I Am My Avatar

Monday Fourteen

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:28:44 GMT

Take all of me. Why not take all of me?
Take all of me: eight score, and several more,
And change (a pound or two, or 50p).
Pick up the hoop. It's time to work the core.

I stumble as I walk. I'm slightly flush
And everything is spinning like a top.
A pot of creme, a reverential hush
From end to end throughout the pastry shop

Until I've found perfection in a cup
And matched you ounce for ounce (and several pints).
We'll stuff their gobs and shut the bastards up.
Our challenges are similar in kind.

Propel the melody. It's time to dance.
Eight weeks from now, I'll fit into my pants.

Monday Fourteen

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:18:47 GMT

Go. Light a candle. Solemnly proceed
Along the aisle. Sweet prometheus
Stole just a bauble. Later came the seed,
And liberation. Ride the abacus

Down Chestnut Street to Main and come to State,
And plant yourself behind the oaken bar.
Employment is an article of faith
In images. We haven't starved so far.

That might be just an aberration. Taste
The fruits that others gather while ye may.
Debug. Refactor. Analyze and trace
And watch the portrait. Witness Seymour Cray

Grown old in spite of Dijkstra, Knuth and Moore.
There's room for doubt. Enjoy your perfect pour.

Star Wars Uncut: Vegetable Edition

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:51:27 GMT

Watch my contribution to Star Wars Uncut! Whee!

Thanks to Jeremy and glaucon for their voice talentz, and to Eleanor for the sound effects (she's a mixcraft diva now).

Those who have been under a rock can learn about the Star Wars Uncut fan remake project here.

Interesting medical news

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:29:17 GMT

Apparently over the counter pain medications at the time of vaccination make the vaccine less effective.

"Many of the pain relievers in question are classified as NSAIDs or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which act in part by blocking the cyclooxygenase-2 (cox-2) enzyme. Blocking the cox-2 enzyme is not a good idea in the context of vaccination, however, because the cox-2 enzyme is necessary for the optimal production of B-lymphocytes."

So while there can be discomfort with certain vaccines apparently it's best for you and/or your kid to tough it out. Well, it sure beats contracting the disease.

Monday Fourteen

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:17:28 GMT

I toldja I was trouble. 9am
Keeps sliding by the wayside. Keep your job,
We'll need it for the cover charges. When
And what and where... consume it to the cob

And let the others snuffle after that.
They get the fallen tassels. You get this.
You take el luchador down to the mat.
There's photographic evidence. You sit

Where no one else can ride. Do not disturb
Until the second workshop. Keep their hands
Where you can see them. Out here in the burbs
We don't leave the hotel. I give commands

And, answering, you chuckle to yourself.
You share the interest. But you keep the wealth.

Monday Fourteen

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:48:16 GMT

Black bottom cupcakes. Danish. Gluten free
Banana muffins. Chocolate chip pecan
Banana muffins full of energy
And antioxidants. Coffee? C'est bon.

Big tipper, don't go easy on the pear
Banana muffins. Have yourself a stack.
Banana muffins bring it on. Compare
The coffee anywhere, then come on back

To papa, shaking imperceptibly.
Banana muffins are your bicycle.
Banana muffins launched successfully
In seven major markets. Feel the pull,

Do not deny yourself. Muffins unbound!
A sea of cinnamon! The world is round!

How do you spell TLA? You don't

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:58:51 GMT

The South Street TLA Video is closing. 15th and Locust will stay open for "as long as the community supports it" but the writing is on the wall.

This is sad. I'd rediscovered the TLA in the past year or two, getting rid of my netflix subscription because I want a movie when I want it (or Eleanor wants it), not days later, and the "Netflix Now"streaming service almost never had what I wanted.

I'm told Netflix Now has improved, but this still suxx0rz.

Granted I don't rent a hell of a lot of movies, owing to the art form that has cheerfully taken over my life, but I'll have to make a pilgrimage or four to the 15th and Locust store while I still can.

Like a cat gleefully exsanguinating a mouse

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:34:05 GMT

I don't get sick much. Obviously, this is a blessing. Still, I wish my immune system wouldn't play with its food.

I haven't had a proper cold in the past couple years. Instead I sniffle just a little for a couple days... and then Everything Is Awesome.

