6 ms·

What Easter Eggs have you placed in code?

24 points by blackswan 18y ago

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
jwilliams 18y ago
A system I worked on years ago was delivered in 4 languages. The app would (initially) guess your language based upon your browser settings. As the translations were often in a state of flux we had a development version that was in swedish chef (bork bork, etc). This was never put into prod. It mostly helped us work on functionality without getting caught up in the actual text (lorem ipsum style). However, down the line we got a batch of testers that were using our development infrastructure. Go figure, one of them has swedish as their browser preference... When they got "bork bork bork" they weren't impressed to say the least. Took us ages to convince them that it wasn't deliberate.
- 0xdefec8 18y ago
  I believe you can still set your language preferences in Google to "bork bork bork". An homage?
delano 18y ago
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2267/2458668241_707bd3f31a_o.jpg http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2267/2458668241_707bd3f31a_o....
- Shamiq 18y ago
  Are you claiming credit? Because that would be amazing.
  - delano 18y ago
    Haha, ya that was me. There were a couple others too. That was in 2006. It was so well hidden in the code that no one found it until I mentioned it to someone at the company this past spring (I had hidden in the jar of a 3rd party library). Within a couple days I got a call asking how to remove it. They obviously didn't see the humour which is unfortunate because it's a marketing goldmine.
stcredzero 18y ago
There was one tester we all hated, because, well she was just insane. Some developers had email filters that moved her messages to the trash. She was so gone, that she couldn't comprehend the difference between her just thinking something to herself and actually communicating it to someone else. One day, a coworker and I decided that she was so close to the edge, that we could probably drive her over it. We placed a little toy called "Gremlin" in the build, with some code that made sure it was shut off, except in the case of our friend, the "Testy Tester." What Gremlin did at random intervals was to have a weird little yellow/green guy grab the bottom of a window (as if the 'window' was a window into his room) and pull himself up to peep in and wave "hi" at you. This was all fine and dandy in testing. Unfortunately, when the app made it out to production, heavy network made the client take six times as long to finish user authentication. Since we had the conditional shutoff code in the user authentication, this gave a chance for the Gremlin to wave "hi" at some of the users in the login dialog. Whoops.
nslater 18y ago
Easter Eggs, illegal in most countries. Now you know.
- huhtenberg 18y ago
  Now we heard it on the Internets.
mutoxen 18y ago
I called R.A.I.S.E. the Intelligent Search Engine I made for the company's web site: http://web.archive.org/web/20040416123830/www.reteambiente.it/ra/index.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040416123830/www.reteambiente.i... ("CERCA nel sito") I was fired.
huhtenberg 18y ago
I .. err .. know of a product that has a clickable Pi symbol in the About box. When clicked with Ctrl and Shift held down and if your account nickname is Sandra Bullock it tells you how many other people figured this out :-) http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/9836/egg1by2.png http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/9836/egg1by2.png http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/7530/egg2zu2.png http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/7530/egg2zu2.png http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/8361/egg3mv6.png http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/8361/egg3mv6.png This is an internal beta, this stuff will be taken out from the the production release.
cmos 18y ago
In 1998 a friend and I were furiously writing a business plan for a 'business plan contest' held at our college. After 2 weeks of continuously writing and editing, at 3:00am, we couldn't come up with anything for the closing paragraph so I type this out: "We are 2 strapping young men willing to do whatever it takes for this company to succeed". We forgot to replace it. And we won. $25k. It was probably the most honest thing we wrote in the whole plan, and the only part of it that turned out true. (except the "strapping" part)
herval 18y ago
cooked in a small animation (south park style) presenting me and the other guys in the project inside the 65 series phone of a now-dead mobile manufacturer from germany (S65, SL65, A65, etc - can't tell the name for NDA reasons, but I guess it's easy to figure out, no?). You just had to open the file explorer app on the phone, type *666#, and there you'd have it... ;-)
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
tyn 18y ago
I have made a desktop application for a DVD rental franchise. I have created an account as a customer too and whenever I go to a store and the clerk enters my customer code the title of his screen becomes a smiley.
- staunch 18y ago
  Is the smiley there to distract the clerk from realizing you always get 90% off everything? :P
spc476 18y ago
Years and years ago when I worked at IBM, I added a panic button to all the dialog boxes in an internal testing program. When hit, it would cycle through several remarks (stuff like "Don't hit this button again" and "I thought I told you not to hit this button"). Back in the mid-90s I had a hidden Easter Egg in a Java Applet (the next big thing, you know) that expressed my frustration with the language even back then ( http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html ) Shortly after that, I added another one in the HTML page for the rewrite to that product (no longer a Java Applet) that, amazingly enough, people found and tried to use ( http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp2.html http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp2.html ). And for the past fourteen years I've included an HTML comment on some of my webpages and I've only had one person find (or at least, one person find and comment about it).
bosky101 18y ago
all xmpp messages needed to be enveloped by a guid. we felt we did'nt need a guid -something smaller was enough. Although i left close to two years ago,and it really is'nt much of a deal - it still brings me a hint of wicket satisfaction that 'each and every' chat/whiteboard message spread across 107 countries, gets wrapped in between my cellphone number : )

24 points by blackswan 18y ago

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

A system I worked on years ago was delivered in 4 languages. The app would (initially) guess your language based upon your browser settings. As the translations were often in a state of flux we had a development version that was in swedish chef (bork bork, etc). This was never put into prod. It mostly helped us work on functionality without getting caught up in the actual text (lorem ipsum style). However, down the line we got a batch of testers that were using our development infrastructure. Go figure, one of them has swedish as their browser preference... When they got "bork bork bork" they weren't impressed to say the least. Took us ages to convince them that it wasn't deliberate.

