Newsweek Easter Egg Reports Zombie Invasion

danielkennedy74 writes "Newsweek.com becomes the latest in a long list of sites that will reveal an Easter egg if you enter the Konami code correctly (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter). This is a cheat code that appeared in many of Konami's video games, starting around 1986 — my favorite places to use it were Contra and Life Force, 30 lives FTW. The Easter egg was probably included by a developer unbeknownst to the Newsweek powers that be. It's reminiscent of an incident that happened at ESPN last year, involving unicorns."

Comments

I'm a programmer for a major metro daily...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me tell you how this happened.

Newspapers and magazines are not development oriented. Here's what I face, and I suspect you will find similar stories at every newspaper and some magazines.

Understaffed - I am the sole developer supporting a dozen sites written in four different languages. (I do have 3 graphic designers who know html, but couldn't even tell you what source control is)

Project duration - Any project that takes more than a week is considered a blasphemy. You're expected to work on a "news cycle" schedule. If you can't roll it out quickly or chunk into into tiny pieces, you probably aren't going to do it.

Project thrashing - Its not uncommon to work on a project for two or three days, get pulled off of it in favor of another project, and then get pulled off of that for yet another project. You can guess at the trail of unfinished projects that die from being ignored due to the whims of an editor or publisher.

Hostile IT departments - setup around servicing journalists, IT departments are extremely hostile towards development needs. I'm not allowed to install browsers or virtual machines for testing, not allowed to have a development server, source control is a security risk, I don't have local admin on my desktop,
and I need to summon an IT guy every time I need to test a deployment package. This leads to a lot of development on production systems because you literally have no other choice. Yes, this has been run up to executive level management.

Not caring - No one really cares what you do until it breaks or until it wins them a press award.

Not understanding - Graphic designers are frequently given root access to linux boxes and superuser access to sql server. They believe anyone can write a windows service, manage a database, or write quality html. This includes graphic designers because "They can do it for print, how is the web different"

No resources - In conjunction with not caring and not having money, you aren't given resources. I use gimp for image manipulation, purchased my own copies of Visual Studio and Zend, and have the bare minimum to do my job.

External politics - Being owned by a larger corporate entity, we often fall victim to running foul of sweetheart deals at the corporate level and random kingdom building. We're not even allowed to submit a proper sitemap to Google, the roll out version has been broken for three years, so I rolled our own which works wonderfully, but it was shutdown because it was "out of step with the larger company-wide sitemap rollout scheduled for Q3 2012."

So, you've got this great combination of no resources, business-wide apathy, developing on production, no communication, politics, and no QA/testing process...it really is as simple as uploading the script. Chances are no one would care that it was there, and I promise you that no one one notice until a reader discovered it and it hit the internet at large.

If you're wondering why I stay, I work with some very good people and I don't ever work overtime. Its pretty decent for anyone that can put up with the nonsense.

Re:I'm a programmer for a major metro daily...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Let ME tell you how this happened. Newsweek hired a very expensive agency to help with their assets creation and design with their site. And that company had one jerk off developer who thought it would be funny to put this into every project he worked on.

Re:I'm a programmer for a major metro daily...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the truth - neither reasonable discourse nor tantrums get you anything from management that isn't personally knowledgeable about the subject (and even then there is probably management above them that isn't).

I did discover a way to handle this: I worked my butt off. But not for my company, for our clients (we wrote custom software for banks). I always detailed everything for the clients, provided all the real information about the costs (time, money, resources, etc.) and always worked to get them the best quality software that they needed, not what they asked for or just defaulted to the best that could be done with the given resources.

Eventually, my clients came to rely on me and believe me over the sales/management staff of my company. The clients came to notice that when they followed my suggestions they got what they wanted and that when they believed the hype from themselves or our management, things didn't work so well. Once that happened, I had leverage with my own management because I had leverage with the client.

It sounds horrible, but my real partners were always my clients (especially their end-users) and not the other staff in my company. It takes time, and doesn't always work, but more often than not clients will recognize your efforts and start relying on you and not management/sales. They want their software right the first time more than on a particular budget and timeline (because right the first time is always cheaper than the really cheap, quick and ultimately wrong timeline).

Re:Not the only one:

[georgeMandis]

Hey, I wrote that! Cool!

The code works on iPhones/iPads too with gestures, but it doesn't seem they implemented it on iphone.newsweek.com. Or perhaps they disabled that - they seem to have disabled it on their main as well.