Would You Add Easter Eggs To Software Produced At Work? 747
Mr. Leinad writes "Do you add Easter Eggs to the software that is produced at the office? I mean, if you have complete control over the final product, do you spice it up with that little personal touch, which, as unlikely as it is that anyone will see, carries with it an 'I was here' signature? I've just finished the development of a large software product, and I have a couple of days left to try to add my own personal Easter Egg code, but given that the software is quite professional, I don't know if I should. What do you think? Should we developers sign our creations?"
What is this "would" you speak of? (Score:5, Funny)
Getting such things past the pointy heads is just good fun. Getting the doomsday code past them is a riot.
Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
Easter Eggs? No, funny comments/error messages, and bizarre variable names, absolutely.
I will never forget the day a student who was using my software for a project asked during a meeting what an 'out of cheese' error was. The poor kid was so confused :)
Rick roll in the Code. (Score:2, Funny)
Something like
You know the Rules, and so do I...
We're never going to give you up,
We're never going to let you down,
We'll never run around and desert you....
Re:Well.. (Score:1, Funny)
... a student who was using my software for a project asked during a meeting what an 'out of cheese' error was. The poor kid was so confused :)
I don't use a mouse, you insensitive clod!
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Funny)
No, never, stop thinking about it. (Score:5, Funny)
One of Microsoft's head programmers tried a little stunt like the one you're suggesting. It cost him his career... his dignity... and if the suicide note was of any indication, even his life.
His name was Andrew B. Clippy, and his "personal touch" tore him asunder.
Re:Professional easter eggs (Score:5, Funny)
Bar code scanner to say "Hello Joost" (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Been there done that (Score:5, Funny)
I used to work in the visuals department for a flight sim company and it was common practice for the image database devs to sign their names and leave each other messages at something like -10m below the airport's primary runway.
This was all well and good until we had some sort of glitch on a sim under test and the customer's chief pilot managed to land through the runway and the entire cockpit view was filled with something like "Fuck off Dave!"
Management were not pleased!
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Funny)
I worked with a text editor in college where upon triggering an unlikely error the user was prompted with the message:
"Are you A) Blind or B) Stupid?"
The user had to pick one to continue.
Re:Professionally Signed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I would (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ask yourself one thing. (Score:5, Funny)
Blame the intern.
Re:You tell me. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No, never, stop thinking about it. (Score:4, Funny)
Did this Andrew B. Clippy receive any help writing his suicide note?
Re:Professional easter eggs (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, it still works in Vista!
Re:Professional easter eggs (Score:5, Funny)
Aren't easter eggs supposed to be hard to find?
static strings in code (Score:4, Funny)
Re:No, never, stop thinking about it. (Score:3, Funny)
Nah. Clippy was descended from Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob's creator married Bill Gates and produced 2 little sprogs. So I'm not sure how this is supposed to show us failure.
Re:Ask yourself one thing. (Score:5, Funny)
Any good software company should allow easter eggs. Back in the good-old days at QuickLogic, we had an awesome movie-like credit's screen with something funny about every contributer. At the new company I founded, I've lost control over our easter-egg policy, and they've been removed :-(
There was one funny episode at QuickLogic. Bill Falk was the manager, and he just about had a heart attack any time there were show-stopper bugs found late in a software release process. So, after we already bought something like 4,000 copies of our release on floppies, a very special easter egg went off. It detected if your name was Bill Falk and if it were a specific date, and then invoked some of the worst possible crashes - the stuff that's random each time, and depends on debug mode vs compiled. We all laughed so hard when Bill went ballistic, we never dreamed our easter egg would work so well. After seeing how hard it was on him, we decided never to do that to him again. The next release came around, and this time there was a real show-stopper late-stage bug, and Bill was convinced we'd planted another easter egg. It got pretty ugly.
Compiler directives (Score:3, Funny)
How about inserting compiler directives so that if the time zone during the build is detected to have changed by about 12 hours, all text boxes are immediately translated to Hindi or pidgin Chinese? But only in the release build and only after detecting the time zone has returned to within Eastern to West Coast time zones after deployment.
Re:Of course! (Score:3, Funny)
Please tell me you made Stupid the activated control.
Yes I would :) (Score:3, Funny)
telnet slashdot.org 80
Take a look at the headers :)
The ones in MySQL are much harder to find.
