Question: What's the story behind the Clawfoot Portal?

Answer: Clawfoot Hearts, the full account! (from ReplayDon)

Hi everyone and thanks for the congratulations.
I thought I would provide a full account of the history of the hearts and the clawfoot portal.

Let me take you back to 06-13-99:

ReplayTV 1.0 had been shipping for a few months and people had discovered the 243-Replay Zones screen. lostboy had run across the text field at the bottom of the screen and wondered about it.
See: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=82816&highlight=CFP+field
ReplayDoug comes running into my office and he and I had a good chuckle over it. You see, the whole 243-ReplayZones screen started out as a debugging tool for me. I wrote the windowing system for Replay before we even had a graphics library to output anything. In order to test my windowing system I needed some user interface controls so I made text field and button control classes. Then I made a screen to put them on (now the 243-RZ screen) and made the popup keyboard since I knew eventually we would need one, but primarily to test my navigation code. Originally, the only reason the text field was written and was put on the 243-RZ screen was to provide a mechanism for bringing up and testing the popup keyboard. I remember studying my serial port output:
Now on Button 'Q'!
CIOC_EAST received!
Deactivating Button 'Q'!
Activating Button 'W'!
Now on Button 'W'!
etc.

So the fact that people on AVS forum were speculating that it was for the purpose of 'secret commands' evoked quite a chuckle!

Doug decided that for the sake of humor, we should play fully into their hands and the first order of business was to come up with a cool name for the field, to lend an aura of mysticism and supposed purpose to the field. The conversation went something like this:
Doug: "It should have 'portal' in the name since Replay is now supposed to be 'The portal to television'."
Don: "I hate that whole 'portal to television' b.s. What a dumb idea."
Doug: "I know, but since we as a company are struggling with our identity, and the whole internet thing is huge, and Yahoo is the 'portal to the internet' and Marc Andreesen just joined our board of directors, there is a lot of momentum for us at Replay to brand ourselves as the 'portal to television'."
Don: "Harumph."
Doug: "Ok, so it should be some type of portal, but otherwise have an obfuscated and semi-meaningless name."
Don: "Okay, well last night I helped my old roommate from college move an antique clawfoot bathtub into his house. How about the 'CLAWFOOT PORTAL?'"
Doug: "Excellent!"

So Doug runs back to his office and decides on a whim to further legitimize the notion that the field is special by writing:
"I don't know of any codes you can enter into the CFP field that will do anything."
Lostboy's reply: "CFP field? What does CFP mean?"

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!


At the time we were working on the 2.0 software release and I decided to amuse myself by actually creating the clawfoot portal:

code:
class ClawFootPortal : public LayoutTextField
{
protected:
void PerformClawFootOperation();
};

All that needed to be done was to add some clawfoot operations.
The first 3 that were added were:
ME LIKE COOKIES
PLAY CONTINUOUSLY
MODESTO GIRL

At the time, however, MODESTO GIRL didn't do anything with hearts, it just printed out "I am for you."
I needed Doug to draw the hearts, you see.

Eventually (12-9-99) I got Doug to draw them and I added them into the MODESTO GIRL feature. All I had to do was wait for 2.0 to be released to the network (any day now), secretly type it into Cindy's unit and I could impress my girl. Being overly impatient, I called ReplayMike, ReplayDoug, and ReplayBen into my office to show off the hearts and I think it was ReplayMike who suggested, "You should make them show up on all units every Valentine's Day."

So that I did.

Meanwhile we had signed Panasonic as an OEM and they decided to produce the Showstopper (ironic to all of us in software where showstopper means a bug that prevents product shipment). However, Panasonic had their own requirements such as Closed Caption support and Macrovision support that delayed the release of 2.0 until we could get those features in. Now an avid follower of AVS forum, and notoriously impatient by nature, I was excited to see if anyone would notice the hearts on Valentine's day, 2000. Meanwhile I added a feature of my own, "SPORTS GUARD", which (in the absence of our show extender feature not to be introduced via the 'More options' button on the record dialog until 3.0), would allow the user to automatically add up to 1 hour of extra record time to live sporting events. Panasonic discovered this and because it wasn't approved by them on their already signed off user interface spec I was forced to remove it from the UI. Because of the imminent release of 2.0 and the ShowStopper, and Panasonic's demand to know of any other last minute or 'secret' features, I became paranoid about my Valentine's day featurette. I was afraid that 2.0 might get delayed past Valentine's day 2000, Panasonic would discover the hearts, and force me to remove them prior to them seeing the light of day.

So, torn with anguish, I modified the code to only display the hearts on Valentine's days that occurred *after* the year 2000. I had to wait another year, and let me tell you it was tough, to see if there would be a reaction on AVS forum.

Meanwhile, to further my anguish, on 12-17-2000 seanriddle reverse engineered the PerformClawFootOperation() function and discovered a few sequences of strings that could be typed in to cause the Modesto Girl functionality to be executed. Serves me right for choosing a non-unique key generating hash function!

Finally, though, 2-14-2001 rolled around and I was delighted to see that the hearts were finally discovered.

It warmed my own heart to see the delighted reactions and yes it's true, we at Replay (SonicBlue) do love you!

-Don