I think of what goes on in my body like this:

DAY ONE

Virus: "ABWAGGGHHAHH! ENNNURRR! HUOOORRRRRGGGAAH! PHEAR"

Immune System: "oh aren't you cute. [Bops virus in the nose, goes back to reading Twitter feed]"

DAY TWO

Virus: "KEEEEL! I KEEEL KEEL KEEL KEEEL"

Immune System: "uh-huh." [Casually pins down toe of virus with left front paw, bites off left ear]

DAY THREE

Virus: "DAAAAAA HUMMINA BWAM KAPOW SLAUGHTER ABUSE DESTROY YARRRRRR!"

Immune System: "MAKING GOR-GAR INCREASES KICKER VALUE. Yeah, yeah, I get it." [Bites off nose of virus, casually shreds tail]

DAY FOUR

Virus: "NNNNNGGGH HARRR BWOOOO KILLELAGH FO' SHIZZLE"

Immune System: "this grows tiresome." [BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA of machine gun fire ensues]

Things were not always thus. When my daughter was small, she brought home every cold in the universe on her grubby unwashed snotty hands, and I got all of them. But after a while there were no new bugs to shoot at.

Unfortunately my immune system has become jaded, and it takes out its boredom on any available target. All my life, I have been allergic to oranges. But now the list has been expanded to include all citrus. And pineapples. And possibly mangoes.

Mango-Tofu Curry: "Mmmm, mm! Scrum dilly umptious and full of vitamin C!"

Immune System: BETTER DEAD THAN ORANGE! DEFCON 5 ACTIVATE OPERATION SPOILSPORT SCRAMBLE ALL STEALTH BOMBERS! BYE-BYE MOSCOW BYE-BYE CLEVELAND NNNNGURK

... At which point the benadryl kicks in. Or I die. I hate it when I die. Makes me late for salsa.

I'm planning to see an allergist soon for a proper battery of tests to figure out exactly which of nature's friends I currently need to avoid to remain living. This is a pain in the ass, but all things considered, it beats leaving a trail of mucous from December through March.

Monday Fourteen

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:06:23 GMT

Don't eat that shit, it's full of hydrogen
In really nasty forms you can't pronounce.
Just step back from the counter. Count to ten
And just stay hungry. Every muscled ounce

Is locked and loaded, ready to deploy.
Don't look at me. That's how it has to be.
There is no calm delight, no easy joy.
You have to prep for every ecstasy,

Rehearse for every pleasure. Train yourself
Until you wink without a hint of strain.
It's not as if we do this for our health.
No sacrifice, no life. No pain, no gain.

Don't eat that. That's not good for you at all.
Don't look at me. I haven't got the balls.

First impressions of Google Wave

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:13:10 GMT

'Google Wave in a nutshell, so far: a seamless transition between IM and email. If you want to send a full-blown email message as your response, you go ahead and do that. If you want to keep going back and forth with quick quips, you do that. The mechanisms are there to fully support both a long near-real-time email exchange and a quick chat, with robust support for groups, not just pairs of people.

A rough English translation of Google Wave:

wave = thread (or a particular chat session, if you like, but it acts more like an email thread)
blip = message (an individual email message or chat statement)

To better enable this seamless transition between chat and email, Google Wave has minimize-and-maximize controls that extend the usual window management metaphor: maximize a Wave and it presents more like an email exchange. Minimize it and it's a little chat-style window. You get to decide how to perceive it.

Everything else feels like a decoration of the above, so far. At least, it does if you've been using GMail and Google Chat for a long time. GMail already supported search of your chat history, and delivery by email if the other person logs off. And YouTube links already offered an inline player in Google Chat. So the multimedia-ness is less of an event if that's what you're already accustomed to.

What's new here is the seamlessness, the certainty that you're using the right medium regardless of the length of what you have to say or the time you want to take saying it. While Google Chat was searchable, it wasn't right in the same thread with email, and the transition between them was a little awkward.

Now, something I'm not crazy about is the "looky look you can see what I'm typing as I type it" factor. Seriously: if I wanted to worry about getting chewed out for my first choice of words, I'd call you.

Still, I think this feature might be worth it because it balances the weirdness of wondering whether you should wait while someone decides to compose a lengthy email-like response instead of a chat-style quip. I'm thinking about it. I'll make up my mind when it gets me fired or saves me from writing War and Peace in response to the wrong question, whichever comes first.

* * *

Okay, that was my very firstest impression, before I cheated and went peekin' at detailed overviews of Wave. Glad I got that down honestly before doing too much homework and drinking too much kool-aid.

