This piece of wierd behaviour of Microsoft's notepad was pointed out to me by Mr.Bibek, a friend of mine….
For those of you using Windows, do the following:
1.) Open an empty notepad file
2.) Type "Bush hid the facts" (without the quotes)
3.) Save it as whatever you want.
4.) Close it, and re-open it.Is it just a really weird bug?
I did that and found to my chagrin that the text in the file was getting converted into some junky boxes! It ain't surprising to see that, considering the fact that there were other such wierd buggy stuff in other microsoft products as well. There's one in Excel (which 'may' be an easter egg!) and another about being unable to create a folder named 'con' or omething like that! A little digging led me to Wired wherein one Mr.Kevin posts in the Wired Blog about it. The Post's comments contain a link to this page which offers a kinda explanation for it! Sounded double dutch to me 😦
Whatever be the explanation, if a simple app such as notepad is this 'wierd' in some cases, how will Vista be !
My Wierd Wired World 
Also known as Easter Eggs. To prevent code copying and reselling as their own, most companies have these kind of hidden tricks to verify that the code has been copied. Check out eeggs.com
I can understand the Con bug since it deals with ports etc, but Bush???
Ok, it deals with reality 😆
I don’ think that this Bush thingy is an Easter Egg! I mean notepad would’ave been coded long before Bush (even Bush Sr.) was in da limelight 😐
Oh! There are lotsa Bushes..
😆 But the sentence suggests ’twas aimed at Jnr 🙂
And yeah, the MSDN guy says that it occurs with 4-word & 3-worded sentence combos 😐
If you copy and paste the “boxes” into Wordpad or MS Word, it comes up as Chinese characters. Try what you get with Babelfish. You get something like ‘touches reflects picks”
This thing occurs probably due to the length of the words or something similar. Definitely not due to the “Bush” statement 😉
I just tried with something like “Busg hif thr factr” and it still gives the same behaviour.
Interesting 🙂
bush hid the facts
interesting. i found out that re-opening the text file, re-pasting it in there, saving it, and opening it again seems to keep it from happening again.
This is not intentional, it has to do with the way Notepad guesses the text encoding of the text inside the file. Open Notepad, click File -> Open, choose the text that has “bush hid the facts” inside, then change the encoding to ANSI (what it’s supposed to be) and it will open it fine. If you make Notepad guess, some combinations of four words (4 letters then 3 then 3 then 5) will make it guess Unicode, which will convert the text into boxes.
Not an easter egg, just shoddy microsoft programming.
Shoddy, Yes. Bet they will let it be…