Easter Eggs in programs are very common in earlier days and even now in some of the programs or if someone has cracked it. Well Easter eggs are undocumented code that does something funny but they can be triggered only through special means. I got a mail today with the subject “New bug in Windows XP!!” The mail had the following instructions.

For those of you using Windows, do the following:

1. Open an empty notepad file
2. Type “Bush hid the facts” (without the quotes)
3. Save it as whatever you want.
4. Close it, and re-open it.

is it just a really weird bug?

The moment I saw the outcome I was thinking “Could it be an Easter egg?”, and not really a bug. Well I do not know the answer, if you knew let me know. But coming back to Easter eggs I also did place one in one of my best projects when I was working on VB in my first company. It was a desktop application and typically in any windows application you see a “About” menu item under the Help menu. That brings up a splash screen that displays the logo of the application and other copyright information. I had placed a hot key (Ctrl + Alt + Shift or something similar, don’t remember it now) in the code, that will open up a text box and scrolls all the team members names. I think Easter eggs are cool and it is really cool when someone hacks it and publishes it.

I think as far as a hidden code does not harm the system, its performance or your work in any way, then why call it a bug? I mean why do you want to save a file with that text above? And if at all you wanted that text, you just add a period or a space to it and you no more have that bug, if you really call it a bug. But at the same time I am curious what that output translates to? I tried the Google Translator but could not get anything out. By the way was it chinese or japanese?