Re:Well, yes (Score:2, Funny)
Obviously [wikipedia.org].
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Funny)
Find all the copy constructors he wrote and rename the argument "dolly". Find all the operator < (const T&); methods he wrote and rename the argument "dicksize".
Re:Professional easter eggs (Score:1, Funny)
Don't forget the Windows95 Easter Egg where a simple series of actions on the desktop would get you a blue screen with a special message from the OS.
That was one of the most reliable pieces of code that they ever wrote. It became part of the NT kernel and I hear that they still port it to new products.
Re:Professional easter eggs (Score:2, Funny)
Huh... you learn something new everyday.
I'm currently writing a traffic lights controller (Score:4, Funny)
...and with the other guy who does the code with me, we agreed to include "disco mode". We're still thinking what set of conditions to pick to trigger it.
Re:What is this "would" you speak of? (Score:3, Funny)
I worked as a graduate assistant in a lab that produced foreign language materials. We were *very* early at producing our own DVDs (back when you had to ship a DLT to the replicator) and won a bid to move some PBS language programs to DVD. Of course, each disc had a credits menu that mentioned our university, but not our lab.
So, late one night the four main people working on the project (getting paid a pittance BTW) created a hidden menu with our pictures and the names of the other students who had given their time. We hid the menu in a place where virtually no one would be able to find it: On the credits menu, the menu buttons are organized horizontally. With the "credits" option highlighted, you push up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right (Contra's 30-lives code) and the hidden menu is revealed.
The hidden menu was created with the same style guides as the other menus, so it doesn't look like "we wuz h3r3!"
We didn't show our boss until *after* the DVD was shipped. When we showed it to him, he just laughed. He was a former programmer and understood us completely. But he did add, "It's a good thing you didn't tell me earlier. I would have had to tell you to take it out."
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Funny)
At one place I worked, the guy who wrote up the coding standard explicitly prohibited jokes in comments and humorous variable names.
Add a comment to the code against the most business-critical part of the code something like "Hmm, I hope SOX-compliance never looks at this." and sign it with his name. The beauty is it's both not at all funny and hilarious, depending on your point of view.
Re:Ask yourself one thing. (Score:3, Funny)
Blame the intern.
I included an easter egg that popped up an error message with the boss's home phone number. He told me that that error would never occur, so I felt confident (wink, wink) that no one would ever see the message. Of course, it did occur. And when it did, the boss blamed the temp!
Re:I would (Score:5, Funny)
So they released a game, and only few noticed that if you look at some plane drawing smoke pictures in the sky from a certain angle, you would see that it writes the infamous "dick".
"I'm sorry Dave..." (Score:3, Funny)
This was all well and good until we had some sort of glitch on a sim under test and the customer's chief pilot managed to land through the runway and the entire cockpit view was filled with something like "Fuck off Dave!"
Management were not pleased!
I trust the developers learned their lesson and are using more politely-worded easter eggs when designing HAL?
Re:I would (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Professional easter eggs (Score:2, Funny)
Why do people think 'professional' equals 'unfun'?
Don't worry - "unprofessional" can equal "unfun" too. Just type "=GAME("Star Wars")" into any cell in OpenOffice and you'll see what I mean.
(I mean, I appreciate the effort, but I played better Space Invaders clones in DOS with ASCII graphics in '86)
Re:Of course! (Score:4, Funny)
"You have chosen STUPID. Please enter your social security number and bank account number in the provided fields so we can, uh... register your software. Yeah."
Re:Professional easter eggs (Score:3, Funny)
That's from memory. In college I would open minesweeper, set it to the most difficult (custom largest with only 9 non-mines), then proceed to beet it. I actually had a kid I babysat convinced I was psychic. The best part about it is that it is so subtle you can do it will lots of people watching and they can't tell!
Let's just say I was known as the king of minesweeper for a couple days
Re:Easter Eggs are unprofessional (Score:4, Funny)
Do civil or mechanical engineers leave easter eggs?
The fact that you can't find them doesn't mean they aren't there.
Re:I would (Score:5, Funny)
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1045201&cid=25919525 [slashdot.org]
Re:Well, yes (Score:3, Funny)
Looks intelligent enough to not get caught, but gets smiles and sniffles if the error pops up :-)