That having been said, some interesting things I missed:

People are saying it is "wiki-like." That's because you can edit other people's "blips" (aka messages... whether they be little chatty ones or long email-y ones). This is downright weird the first time you do it. "Really? I can just click Edit and change things so that John says he's a monkey and he owes me $50?"

Yeah, you can, but then the blip is attributed to "you and John," not just John. So don't get too excited about the sabotage potential. Though I definitely see confusion arising here.

Related to that is the ability to embed an entire Wave in a web page. I'm not yet certain how that works in practice.

The email-like-ness of Wave introduces other new concepts from a chat perspective. You can have a quick little chat in which twenty things are said, and go back tomorrow and reply to the third thing the other guy said, just as you could do in an email or forum conversation.

One of the biggest differences: you can introduce new people to a wave at any time. And when you do my understanding is that they have access to the complete history of the wave, including the ability to walk through the whole thing in chronological order, bringing themselves up to date with the spirit of the thing as they might in a forum or blog thread. This solves a number of common problems with group chats and emails, but also poses new challenges: how do you integrate people without making them privy to the embarrassing details of your decision to bring them aboard? So far I don't think you really can. You can delete your own blips, but it would take a great deal of coordination to clean up a slightly dicey conversation for a newcomer's consumption. I think you'd be forced to start another wave in that situation.

Chat and email are the most obvious metaphors for what Google Wave provides, but Wave has other features as well, things whose best analogies are in forums, livejournal and the like. You can easily add a simple poll to a Wave ("do you like this? Yes / No / Maybe") to gather opinions from participants.

All of these features, coupled with the sheer usability of the thing, are apt to make it a popular tool once a critical mass of users have access to it. Facebook was much the same way: they built a core feature set that was actually useful and not annoying for communicating with your people, and people came.

But that leads me to one important difference between Wave's rollout and that of Facebook: Facebook was consciously rolled out to entire intact communities, like high schools and colleges. That guaranteed that even before the whole world was on Facebook, you had someone to talk to about meaningful things (um... more meaningful than MySpace, anyway).

So far I'm not seeing that on Wave. I know a few people who have access to it, but with the exception of one coworker, most of us don't have cause for such a high level of collaboration. We're occasional emailers, occasional chatters, old friends flung about the planet. Will we really use Wave to its full potential? Only by conscious effort. Heck, right now Wave doesn't even email me to remind me that things are happening, something Facebook has always done.

I think Google should concentrate on making Wave available to intact groups, or else provide members with a significant number of invitations to give out in a single burst so that they can make a decision to bring their real-life professional circle or personal circle aboard at one pop and really use this puppy. If that means that fewer invites can be given out to individuals not yet part of the puzzle, then slow that process down. More important to grow the number of people who are truly getting the point.

* * *

Another notable feature: support for third-party widgets. Anyone can write a widget that integrates into Wave, and any user with access to the site hosting it can insert that widget into waves as they see fit. This clearly has tremendous potential, as waves will soon be able to carry business data like live sales and inventory, emergency notifications, source code commits and warnings to order more coffee beans.

And that leads to the last and hopefully most important feature: open source. Google has promised to release the code to their implementation, and they have already made good on significant parts of that promise. And Google says Wave is intended to support federation between different hosts. In other words, if Microsoft and Yahoo want to host Google Wave servers of their own, they are welcome to do that, and their users will be able to share waves with Google users.

I get the distinct impression Google feels they have hit on something so big and potentially universal, yet so critically dependent on user goodwill for its growth, that it would be a mistake to try to lock it down. Better to let the appetite for Wave grow without the distraction of worrying about vendor lock-in and arguing about competing incompatible implementations of the idea now that the crucial notions are out there in the ether. From what I've seen so far, I hope they're right.

(P.S. Thanks for the invite Art)

Agua Luna

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:13:14 GMT

If 25% of lunar soil is water, shouldn't we have been able to determine that from the stuff we brought home on our manned visits? Something about this story does not make sense.

I can haz google wave invite?

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:55:42 GMT

If so, please contact me at tommybgoode@gmail.com. Thanks!

New! Exciting! For the three of you who still have printers!

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:16:44 GMT

I like making custom one-off birthday cards and other greeting cards for people. Not e-cards... please... that crap is tacky. I'm talking about real actual physical things that folks can display and admire and line their catboxes with.

