A couple of years ago at Duke I served as an undergraduate teaching assistant, or UTA, for CPS108, which is basically the large-program design course. While there, I wrote a program called Crystal, which was a plugin-driven web browser written in Java. Basically, the code students received provided a couple of interfaces and a single concrete class called Crystal that implemented just a window frame and a handful of events to notify notify plugins of changes in the current URL viewed and so on. The students had to write the display components (at least an HTML view and a text view) and application services (URL bar, search bar, back and forward buttons, and so on) that would turn this shell into a real web browser. At the time, due to how close we were to finals and how much material we were trying to cram into the semester, the professor opted not to use Crystal, and I basically forgot about it. In the last semester or two, though, Crystal, now known as Websta, has made a reappearance.

While talking to Ben, a friend of mine who’s currently a UTA for 108, we got to talking about how to add tabbed browsing to the Websta framework. Ben insisted it was convoluted; I insisted that it was straightforward. (For the record, Ben was basically right; the interfaces provided are sufficient to allow for tabbed browsing, but students basically have to throw out the Crystal class and write their own shell in order to achieve a sane tab implementation.) In order to figure out how to do it, I asked Ben to send me a tarball of the current version of the source code. A moment later, I extracted the tarball, dragged the folder to TextMate, and was immediately greeted with this:

I spent a good minute or two frantically trying to figure out how to customize TextMate backgrounds before I finally realized that the TextMate icon in my dock had mysteriously changed as well:

It turns out that Allan Odgaard, TextMate’s author, pushed a special Halloween update into the bleeding-edge stream. Once I figured out what was going on, I had a good laugh and got back to work. I know that doing stunts like this would make a marketing department’s skin crawl, but I love how much personality little actions like this add to applications and the companies behind them. Somehow, it just makes things feel more personal.

I think it’s for that reason that I was so profoundly hurt several months ago when I learned that the Malkovich easter egg in Copilot had been removed. When doing development on Copilot, we usually run the Host (the helpee’s program) in a VMware session and run the Helper directly from our desktops. Occasionally, though, we need to test running Host on our own desktops (possibly because we need to test dual monitors, or because we want to see a Windows 98-to-Windows XP session, or because we really need the more powerful debugging facilities that VisualStudio provides to locally running applications), which results in a Copilot-into-infinity session, wherein each Copilot window contains another Copilot window which contains another Copilot window, etc. One day, Joel was looking at that and commented how similar it was to the movie Being John Malkovich when John Malkovich accidentally enters his own head and sees only other copies of John Malkovich. A few beers and a movie viewing later, Copilot had its first (and to date, only) easter egg: if the Helper and the Host ran from the same computer, the title bars would change to read “Malkovich.” I was especially proud of the code for this patch, which was, in its own little way, worthy of at least the lesser entries in the IOCCC:

void ClientConnection::Malkovich() {
    MALKOVICH MALK0VICH MALk0VICH
        MALKOV1CH MALK0V1CH MA1KOVICH
            MA1KOV1CH MaLKOVICH MALkOVICH
}

Sadly, the Malkovich easter egg, as software easter eggs are wont to do, was responsible for a bug in Copilot, and so had to be removed, but for those of you who really just gotta see it, fire off an email and I’d be happy to send you a copy of the Copilot helpers that still have the Malkovich feature in them.