Easter Eggs
August 12th, 2010
Technical books don’t have to be boring. Throughout the text, I strived to make something that was as fun to read as it was educational. To this end, I did something you won’t find in other books: there are four Easter eggs.
The Easter eggs are sprinkled throughout the book: the only hint I will give is that each one appears in some form of computer input or output. So references to things like “Al Czervik Web Site” on page 243 do not count. Nor do the copious mentions of the CHOCKLOCK in source code listings (including the one in Figure 1-2 that you probably missed.)
The first person who successfully finds one of the hidden phrases will win a T-shirt and Ollie vinyl figure from the Iconfactory store. Each of the four winners will also be mentioned on this site (along with a description of the Easter egg they found.)
Send your guesses to the email address shown in Figure 5-6. Good luck!
Updated August 18th, 2010: We have our first winner! Matt Moriarity correctly identified that the device name fields in Figure 5-9 were David Bowman and Francis Poole: the names of the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Congratulations, Matt!
Updated September 22nd, 2010: And another winner! Marcus Schröder noted that my user name on page 264 isn’t “studmuffin” (although part of me wishes that it was.) Well done, Marcus!
And another hint for those of you still looking: the remaining Easter eggs are numbers that you can read.
Updated September 28th, 2010: We have our final two winners!
Glenn Hoppe spotted a “unique” hexadecimal value in the breakpoint on page 56: 0xf135h90d. (For those of you who don’t speak 1337, that’s FLESHGOD AND ITS AWESOME.)
I wasn’t really expecting the final Easter egg to be found, but Nick Mackintosh spotted it on page 296. If you enter the Advertiser ID from Figure 9-12 into a calculator and turn it over, you’ll see a special message. Make sure you don’t use one of my favorite iPhone apps.
Congratulations to all the winners and their detective skills!