Of course, I can't draw worth a damn, so I generally do this with software like The Gimp or OpenOffice Draw. Which works great until I want to print and fold the damn thing.

Then I find out that the "pages" don't line up right, or I've rotated the pages wrong.

Aggravation is the mother of invention. Thus I give you: Real Cards Win. A dead-simple site on which you upload up to four images, one for each page... and you get back a lovely ready-to-print PDF. Each "page" has been correctly scaled, rotated and placed; everything lines up beautifully. All you have to do is print that sucker and fold it.

Real Cards Win

While I'm at it, a quick unsolicited plug for ServerGrove. These guys offer virtual private servers starting at $19/month, which is insanely great. Especially when they come preloaded with PHP 5.2.11, correctly configured for high performance with the APC cache... heaven for folks who really know their PHP and are not willing to expose their work to the utter insecurity of shared hosting. I'm using them exclusively instead of my usual boutell.com server for new Symfony-and-PHP-based sites like isitrainingout.com and realcardswin.

Monday Fourteen

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:16:22 GMT

Our man-Jack works just one week in a year
And socks don't buy themselves. The sort with toes
And braille barber stripes. We're full of beer
And firm intentions. When a goddess goes

I do admit to watching her, of course.
I grant I have no scruples in the dark.
We never spoke of vows. The realm of tort
Is where we lie, and where we make our mark.

You have the carriage, and the skill to drive,
And every other pagan quality.
So drive on, driver. Keep this thing alive.
There's more to love than tame morality.

The other ninety-nine were child's play.
But this is mine. So give me cause to stay.

Because no one should have to look out the window

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:24:11 GMT

I launched my first single-serving website today! Whee! isitrainingout.com

Monday Fourteen

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:46:46 GMT

The people of the island greeted them
With open arms and kept an eyeball cocked
For trouble. Pour the beer and mend the hem,
But keep the basement storerooms tightly locked.

The captain's here, the frigging captain's here
With some attractive nuisance by her side
Inspiring worship, ecstasy and fear.
Keep tankards coming. Keep her well supplied

And maybe she'll go hunting somewhere else.
The bride and groom are terrors of the sea.
It's best we do the pillaging ourselves.
Yo ho and matzeltov! From dusk till three

The islanders will celebrate and shout.
But no one breathes until they sail out.

What to do when your PC gets hit by a power surge

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:34:17 GMT

Question from a friend: "oh crap my PC and TV were fried by a lightning strike. Is my data in data heaven?"

Answer: your computer might not be fried at all. It could just be the power supply that is fried. If this PC isn't a laptop your chances of an inexpensive fix are pretty good.

If it's a somewhat typical non-laptop PC you could just pick up a new PC power supply— or take one out of a discarded PC on the curb— open up your case, take out the old power supply (all you have to do is disconnect the obvious connectors and unbolt it and take it out, don't ever open a power supply, capacitors = dangerous) and then attach the new one and give it a shot.

If that boots your PC and gives you access to your data, take the trouble to bolt the power supply in properly and you've got a PC again, hoo rah. Definitely time for a backup though, it could be less sturdy than it used to be.

If this doesn't work out, or you're just ready for a new PC, take the drive out and pop it in an external USB hard drive cage, or just use a universal adapter like this one ($17). Then you can hook it up to the USB port of any PC and see if you have a good drive or not. If you do, copy stuff off to your heart's content.

That universal adapter may also fit a laptop hard drive, but removing them is much trickier.

Be sure to ground yourself before working inside your PC (touching a pipe is one simple way to do it). Don't work on carpet.

Hope this is helpful!

Monday Fourteen

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:10:12 GMT

It's not the wings that scare me. It's the air.
The elements don't love me anymore.
The atoms raise their eyebrows and they stare.
It's technically permissible, but poor

In social graces. Protons must be asked,
And neutrons should be courted patiently.
Electrons might come first, or both, or last
But you should see them as they wish to be,

As individuals. It's not a shock
That they don't cotton kindly to abuse.
The carpet wicks them slowly to the sock,
The naked doorknob sets the buggers loose

In one bright flash and puts you in your place.
There's magic here. Respect it. Touch the face.

Oh say can you ping by the ICMP what so proudly emailed

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:39:08 GMT

The head of the FCC on net neutrality. Yay, the good guys are winning! (Or to put it a bit more cynically, yay Google has lobbyists too!)

