The Rand

The rand “virus”: or how to insert dummy text into a document Article contributed by Suzanne Barnhill

Like jokes, urban legends, and virus hoaxes, tips about Word’s little-used or undocumented features periodically makes their way around the Internet, occasioning a wave of postings in Word newsgroups. One of these is =rand(), which is sometimes represented as an Easter egg, sometimes feared as a possible virus. It is neither. It is a Word function (undocumented in the online Help but documented in the Microsoft Knowledge Base) that can be useful in certain circumstances.

The rand function The Microsoft Knowledge Base article How to Insert Sample Text into a Document in Word [212251] explains the use and syntax of the function: Microsoft Word allows you to quickly insert sample text into a document. To do this, type =rand() in the document where you want the text to appear, and then press ENTER. The inserted text is that hardy perennial: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” which contains every letter in the English alphabet. By default, the sample text contains three paragraphs, each containing five sentences. You can control how many paragraphs and sentences appear by adding numbers inside the parentheses, for instance: =rand(3,4)

The first number is the number of paragraphs, and the second the number of sentences per paragraph. If you omit the second number, you get five sentences in each paragraph. So, for example: =rand(3,4)

inserts three, four-sentence paragraphs, while: =rand(10) inserts ten, five-sentence paragraphs. The maximum number for either parameter is 200 and may be lower depending on the number of paragraphs and sentences specified. For instance, if you specify 200 paragraphs, then the maximum number of sentences per paragraph you can specify is 99: =rand(200, 99)

If you specify 200 sentences per paragraph, then the maximum number of paragraphs you can specify is 99. Admittedly, this function serves a useful purpose for filling a page when you’re designing a template and want to see how it will look with text in it. It’s also easy to see how users can be alarmed and fear this is a virus when someone suggests they try “=rand(200,99),” which quickly blows up into a giant document! (Incidentally, part of the instructions in some versions is to “Make sure there is a space between = and rand and a space between rand and (200,99).” This actually makes no difference: the function works equally well with and without spaces.)

A better method of creating dummy text

Although the rand function is quick and easy, the text it produces is not very natural. All the paragraphs are the same length, and, because every sentence is the same, the lines will tend to break in the same places. The result is that some possible formatting problems may be masked. Another, more useful, possibility, therefore, is to use “Greek“ or “lorem ipsum” text. Because this kind of dummy text is very commonly used by designers (because it gives a natural look without distracting content), you’ve probably seen examples of it. Microsoft even used it in the Microsoft TrueType Font Assistant (version 1.1) in Windows 3.x. According to the Microsoft Knowledge Base article: What ‘lorem ipsum dolor sit amet’ Means (Q114222): The phrase “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” appears in Microsoft TrueType Font Assistant for each example of the fonts available. This phrase has the appearance of an intelligent Latin idiom. Actually, it’s nonsense .... It's used because the letters involved and the letter spacing in those combinations reveal at their best the weight, design, and other important features of the typeface. “Although the phrase is nonsense,” the article continues, “it does have a long history.” If you’re curious about that history, follow the link above. The Lorem ipsum text is also discussed at The Free Online Dictionary of Computing, which adds that: “The point of using this text, or some other text of incidental intelligibility, is that it has a more-or-less normal (for English and Latin, at least) distribution of ascenders, descenders, and word lengths, as opposed to just using ‘abc 123 abc 123’, ‘Content here content here’, or the like.” If you want to use the text, here’s how: 1.

A sample of “lorem ipsum” text is provided below. Copy it and paste it into a Word document.

2.

You may want to duplicate the text (to expand it) and edit it to create longer and shorter paragraphs, add some dummy headings, or the like. (The chunk I have saved is about a page long, which is a useful size; you can always truncate it as needed.) Needless to say, you can break the text anywhere – not just between sentences.

3.

To keep Word’s spelling checker from going crazy when you use this text, do it (and yourself) a favor by selecting the text and choosing “(no proofing)” as the language under Tools | Language | Set Language.

4.

To save the text as an AutoText entry, select it, press Alt+F3, and type in a name for your AutoText entry. (After some experimentation, I settled on “lorem”; now whenever I type “lore” and press Enter, the text is inserted.)

Here’s the text: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. One caveat about the above sample: it does not contain every letter in the English alphabet. If it is important for testing purposes that you include every letter, then you are better off with quick brown foxes.

