Man Proposes to Girlfriend Through Bejeweled

Firmly cementing himself as the Don Juan of all nerdom, Bernie Peng reprogrammed his girlfriend's copy of Bejeweled so that a marriage proposal popped up when she reached a certain score. She giggle-snorted, pushed up her broken glasses and said yes.

Comments

How?

[devinteske]

How pray-tell did he "re-program" the app? I don't believe that Bejeweled is an open-source application. What I'm thinking is, he did one of: - De-compiled, modified and re-compiled - Used DLL injection - Wrote a monitoring program that ran in the background - Did a Rube Goldberg approach - Found a leaked copy of the source - Modified the compiled binary using a hex editor and wrote some assembly - Used some other sort of injection - Found some way of exploiting a security hole that allowed him to alter the applications behavior through external means Any theories on which?

Re:How?

[devinteske]

As an update, I found on his blog (follow the click-trail) that he programmed a version of bejeweled from scratch! Pfffftttt... that's not uber! It's commendable, but the way I see it is, ... he probably tried every which way that he could to modify the game and then gave up and programmed it from scratch. Normally, I would say "bravo! Excellent job!"... BUT somebody in an article (and also on NPR this morning, I heard about this on the radio hours before /. got it) referred to this guy as a "hacker" and on NPR, they mentioned that the makers of bejeweled were "impressed by the hack".

I just want to be very clear that what he did does NOT classify him as a "hacker" nor should what he did be termed "a hack." Based on this one deed, he should be classified as a "programmer" and the end result should be termed a "program" or "game."

One thing I still can't grok however, is why the Bejeweled makers did not consider this as an infringement! The only answer I can come up with is that the story inspires tears in the eyes of sex-depraved geeks at the Bejeweled head-quarters. After all, who doesn't like a happy ending?

However, I'll leave you with this... couldn't it be said that Bernie Peng "profited" from his infringement upon the company's rights? It was said that "he won the woman!" Therefore, can't PopCap sue for over ownership of said woman (aka. profits)? After all, the woman in question (no name is ever given) was already a Bejeweled NUT-JOB, and would likely have accepted a proposal from any number of PopCap employees/programmers if given the chance. Mr. Peng undoubtedly has taken that away from the Seattle-based workers by infringing upon their IP rights.

Re:How?

[Seakip18]

Actually, if I was in PopCaps shoes, I'd wait for them to get married, and have a few kids. Then BAM you've seize the house, the kids, the wife, the card. Especially given their nerduliness, I'd say the kids have some programming potential.

Free developers!

Re:How?

[SolitaryMan]

I just want to be very clear that what he did does NOT classify him as a "hacker" nor should what he did be termed "a hack." Based on this one deed, he should be classified as a "programmer" and the end result should be termed a "program" or "game."

Actually, this is exactly the original meaning of the term hacker

Re:How?

[Mistshadow2k4]

One thing I still can't grok however, is why the Bejeweled makers did not consider this as an infringement! The only answer I can come up with is that the story inspires tears in the eyes of sex-depraved geeks at the Bejeweled head-quarters.

Well, that and he only distributed it to his girlfriend. If he started posting it to sites for others to download I'm sure their reaction would've been quite different. But yeah, all too many other companies would be suing already.

Astraware

[Misch]

I considered this odd because Astraware released a version of Bejeweled that did this for Valentines Day 2007.