The pictures that are shown during the opening credits, of James and his father, are actual childhood photos of Colin Farrell and his father.
The scene where Colin Farrell's character tells the girl at the bar how he "just got out of jail" was Farrell's idea. He said he used it on a girl in a bar one time and that it worked, so the producers respected his improvisation and put that line in the film.
Colin Farrell states on the DVD audio commentary that while filming the scene in which he and Al Pacino's characters go to a restaurant, Al Pacino accidentally damaged the car they were riding in. The resulting damage can be clearly seen in the scene where Clayton and Burke pull up to the restaurant.
While not using power outlets as a means of hacking, some years back the CIA was able to penetrate a computer network at a nuclear enrichment plant in Iran. They were able to download the code used to operate the centrifuges, analyze it, tweak it and upload it. The tweak caused the system to display an incorrect temperature. The centrifuge operators adjusted their systems so that the temperatures appeared to be correct. This resulted in quite a few defective and useless batches to be processed before the hack was discovered.
The computer code seen as part of Ice-9 is actually gibberish taken from code written in C for Windows using Hungarian notation for variables and seemingly part of an earlier routine to search for files. It is not syntactically correct - taken as a whole it's just gibberish.