Easter Eggs

While browsing through a bookstore the other day, I found myself flipping through a book about easter eggs. No, not the type you always wanted to make with those fancy looking PAAS kits when you were a kid, but rather those little images, messages, games or features that programmers leave in their programs, hidden, of course, for others to find (thus the easter egg analogy).

I'd come across these before, most recently on the web...Google in fact. If you go to google.com and search for "the answer to life, the universe, and everything" (no quotes), your first result is the Google calculator claiming it equals 42. This is a reference to Douglas Adams's classic "Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy" series in which a hypercomputer spends centuries to do essentially the same thing.

There are lots of these eggs out there. Try clicking on Yahoo!'s exclamation point and see what happens. Or go to Google maps and try getting directions from, say, Boston to Prague. Now THAT'S a long swim...

I came across some sites that have pretty good listing of eggs in not only software but also DVDs and music, etc. The Easter Egg Archive claims to have about 10.5 thousand indexed. Egg Heaven also has a good listing.

The Easter Egg Archive had an egg for OS X Tiger I found novel. If you go to the dashboard widget and apple-option-click the weather symbol at the top, the city changes to "Nowhere". If you keep doing it, the widget will cycle through all the available weather symbols it can show. According to the image below, it looks like Nowhere is in for a pretty bad hailstorm...