Let me start this article by saying something that I’m sure will get me a lot of angry people commenting: Microsoft Windows is no fun. Now let me explain before you tear into me why I say this. Yes, Microsoft has the mass majority of the games written for it, and ported to it. Yes, Microsoft has it’s own share of humour inside it’s own programs by making the users insanely frustrated. Yes, Microsoft has had it’s own fair share of Easter Eggs… but it seems recently they haven’t included any in any of their programs. It seems that humour we used to see in the years of Bill Gates has officially died off once Balmer stepped in, but according to Wikipedia, it has been even worse then that: officially the Easter Eggs died off in 2002. But what is an Easter Egg?
An Easter Egg is quite simply a joke put into a program that the coder mean to slip in, as a joke for those that might find humour or reassurance in finding/testing it out fully. And to be honest, they are one of my favourite things to look for when I know there’s one in there. Even Facebook’s Konami code had me giggling like a fool for a little bit. That’s why I’m choosing to share with you some of the humour I’ve seen and I’ve noticed in Open Source, because believe me, some of them might have you smiling at the humour. This isn’t a useful post by all means, but it is one where I’d like you to try them out and see if you laugh too.
sudo apt-get moo
While you can run the ‘apt-get moo’ command without sudo, it is proper to use apt-get with sudo when you’re using the terminal, otherwise it would fail. So to keep with proper practice, I offer you the first Easter Egg and most hotly debated one on Launchpad. So if you didn’t laugh at the actual depiction, I can assure you, the bug report does have it’s humour instead. It has become so engraved in Linux culture that there’s even a program out there that mimics this, called cowsay. Just remember, aptitude has no super cow powers.
But who wants to install an Easter Egg?
vi :help 42
This one requires only slightly more effort. Type in the Terminal prompt, vi, then once in, hit :help 42. You should get something like the screenshot above, a reference to Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. If it errors for any reason, install vim. Despite the command being for ‘vi’, we’re actually using Vim… moving on…
ddate
ddate is an unusual way of getting the date but to Discordianists, this would be the actual date. A little background on Discordianism, it’s the believe that there is just chaos and order/disorder are illusions. I just find it humourous when you compare it to other calenders.
I felt like sharing these and perhaps teach you a little more about Linux. At the same time, this does loosen up newbies to Linux with the Terminal, and I’ll be covering more useful commands in the Terminal tomorrow. Today is more for humour, because I find Mondays and Tuesdays the most boring of days. Since I’ve covered a decent amount on Windows, I will be covering a decent amount on Linux for the next few days to make up for my lack of writing for it. But keep in mind, I’m planning on having a nice balance between the two.
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