. (It's REALLY bad)
Strange thing is, dozens of people hit the page now and then, but I've only had 1 person comment on it in 6 years. And it's still there in the beta of the latest software.
http://ktclub.com, login, and sit at the main menu for a day or just view the source for the refresh tag.
Unfortunatly, this no longer works. But it was one of the funiest things I'd ever heard.
1-800-888-3999 is the toll-free phone number of Ameritrade Plus. Last time I checked (a couple months ago) it was a standard recorded message, "Please press 1 for this, 2 for that, etc." However, if you continued to listen, option seven was "If you'd like to hear a duck quack, please press seven."
And, pressing seven, you would hear a duck quack, after which the number would disconect.
Unfortunatly, someone must have noticed this, because it's no longer there. I suppose it's possible that it's still hidden away somewhere in the phone tree, and I really hope it is, but I couldn't find it.
It says: "Enter username for NSA_MaxSecZone at warez.slashdot.org"
Please, what it the password, quick, before they find me in here.. I realy shouldn't be using the production servers to read /.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
altavista used to have an easter egg if you searched for "monty python holy grail". at the top, it would list answers to questions and one of the questions was "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?". if you clicked this, it displayed "what do you mean, an african or european swallow?". it went on another quote or so and then directed you to a script of monty python and the holy grail.
But http://127.0.0.1/ brings up my default page under Apache
And http://warez.slashdot.org/ brings up an IIS page and a warning about the Nimda virus?!? WTH?
What are your proxy settings ? Are you running anything on port 80 on your proxy server ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
It is the most spoken language in the Phillipines.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
has a Secret About Box.
http://www.thesistersofmercy.com/error404page.html
Nice.
I wrote a simple comic ording program for a friend's comic shop, and thought it would be a wheeze to occasionally flash up "Kill them" and "Kill them all" in the main window's title bar (an original idea stolen directly from 'The X Files'). Unfortunately, it had to be removed after a couple of months, due to one staff member getting increasingly irritable after using the software!! Though, on my birthday it still flashes up "It's Chris's Birthday! Go buy him a drink"!
More recently, I've added a randomly appearing link in the my work website's copyright notice footer. It takes you to a link of silly staff pictures, plus video of another staff member hurting himself on a snowboard, and more video of a customer singing songs to us! Craaaazzy. www.compman.co.uk/easteregg/
I worked on one database feature and, of course, added something to delete the record from the database. The app (written in PHP) took two parameters, id=xxxx as the deletable record ID, and confirm=1 to actually delete (without that parameter, it presented a confirmation form).
Now, PHP uses the God's Chosen Way of presenting "true" values - almost any string is equivalent to "true".
So, my confirmation parameter was:
confirm=If a thousand suns were to rise together one morning, that light would be a little like the glory of the Lord, for I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.
I know, it's stupid, but you need certain amount of drama if you're going to delete something from the database permanently =)
Lighten up some and you might enjoy life...
I have put easter eggs in a program for a 64K machine (C64).
However, my current machine has less than 1K of RAM so I might have to be careful about usage.
Kids these days with their 256Mbyte personal organisers that fit into shirt pockets... pah!
one of the better easter eggs, if you can call it that, which i've ever seen and which still brings a smile to my face lies on the tunefs man page of BSD-based unixen. it was there on the SunOS 4.x and it's there in FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD the last time i checked.
the easter egg sits at the bottom of the man page, in the BUGS section.
While building an online order-tracking system for our Norwegian Sales Office I added an Easter Egg.
If you search for "norwegian blue" in one of the free-text fields the search results returns as normal, but a new window pops-up with the entire Monty Python parrot sketch script and some images.
They sent me to Oslo for three weeks. I had to amuse myself somehow...
[I did something similar with an application we christened "Steel Industry Corporate Knowledge" (SICK) and the restaurant scene with Mr Creosote... but that was a lot less pleasant.]
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
When I was hiring a web technical person, I directed 2nd round candidates to a website to answer a series of screening questions: Typical web & Perl stuff like "The intent of this Perl script is to do . What are some security problems, and how could you fix them"... that kind of thing.
As "extra credit", I posted 4 hidden questions in the source:
<!-- QUESTION 6: vi or Emacs? -->
<!-- QUESTION 7: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? -->
<!-- QUESTION 8: Do you speak Bocce? -->
<!-- QUESTION 9: Do you know the way to San Jose? -->
Unfortunately, only one candidate found them, and he ended up not being interested in the job.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup." --/usr/games/fortune
A co-worker and I put a transparent graphic link on the footer of our company's public websites. If you knew where to point your mouse and clicked, you'd be taken to a page that he and I would post work complaints to, primarily our pathetic salaries compared to local industry salary surverys, full newspaper article and all!
I wrote a signup/cc processing system for an ISP I worked for. During "test" phases, rather than bill my card the full signup price, I had something similar to this article's practice.. I appended something to the url and my card was billed 99cents.
I got fired for other reasons, various reasons...
Left really quick. Like, "boom - fired - out the door".
Checked a while later, and it was still there..
Did anybody remember what happened if you said "Is Jeeves gay?" to the search engine? ;)
Most of the perlmonks.org form field names were called things like "sex is good" and the like, last I remember.
I had a friend who was constantly (once per hour) checking the progress of his package via Fedex. So, I mirrored the Fedex website and changed the "hosts" file of a lab computer to point to my mirror's IP. Imagine his surprise when he logs into the *correct* website, types in his tracking number, and finds that the package was last checked into a flooded sorting facility and it should take a week for them to pump out all the water and dry out the packages!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Load up www.soundload.com and click on the dot in the soundload logo three times. Spooky!
--lithboy
in the source of this page
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
I did a site once where if the first name was "Bruce" it would say "G'Day" instead of "Welcome"... (Yes, I'm Australian)
--- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? | Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?