Computer-related Easter eggs

Software based Easter eggs are messages, graphics, sound effects, or an unusual change in program behavior, that mainly occur in a software program in response to some undocumented set of commands, mouse clicks, keystrokes or other stimuli intended as a joke or to display program credits. An early use of the term Easter egg was to describe a message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code.

The ASCII cow from apt-get. Two well-known early Easter eggs found in some Unix operating systems caused them to respond to the command "make love" with "not war?" and "why" with "why not" (Berkeley Unix 1977 "The Prisoner" reference). This same behavior occurred on the RSTS/E operating system where the command "make" was used to invoke the TECO editor, and TECO would also provide this response. The largest easter egg is purported to be in the Atari 400/800 version of Pitfall II, which contains an entire game that was more complex and challenging than the original Pitfall II (Pitfall). 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) images of the entire development team. The 1997 version of Microsoft Excel contained a hidden flight simulator[1][2]; the 1997 version of Word, a pinball game[3]. Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 contained a small, hidden video game named 'GORILLA.BAS'. The Palm operating system has elaborately hidden animations and other surprises. The Debian GNU/Linux package tool apt-get has an Easter egg involving an ASCII cow when variants on "apt-get moo" are typed into the shell. Another notable easter egg is from The MathWorks' MATLAB: the why command provides succinct random answers to almost any question: % why % because the not very smart system engineer insisted on it

Non-software While computer-related Easter eggs are often found in software, occasionally they exist in hardware or firmware of certain devices. On some PCs, the BIOS ROM contains Easter eggs. Notable examples include several early Apple Macintosh models which had pictures of the development team in the ROM (accessible by pressing the programmer's switch and jumping to a specific memory address, or other equally obscure means), and some errant 1993 AMI BIOS that on 13 November proceeded to play "Happy Birthday" via the PC speaker over and over again instead of booting. Perhaps the most famous example of a hardware Easter egg is in the HP ScanJet 5P, where the device will play the Ode to Joy or Für Elise by varying the stepper motor speed if users power the device up with the scan button depressed. Another fun Easter egg is found in the Kurzweil K2x musical keyboard series (K2500, K2600 and others): if users type "Pong" while in search mode they can play the game Pong. The EEPROM of Nagra smart cards for the Dish Network satellite television system contain the phrase "NipPEr Is a buTt liCkeR". Nipper was a hacker who broke old security routines on the cards, and this text is included as a fallback to old security routines, where the phrase was hashed against an input text to verify the card.

Chip and PCB-based Easter eggs

Main article: Chip art

Easter egg inside an ADSP-2181 chip: an etching of video game character Sonic the Hedgehog Many integrated circuit (chip) designers have included hidden artwork, including assorted images, phrases, developer initials, logos, and so on. This artwork, like the rest of the chip, is reproduced in each copy by lithography and etching. These are visible only when the chip package is opened and examined under magnification, so they are, in a sense, more of an "inside joke" than most of the Easter eggs included in software. Originally, the Easter eggs served a useful purpose as well. Not unlike cartographers who may insert trap streets or nonexistent landscape features as a copyright infringement detection aid, IC designers may also build non-functional circuits on their chips to help them catch infringers. Easter eggs, however benign, if directly copied by the defendant, could be used in mask work infringement litigation. Changes to the copyright laws (in the USA, the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984, and similar laws in other countries) now grant automatic exclusive rights to mask works, and the Easter egg no longer serves any practical use. Western Digital's MyBook Pro has several words on the metal band that wraps around 3 sides in Morse Code. The code reads: PERSONALRELIABLEINNOVATIVESIMPLE INNOVATIVEPERSONALDESIGNRELIABLE INNOVATIVEDESIGNPERSONALDESIGN SIMPLEINNOVATIVE This is also mentioned in the MyBook Wiki. There is more information about it there. The Commodore Amiga models 500, 600 and 1200 each featured easter eggs, in the form of The B52s song names etched on the motherboards. The 500 says "Rock Lobster", the 600 says "June Bug", and the 1200 says "Channel Z".

Video game Easter eggs

The Easter egg in the Atari 2600 game Yars' Revenge: displaying the programmer's initials, "HSWWSH". Easter eggs in computer and video games are distinguished from cheat codes which allow players to cheat — see Minesweeper for an example. The tradition of including Easter eggs in video games has created small sections of gaming fandom that are as devoted to finding Easter eggs as they are to playing games as they are intended. In Taito's 1986 arcade game Land-Sea-Air Squad, some of the destructible buildings yielded a winged angel and 20,000 points if hit the right number of times.

