Name: Dr. Anvik

Office: Hebler 214-D

Phone number: 963-2901

CWU page: www.cwu.edu/~janvik

Syllabus: www.cwu.edu/~janvik/cs101

“Easter EGGS” AND BUGS for the geeks

Imagine nerdy people working very loooong hours….

… what we end up with is…. Easter Eggs and BUGS

What is an “Easter Egg”?

For example:

• Highlight any text, do Shift F3: toggles caps.• Select a text, Ctrl 1,2,5 to change spacing

• Placeholder for text just type: =rand(6,6)

… are all “Easter Eggs” because they are not documented features.

An Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, hidden message, or feature in a work such as a computer program, movie, book, or crossword. According to game designer Warren Robinett, the term was coined at Atari by personnel who were alerted to the presence of a secret message which had been hidden by Robinett in his already widely distributed game, Adventure.

Easter eggs in Microsoft productsSome of Microsoft’s early products included hidden Easter eggs.

Microsoft formally stopped including Easter eggs in its programs as part of its Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2002

The Microsoft Bear is a mascot of the Windows 3.1

During the development of Microsoft Windows 95 the shell developers had several stuffed animals as mascots.

There were two others, bunnies, as well: the smaller one called "16-bit Bunny" and the larger one called "32-bit Bunny". Just like the Bear, the Bunny has an exported function named after him, BUNNY_351.

Also, the Bunny is the icon for rumor.exe (Microsoft Party Line) in some Windows Chicago betas.

Microsoft OfficeIn Word for Windows 2, there is a simple animation involving a WordPerfect 'Monster', a fireworks display and credits roll in the About box. The user's name (entered in Tools Options) was appended to the end of the "Thanks" section of the credits. (Office 4.3/95/97)

The tip of the day would sometimes display the following fun and inspirational tips. They could also be viewed in the help file.

• If you do your best, whatever happens will be for the best.• Things that go away by themselves can come back by

themselves.• Plaid shirts and striped pants rarely make a positive fashion

statement.• You should never dive into murky waters.• It's never too late to learn to play the piano.• You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors.• You should never look directly at the sun.• This is the last tip.

Microsoft Excel contained a hidden Doom-like mini-game called "The Hall of Tortured Souls".

Office 97• Microsoft Excel contained a hidden flight simulator.• Microsoft Word contained a hidden pinball game.

Microsoft Access contained a hidden simulation of the Magic 8 Ball toy.

Office 2000Following in the tradition of hiding a small game in Microsoft Office programs, using Microsoft Excel 2000 and the Microsoft Office Web Components, a small 3-D game called "Dev Hunter" (inspired by Spy Hunter) is accessible. DirectX must be installed for this to work, and the egg is incompatible with certain service pack upgrades.

On the roadway shown in this game, a list of sentences appears, all capitalized:

• WE ARE SPECIAL TOO• YOU WILL RESPECT THE RECTANGLES• DONT SKIMP ON THE DATA• WHAT DO THESE PEOPLE DO AGAIN• SO YOUR NAME IS MISSPELLED WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT• CIRCLES ARE GOOD TOO BUT THEYRE NOT RECTANGLES• PIVOT PIVOT PIVOT CANT GET ENOUGH• MALICIOUS PIXIES

Office 2004 MacMicrosift decided to include more Easter eggs after 2000 in the Mac version of Office 2004. The game Asteroids is included in the Microsoft Office Notifications application.

Microsoft WordEvery version of Microsoft Word from 97 to 2013 (Windows) or 2004 to 2011 (Word:Mac) contains a function to create filler text: typing =rand() in a Word document and hitting Enter results in 3 paragraphs of 5 repetitions of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Typing =rand(X,Y) (with numbers for X and Y) results in X paragraphs of Y repetitions of the sentence. For example, =rand(10,10) will produce ten paragraphs, each with ten repetitions. Microsoft has officially described this as a feature and not an Easter egg. .. But is it?

In every version of Word text is replaced.In Word 2007 and 2010, the "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" text is available by typing the command =rand.old () and pressing enter.

Additionally, typing =lorem() gives the following text:“ Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. Nunc viverra imperdiet enim. Fusce est. Vivamus a tellus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Proin pharetra nonummy pede. Mauris et orci. ”

Typing =lorem(N) will produce "N" (where N is an integer) lines of lorem ipsum text.

All of these features will be disabled when "Replace text as you type" is turned off.

Microsoft ExcelSince version 5, Excel has possessed a "datedif" function, which calculates the difference in whole days, months or years between two dates. Although this function is still present in Excel 2007 and 2010, it was only documented in Excel 2000.

Microsoft Windows

In Windows 2000 and Windows XP, the game Minesweeper if the user starts the game, types "xyzzy", and presses shift and enter simultaneously, the top left-most pixel of the monitor (not the window) will be white or black when the mouse is hovered above a square, indicating that the square is either safe or mined, respectively. (The first click anywhere in Minesweeper is never a mine. A click on a 'black' square, as first click, moves that mine away).

Microsoft Windows 7 "God Mode"Main article: Windows Master Control Panel shortcut

The so-called Windows 7 "God Mode" is commonly mistaken for an easter egg. Creating a folder that references a specific global unique identifier allows for the creation of a shortcut to a location; in the case of "God Mode" it creates a control panel applet with all control panel items view enabled.

Naming & Renaming Folders

For the first one, try to create a folder named CON and you will see the following thing happening:

The same thing happens when you try any of the following names:

PRN, LPT1, LPT2, (…), LPT9, NUL, COM1, (…), COM9, and CLOCK$

All of the above names are reserved device names, which cannot be used as file names or folder names, regardless of the file extension. This is a relic from DOS, which has made its way through all versions of Windows, including Windows 7.

Advanced CalculationsLet’s do some basic math together:Highlight the next two lines to see the respective answers.What is the square root of four? It’s two, isn’t it?And what do you get if you subtract two from two? Zero, right?Now let’s do the above calculation using the Windows calculator. Type in 4, take the square root and from the result subtract 2. What do you get now? See why they don’t want you to use calculators at school?

To my knowledge, there is no explanation for this result. The operation returns different numbers in different versions of Windows, so it’s possibly a bug by design or an Easter Egg and not some weird functional error. What was your result?

Notepad Bug (XP Only)

Launch Notepad and type the following sentence: Bush hid the facts

Now save the file as anything you like, close it and open it again. What do you see?

If you did this in Windows XP, you probably see some weird unicode characters or Chinese characters like in the screenshot above.

The explanation for this bug lies in the Windows function ‘IsTextUnicode’. When a text file is encoded in Windows-1252 it is interpreted as UTF-16LE, resulting in the so-called mojibake. It means that Notepad recognizes unicode characters representing Chinese characters and translates them back into Chinese characters.

Solitaire Bug (XP Only)

Here is another trick that apparently disappeared in Windows 7. Please try it if you have Windows XP.

Open Solitaire and click the following key combination: [ALT] + [SHIFT] + [2]

When you click the above key combination, the game ends right there and you see the cards jumping to the front in waves, as they do when a game is completed successfully.