Easter eggs in your application?
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No. Never. I personally think that while they may be fun to write, Easter Eggs are unprofessional. As far as your employer is concerned, programming wastes time that could be applied more productively. As far as the client is concerned, they are just another possible failure point. (How many programmers ensure that their Easter Eggs have no security issues, etc.?)
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
You must be the fun guy at parties ;P
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(as a reference to the daily news) Do you ever included easter eggs in your application? Did the customers found it? How they acted on? [We have a 'David Akouka fatal error', that pops on network errors when the application can not connect home server. It named after or beloved sa...]
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
We wrote a video surveillance system years ago (think 14.4K modems as the peak of technology) and put in an Easter egg that showed the credits. Also check out [Survey Results - Do you include Easter Eggs in production code?](https://www.codeproject.com/Surveys/2013/Do-you-include-Easter-Eggs-in-production-code.aspx) ;)
Latest Article - Class-less Coding - Minimalist C# and Why F# and Function Programming Has Some Advantages Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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(as a reference to the daily news) Do you ever included easter eggs in your application? Did the customers found it? How they acted on? [We have a 'David Akouka fatal error', that pops on network errors when the application can not connect home server. It named after or beloved sa...]
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
In my last university year, as a final project in CS, we had to write a program emulating a calculator. (I am a mechanical engineer, hence the triviality of the task). With my mate, we made a calculator that could handle variables and symbolic derivation and integration - that was the visible part - and we put a tetris in the calculator - that was the easter egg -. Nobody found out, but it was fun !
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In my last university year, as a final project in CS, we had to write a program emulating a calculator. (I am a mechanical engineer, hence the triviality of the task). With my mate, we made a calculator that could handle variables and symbolic derivation and integration - that was the visible part - and we put a tetris in the calculator - that was the easter egg -. Nobody found out, but it was fun !
Rage wrote:
final project in CS
Now I feel old... My 'goodbye-project' was in assembly of mainframe running a 'virus' imitating disk formating...
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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You must be the fun guy at parties ;P
I'm usually a wallflower, not fungi. :)
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
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(as a reference to the daily news) Do you ever included easter eggs in your application? Did the customers found it? How they acted on? [We have a 'David Akouka fatal error', that pops on network errors when the application can not connect home server. It named after or beloved sa...]
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
I've never done this.
Nish Nishant Consultant Software Architect Ganymede Software Solutions LLC www.ganymedesoftwaresolutions.com
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(as a reference to the daily news) Do you ever included easter eggs in your application? Did the customers found it? How they acted on? [We have a 'David Akouka fatal error', that pops on network errors when the application can not connect home server. It named after or beloved sa...]
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
Oh all the time! And they call up and go "WTF is this software doing now!?" I say sorry, I'll look at it....... Latent bugs anyway.
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(as a reference to the daily news) Do you ever included easter eggs in your application? Did the customers found it? How they acted on? [We have a 'David Akouka fatal error', that pops on network errors when the application can not connect home server. It named after or beloved sa...]
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
Years ago I wrote an application internally for the business which created a printable catalogue from items salespeople selected. On the 100th catalogue each salesperson printed an image of Cliff Richard appeared with the words "Congratulations" below the image. The salespeople would get excited each time someone saw the easter egg and begged me to reset their count to 99 - which of course Ii refused as it would have been highly unprofessional of me to do that.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Sure I do... And yes, they are found regularly. Oh wait... you are talking about actual deliberate Easter eggs, not bugs... never mind.
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(as a reference to the daily news) Do you ever included easter eggs in your application? Did the customers found it? How they acted on? [We have a 'David Akouka fatal error', that pops on network errors when the application can not connect home server. It named after or beloved sa...]
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
Yes, tons of them. Users call them bugs and they aren't have if they find them. Ohh, I forgot to mention the surprise that they'll find when I have left the company... :wtf:
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(as a reference to the daily news) Do you ever included easter eggs in your application? Did the customers found it? How they acted on? [We have a 'David Akouka fatal error', that pops on network errors when the application can not connect home server. It named after or beloved sa...]
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
Many years ago in my VB days: Every 17th time the mouse-over event of an icon was hit, the finger pointer would briefly change to the middle finger. I thought it was funny, didn't take too much time and I thought no one would ever notice. An hour after releasing it to testing, the lead tester came to my office smiling and asking, "did your app just give me the finger?"
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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(as a reference to the daily news) Do you ever included easter eggs in your application? Did the customers found it? How they acted on? [We have a 'David Akouka fatal error', that pops on network errors when the application can not connect home server. It named after or beloved sa...]
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
No, they're unprofessional, and they're hacker magnets. Let me tell you about the one time I put an easter egg in software. On a particular release of a very ancient embedded product, there was a statement you could execute in the product's programming language, that listed the names of the software developers. We shipped the product with the easter egg. In the fullness of time, one of the engineers showed the easter egg to a hardware guy (whose name wasn't on the list). This nominally grown up person went to management crying because hardware wasn't represented in the easter egg. Well of course the easter egg had to go. But the idea proved irresistible. The mechanical engineers had the injection mold for the plastic case modified to include the signatures of about 120 people who had even the most marginal relationship to the product. So if you have an old Fluke 9100A lying around, dissassemble it, and look inside the back of the keyboard case. The most telling reason to remove the easter egg turned out to be that customers who knew the names of any of the product engineers had a bad habit of bypassing customer service to get the "real scoop" on the product by calling the switchboard and asking to speak to an engineer by name. Nobody wanted to get these calls...
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It probably doesn't count as an Easter Egg: I develop/maintain a tool used internally by about two hundred developers. For years, the installation job has presented a license agreement that you have to confirm that you have read and understood. It took about five years before I had the first reaction to the missing 'l' in 'Common Public License' headline, then another year before one guy came over to my desk laughing so much that he couldn't speak... The license terms refer both to source code and destination code. A "Contribution" is extended to cover
i) changes to the Program, and
ii) additions to the Program;
iii) subtractions from the Program;
iv) multiplication of the Program;
v) divisions of the Program;
vi) demolition of the Program;and grants the user ("recipient") rights:
Each Recipient may uninstall, delete or in any other way remove the Program from a computer, under the strict condition that
i) a complete, deep reformatting is made of the entire storage device where the Program was stored, and if not the same, the system drive of all computers having access to this copy of the Program. The formatting shall be performed a minimum of three (3) times,
ii) a physical demolishion of said storage device(s) is done by use of a sledgehammer of weight ho less than five kilograms, reducing the device to a maximum thickness of 2 mm for rotating magnetic disks or a maximum grain size of 2 mm for solid state devices.
By exercizing any such removal of the Program, the Recipient agrees for all future to make no complaints or critical statements about the Program or any other software procuded by any of the Contributors to the program.
A Recipient may reinstall the Program by performing the inverse operations listed above, in the reverse order.There are lots of such humour in this license that is not only royalty-free but also presidency-free (and coffeine-free). It states that "Contributors may not remove or alter any copyright notices contained within the Program for any other purpose than to ridicule typical License Agreements". Distribution of the source code is permitted "in a reasonable manner on or through a medium customarily used for software exchange, including, but not limited to, Pirate Bay", but requires that "the following Friday, two large size pizzas (one Pigs Knuckle, one Rio Grande) are delivered from Peppe's Pizza Pub at the Contributer's expense to the premises of the licensor, no later than 2.pm". If this tool is ever given to an external customer, I