A video game series famed for its Easter eggs is the Grand Theft Auto series. In Grand Theft Auto III there is a sign on one of the walls of a hard-to-access alleyway saying "you weren't supposed to be able to get here you know". An actual chocolate Easter egg is hidden in a secret room in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. This was referenced in the sequel San Andreas by a sign on top of a tower of a Golden Gate Bridge-clone that reads "There are no Easter eggs up here. Go away." The GTA III alleyway Easter egg was seen again in the PSP game Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, where the same wall said "Hello again" with a smiley face. The same game was later released on PlayStation 2, with the wall this time saying "You just can't get enough of this alley, can you?" with a smiley face with its tongue stuck out. Another very famous Easter egg is the "Megg" from the video game Halo. It is an elaborate sequence that allows players to see a heart with an M in the middle, made with blood splatters. It is called the Megg after Megan, the girlfriend of one of the programmers. The Megg was never supposed to be seen by anyone except him and his girlfriend. There are many other easter eggs in the Halo series, probably the most famous being "The Skulls" found in Halo 2. The skulls are objects that you can pick up that activate different effects like "intensified" explosions. A guide with descriptions and videos of the skulls and other Halo easter eggs can be found at Halo Easter Eggs. On the bonus disc for the Halo 2: Limited Collector's Edition, if the left button is held for ten seconds, there will appear in a hidden fan work gallery. Another example would be the ones that can be found in the popular Valve game, CounterStrike. For example, in the level "Estate", when dead (in Free-View mode), players can slide under the house (using the mouse to direct, and the keyboard to go forward and backwards), to see a cube-shaped Easter egg containing the author's names and one of the programmers' pictures entitled "Tofu X", showing him attempting to drink a bottle of Windex. In the Nintendo 64 classic, Perfect Dark, pieces of cheese that had no purpose or explanation could be found in every level. Some computer-era pinball games also included Easter eggs, triggered by pressing the flipper and start buttons in certain sequences. For example, The Addams Family pinball game included two Easter eggs showing extended credits and chainsaw-wielding cows. In Max Payne and Max Payne 2, Easter eggs included a memorial to a deceased developer, a radio that plays a message from the programmers, and an in-joke that creates a series of moving fireballs, intending to make the level a Mario-like endeavour. Text-based games often include hidden messages which appear when the user types specific words into the computer. For example, the Zork series contains a number of these which become running gags and can be used with different results in each game. In the video game Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, there was an in-game myth of a monster capable of transforming to a blue bunny. After completing a quest in the game related to this myth and seemingly proving that the myth was a hoax, the player has a chance to encounter and be stopped by a blue bunny while traveling in the world. If the player attacked the bunny, it would instantly transform into a giant monster. In the SNES game Chrono Trigger, if you beat the game in a very difficult and specific way you will be brought to an area in the game that is then populated by the game developers. You can talk to them and some will ask you questions like how you liked the game, and others will have side conversation, like about how a particular sports team is doing. In the game Ultimate Doom there is a secret room which features the symbol of the band Nine Inch Nails on the ceiling and the floor. Trent Reznor is a fan of the Doom games and has help contribute music and other work for Quake, another id Software title. In Banjo-Kazooie, an Easter Egg can be given if the player obtains the Jiggy from the sandcastle in Treasure Trove Cove, returns to Banjo's house in Spiral Mountain, stands on the yellow lines on the carpet closest to the fireplace, and then switches to first-person view and looks at the

picture of Bottles the mole, he will offer the player a chance to complete a "moving picture" puzzle in which the player will receive codes to alter Banjo's looks, such as enlarging his head or making him tall and thin, whereas the final code will turn him into a washing machine. However, this does not affect gameplay. Another easter egg is gotten at the end of the game, once the player collects all 100 Jiggies, where Mumbo Jumbo reveals information about the sequel, Banjo-Tooie. In Wii Sports (Bowling), on the second stage of the training, on the last lane, throwing the ball to the side in a certain way triggers an explosion, resulting in dropping all 91 pins. Various games feature hidden references to/images of the 'Dopefish', a character from id Software's platformer title Commander Keen. (See the Dopefish article for a complete list of games.)

