easter egg

Either 1. A plastic or painted egg traditionally used in bizarre Christian Easter rituals or 2. A colorful hidden feature or screen in a program, sometimes listing credits.

If you've ever done any kind of development work, you know how it is. Sitting, starring a a CRT for hours and weeks, trying to find the one-character error in the subroutine that makes the title text blink. Naturally, you get a little bit bored. And what helps cure a programmers' boredom? More programming, of course!

Easter eggs are great stress relivers for a coder. Some exaples are Fallout -- by holding down the Shift Key while pushing "Credits", you see a (long) list of quotes by the development staff (that contains some pretty raw language, too). Another example is a software package I won't name that, when you click "Exit" while holding down "shift" and "ctrl", spews out a string of profanity stating just what the developers thought of that project.

I have a feeling that the programmers of that new whiz-bang computer game you've been playing all night like it significantly less then you do.

Also possibly the only way that Microsoft Excel is usefull.

Easter Egg

1 oz. Rum, 1 oz. Apricot Brandy, Pineapple juice, Apple juice

Blend and serve over ice in a Collins glass, Garnish with a flag

Back to the Everything Bartender

(UK)

A hollow, chocolate egg, often containing sweets (or, occasionally - and less appreciated - a toy). Per gram, way more expensive that the chocolate used to make it.

But chocolate is chocolate and they're half price today...

In celebration of Easter, I've done a tidbit of research on the easter egg. The true one, not the easter eggs you find within computer programs.

Used by Christians, the egg is thought of to best symbolize the rebirth of Jesus Christ. Other cultures, such as the ancient Greeks, Persians, and the Chinese use an egg in their spring festivals.

Some pagans also have used the easter egg, where they believe the Heaven and Earth were believed to have formed the two halves of an egg. In pagan mythology, a Sun-Bird is believed to have hatched from the World Egg.

Even as early as the Middle Ages, eggs were colored and given as gifts. Edward I's accounts in 1290 include the expense of purchasing hundreds of eggs to be distributed to his household.

In the 17th Century, Pope Paul V blessed the egg in a prayer to be used in England, Ireland and Scotland: "Bless, O Lord, we beseech Thee, this Thy creature of eggs, that it may become a wholesome sustenance to Thy faithful servants, eating in thankfulness to Thee, on account of the Resurrection of Our Lord."

earthquake = E = Easter egging

Easter egg n.

[from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in the U.S. and many parts of Europe] 1. A message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code. 2. A message, graphic, or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes, intended as a joke or to display program credits. One well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to respond to the command make love with not war?. Many personal computers have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire development team.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

On Everything2, an easter egg is a type of item users can collect which can be "thrown" at other users in the chatterbox using one of a series of easter egg commands.

The basic egg command is "/egg", and is used thusly:

/egg mauler 
You EGGS MAULER

A user who is "egged" in this manner receives 3 GP, and the thrower has their total collection of easter eggs reduced by one.

There are also an unknown amount of additional "secret" egg commands, but you will have to discover those for yourself!

The easter eggs first appeared on Everything2 as part of an Easter-themed April Fools Day event orchestrated by kthejoker on April 1, 2007 (a bizarre day which also featured images of the Easter Bunny randomly appearing across the site). Although initially only intended to be part of this one-time event, the easter eggs proved so popular with users that they were allowed to remain as a permanent part of the site.

In video games, an Easter egg is an optional hidden feature in a game that involves an unimportant but sometimes humorous event. For example, in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, if you could get yourself into a certain secret room (which I will keep a secret to avoid spoilers), there is an actual chocolate Easter Egg. In the sequel, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, another secret room has a weird Easter egg - a note saying "There are no Easter Eggs here. Go away."

Common Easter Eggs are:

• Big Heads
• Little Heads
• Different Costumes
• Invincibility (usually found after the game is beaten)
• A non-canon appearance of another character

See Also:

• Cheat Codes
• GameShark
• Video Games

Credit to:
Information for the Grand Theft Auto easter eggs