0xdefec8 18y ago
I believe you can still set your language preferences in Google to "bork bork bork". An homage?

delano 18y ago

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2267/2458668241_707bd3f31a_o.jpg http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2267/2458668241_707bd3f31a_o....

Shamiq 18y ago
Are you claiming credit? Because that would be amazing.
- delano 18y ago
  Haha, ya that was me. There were a couple others too. That was in 2006. It was so well hidden in the code that no one found it until I mentioned it to someone at the company this past spring (I had hidden in the jar of a 3rd party library). Within a couple days I got a call asking how to remove it. They obviously didn't see the humour which is unfortunate because it's a marketing goldmine.

stcredzero 18y ago

There was one tester we all hated, because, well she was just insane. Some developers had email filters that moved her messages to the trash. She was so gone, that she couldn't comprehend the difference between her just thinking something to herself and actually communicating it to someone else. One day, a coworker and I decided that she was so close to the edge, that we could probably drive her over it. We placed a little toy called "Gremlin" in the build, with some code that made sure it was shut off, except in the case of our friend, the "Testy Tester." What Gremlin did at random intervals was to have a weird little yellow/green guy grab the bottom of a window (as if the 'window' was a window into his room) and pull himself up to peep in and wave "hi" at you. This was all fine and dandy in testing. Unfortunately, when the app made it out to production, heavy network made the client take six times as long to finish user authentication. Since we had the conditional shutoff code in the user authentication, this gave a chance for the Gremlin to wave "hi" at some of the users in the login dialog. Whoops.

nslater 18y ago

Easter Eggs, illegal in most countries. Now you know.

huhtenberg 18y ago
Now we heard it on the Internets.

mutoxen 18y ago

I called R.A.I.S.E. the Intelligent Search Engine I made for the company's web site: http://web.archive.org/web/20040416123830/www.reteambiente.it/ra/index.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040416123830/www.reteambiente.i... ("CERCA nel sito") I was fired.

huhtenberg 18y ago

I .. err .. know of a product that has a clickable Pi symbol in the About box. When clicked with Ctrl and Shift held down and if your account nickname is Sandra Bullock it tells you how many other people figured this out :-) http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/9836/egg1by2.png http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/9836/egg1by2.png http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/7530/egg2zu2.png http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/7530/egg2zu2.png http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/8361/egg3mv6.png http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/8361/egg3mv6.png This is an internal beta, this stuff will be taken out from the the production release.

cmos 18y ago

In 1998 a friend and I were furiously writing a business plan for a 'business plan contest' held at our college. After 2 weeks of continuously writing and editing, at 3:00am, we couldn't come up with anything for the closing paragraph so I type this out: "We are 2 strapping young men willing to do whatever it takes for this company to succeed". We forgot to replace it. And we won. $25k. It was probably the most honest thing we wrote in the whole plan, and the only part of it that turned out true. (except the "strapping" part)

herval 18y ago

cooked in a small animation (south park style) presenting me and the other guys in the project inside the 65 series phone of a now-dead mobile manufacturer from germany (S65, SL65, A65, etc - can't tell the name for NDA reasons, but I guess it's easy to figure out, no?). You just had to open the file explorer app on the phone, type *666#, and there you'd have it... ;-)

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

tyn 18y ago

I have made a desktop application for a DVD rental franchise. I have created an account as a customer too and whenever I go to a store and the clerk enters my customer code the title of his screen becomes a smiley.

staunch 18y ago
Is the smiley there to distract the clerk from realizing you always get 90% off everything? :P

spc476 18y ago

Years and years ago when I worked at IBM, I added a panic button to all the dialog boxes in an internal testing program. When hit, it would cycle through several remarks (stuff like "Don't hit this button again" and "I thought I told you not to hit this button"). Back in the mid-90s I had a hidden Easter Egg in a Java Applet (the next big thing, you know) that expressed my frustration with the language even back then ( http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html ) Shortly after that, I added another one in the HTML page for the rewrite to that product (no longer a Java Applet) that, amazingly enough, people found and tried to use ( http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp2.html http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp2.html ). And for the past fourteen years I've included an HTML comment on some of my webpages and I've only had one person find (or at least, one person find and comment about it).

bosky101 18y ago

all xmpp messages needed to be enveloped by a guid. we felt we did'nt need a guid -something smaller was enough. Although i left close to two years ago,and it really is'nt much of a deal - it still brings me a hint of wicket satisfaction that 'each and every' chat/whiteboard message spread across 107 countries, gets wrapped in between my cellphone number : )