Compact disc and DVD Easter eggs

"Dancing Yoda" in an Easter egg from the Revenge of the Sith DVD

Bloody Gir, an easter egg on the animated series, Invader Zim. Some compact discs include hidden features which may be called Easter eggs, such as screensavers for a computer which can only be accessed if the CD is played in a CD-ROM drive, or hidden tracks. An example of the latter is the album Nevermind by Nirvana: at the end of the final track there is a period of silence, after which the unlisted song 'Endless, Nameless" appears. Many other CDs have similar features, some with hidden material appearing on high track numbers (often 69 or 99) and sometimes merely after a long pause in the final track. An exhaustive listing would be nearly impossible.

The practice also occasionally occurred with LPs. Possibly the first ever Easter egg on record was on The Beatles' 1969 album Abbey Road. Original sleeve pressings list "The End" as being the last track on the album. However, after a break of about 12 seconds, a short piece called "Her Majesty" appears. However, the surprise was spoiled for CD buyers as this track is included in the sleeve listings. A more unusual method of hiding tracks is to insert material before the first song, only reachable by "rewinding" the CD from its beginning. This achieved by using the "pregap" space on an audio CD between index 0 and 1. Albums that use this kind of Easter egg include Factory Showroom by They Might Be Giants, Burn by Sister Machine Gun, and many others. Again, a comprehensive list is beyond the scope of the concept's description. Even more prevalent are Easter eggs in DVD releases of movies; these are often in the form of hidden trailers, documentaries, or deleted scenes, and are accessed by manipulation of the disc's interactive menus. An example is the Region 1 2000 DVD release of James Cameron's 1989 feature film The Abyss, which has at least nine Easter eggs, including at least three different trailers for Aliens and two for True Lies, two other James Cameron films. More elaborate eggs include that in the 2002 release of Christopher Nolan's 2000 reverse-time thriller Memento, which plays the scenes of the movie in conventional chronological order. The 2-disc version of The Incredibles has many easter eggs, most of which can be accessed on different screens by clicking the omnidroid that appears (after a little while) in the upper right hand corner. Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate features several hidden trailers for the film. The deluxe editions of The Lord of the Rings feature the following Easter eggs: • • • • •

Jack Black's parody of the "Council of Elrond" scene Gollum's "award acceptance" speech A comic interview with Elijah Wood A trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers A comic interview with director Peter Jackson

The film "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" has an easter egg that includes several "alternate" scenes and an otherwise unavailable director's commentary by Rawson Marshall Thurber, these are all accessed by pressing the enter button on the DVD remote control every time the character "White Goodman" played by Ben Stiller snaps his fingers. The animated television series "Invader Zim", pictures of a easter egg named Bloody GIR are hidden in frames through the last 14 episodes. Even such serious films as Doctor Zhivago, Dances With Wolves and Tombstone can have Easter eggs. Most DVD releases of George Lucas' films include blooper reels or hidden videos that can only be accessed by entering "1138" on the DVD remote when the "THX" logo has been highlighted. This is an in-joke referring to his first film, THX 1138. In the movie Dumb and Dumber, an Easter egg in the form of an actor's commentary on a scene is accessed in the special features menu, and moving the cursor to an invisible icon that looks like an Easter egg when highlighted. DVD releases of television series can also feature Easter eggs, particularly The Simpsons. Moving the cursor to a T-shirt Bart is wearing, for example, gives viewers a news broadcast about the underground manufacture of illegal Simpsons shirts. In order to distinguish between different editions of the same film, some distributors have taken to listing Easter eggs in lists of "extra features" on the packaging and promotional material; some do not consider Easter eggs advertised in this way to be true Easter eggs.

Security concerns Because of the increase in malware, many companies and government offices forbid the use of software containing Easter eggs for security reasons. With the rise of cybercrime and the prevalence of the Easter egg's cousin, the logic bomb, there is now concern that if the programmer could slip in undocumented code, then the software cannot be trusted. This is of particular concern in offices where personal or confidential information is stored, making it sensitive to theft and ransom. For this reason, many developers have stopped the practice of adding Easter eggs to their software. Microsoft, who has in the past created some of the largest and most elaborate Easter eggs such as the ones in Microsoft Office, no longer allows Easter eggs as part of their Trustworthy Computing initiative.[4]

Non-interactive media Easter eggs •

In the write-up of the plagiarism trial of The Da Vinci Code, Judge Peter Smith included a coded message.

•

BBC MindGames Magazine contains a number of hidden puzzles and messages in each issue which it refers to as Easter eggs, and which it challenges its readers to find.

•

In the Dan Brown book Digital Fortress, a numerical message at the back of the book, when decoded, spells out "WE ARE WATCHING YOU".