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.
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Easter egging n.
[IBM] The act of replacing unrelated components more or less
at random in hopes that a malfunction will go away. Hackers
consider this the normal operating mode of field circus techs and do not love them
for it. See also the jokes under field circus. Compare shotgun debugging.
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eat flaming death imp.
A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous CPU Wars comic; supposedly derive from
a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic
that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something of
the sort (however, it is also reported that the Firesign
Theatre's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" a
character won the right to scream "Eat flaming death, fascist
media pigs" in the middle of Oscar night on a game show; this may
have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown expressions
of hostility. "Eat flaming death, EBCDIC users!"