Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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
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 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."
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.
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
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?"
A few here and there
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
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".
I always liked google's "more evil than satan himself" egg, although it seems as though it does not work anymore...
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.
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
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.
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
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.
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
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.
Check here
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).
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).
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
How typical of a guy to be unable to find it. ;)
-Sara
...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!
When your BSD-related story gets submitted and approved, "BSD is dying" posts suddenly appear.
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
Back when I was a wee tot and playing ET on my 2600. (I didn't have alot of toys) I stumbled upon an easter egg on accident. A flower pot at the bottom of a pit suddenly turned int a YAR from yars revenge and flew off the screen!
I'd never seen any sort of easter egg at this point in my life and I freaked out pretty badly.
I told this story to my friends for YEARS and noone took me seriously. It wasn't until sometime around last year that I found a text by the original game author verifying the easter egg. (it was much more complex and I never found the rest of it)
Frankly I'm amazed that I found it at all considering what you had to do. I'm sure the programmer would have LOVED to have seen my face at the time of discovery.
THIS is what easter eggs are about. Not the 99% of the people who use your program but the 1 guy who nearly pisses himself when he finds it on accident.
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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: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 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....
For a company on its way out, this is still amusing....
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.
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.
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;
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?
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;
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
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.
omfg, at work sometime last week, i had these two asian men come into the store, and i approached them, said "How are you gentlemen?"
They both responded, almost in perfect time "All your base are belong to us!"
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
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.
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
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.
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 =)
Actually, no,
:)
The eggs were of a VERY specific purpose,
The provided NO alternative access, they simply provided, what appeared to be debug/versioning information.
I gave the addition much thought, I used a string on a Seperate CGI, (an executable, so it couldnt be reversed) that had to carry a specific variable (actually , "who_wrote_this" or "current_version" and they needed a query appended , but Im not telling you that
It actually had its uses, when we later went to load balancing and were initially having problems with page version distribution amongst servers, I added a parsing mechanism, and we would add a serial #into a comment field, we could then run another app which hit all the CGI's on all the load balanced servers and gave a quick report of which server wasnt getting updates properly.
No, never once did I hear them say No easter eggs for us. I gave a very detailed explanation it was OUR (my employeers) version checking application, the fact that I wrote and implemented it was of course left out.
In short they didnt see them as easter eggs, rather as a tool they could potentially see some value in for some unknown reason.
Truth be told psycology works both way in an interview, typically in interviewer, will NOT ask questions about something he/she does not full understand, at the risk of looking dumber than the person they are interviewing.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........