Also: Arm & Hammer are not communists, and Obama will not be killing your mom

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:06:20 GMT

SEO kids: Google does NOT care about the keywords meta tag. Never did. May as well spraypaint "NOOB" on your forehead. Don't listen to me, listen to the official Google blogs. An obsession with the keywords meta tag is something to look out for when evaluating SEOs. Which you might not need to do anyway.

P.S. No, you don't have to "pay for your website to be on Google" either. [Headslap]

Monday Fourteen

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:43:12 GMT

I hold out both hands. See? No mystery.
So push the question down into collapse.
I don't have any secret history.
There is no catch. There was no private lapse,

No world underground that came before.
I was not lost at sea for forty days
And rebuilt out of tinkertoys. Ignore
The backstage antics, child. Watch the play

That I have thoughtfully prepared for you.
There's room for you. There's room for your distress.
Your siblings simply love to share the shoe.
And only one looks silly in a dress.

I've got a muse. A steady stream of words.
I've got a muse. I need a dramaturg.

Multitouch in a notebook... a shitty one

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:20:24 GMT

It's a shame this is such crap. Having finally gotten the hang of multitouch on my iPhone, I find myself wanting to "squash and stretch" on my laptop screen every time I want to zoom in or out on a Google Map, or even a webpage.

Carrie Fisher: being slave leia forever = not my job

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:10:29 GMT

Carrie Fisher on exactly how little she gives a shit that you are offended by her failure to remain forever 29.

That is a kickass rant. Seriously, if seeing the idols of your youth choose not to work like slaves every day just to maintain the body you wish you had (in either sense) causes you pain... if you have a problem with being reminded of the grim spectre of D-E-E-E-E-A-T-H (to quote Grandpa Simpson)... try taking your own damn health and fitness in hand instead of giving them unearned shit for no longer being the person you wish you were.

You know what upsets me? Patrick Swayze dying in his fifties of pancreatic cancer. My first thought was "shit, we have some of the same healthy habits, sometimes it doesn't matter..." OK, yes, I admit it: I just googled to find out what his vices were and I'm relieved to find that I don't share them.

But still. That's some scary shit, makes me want to live my life like I mean it while I have it. Oh wait I am. (I've had reminders far closer to home...)

Listen to me and my high-minded preachin'. Here, have a tasteless gag to wash it down:

(Thanks to Nat Torkington for the Carrie Fisher link)

Monday Fourteen

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:55:58 GMT

Another day, another hand grenade.
Another drop of sewage in the wine.
Another washed up star in the parade.
I don't know how we do this all the time.

Another interruption in the speech,
Another stalling tactic. You could cry.
I hear the assholes calling, each to each.
They're loud enough. I have no wish to pry,

But they will share their contents nonetheless.
I'm positive that they will sing to me.
Sometimes I think this cup is bottomless.
The medicine won't go down easily,

But down it goes. Hey, I signed up for this.
Corralling toddlers is just politics.

How to distribute shareware people will sometimes pay for and get ripped off somewhat less often

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:00:54 GMT

The estimable Jeff Vogel just wrote a post entitled Some Kind Words About DRM For Once, which got slashdotted. It's a good piece. This is my response to it, which proved too long for the blogspot comment form. Also, while it's definitely relevant to DRM, it's a bit more shareware-specific than Jeff's post. So here you are. I recommend reading Jeff's post first, as it's excellent and explains where I'm coming from a bit.

Like Jeff, I've distributed software as shareware for about a million years. I still do, but ot a lesser degree, because those products are very "mature" (that's software-speak for "played out"). But for a decade they kept an average of three people and four cats in kibble, as a real-no-fooling day job. So I get it.

My shareware applications have extremely simple DRM (Digital Rights Management). I don't try to use the latest super-wiggy technology to implement DRM because it doesn't make the situation any better for PC applications. Sooner or later someone who's competent to disassemble a binary and wildly unemployed in their former Soviet Republic of choice will just slap a JMP instruction in the right place and oh hey, downloadable cracked version.

No, the point is to ensure that you have to at least make a conscious choice to steal the app.

So how does this work out for me? It works out awesome.

To those who say that the honest people who would pay anyway are my customers and I shouldn't nag them: for the first year, one of my applications was distributed on the honor system. You paid because you were supposed to. I sold maybe a copy every two days, at a time when Mapedit was the only application of its kind.

After that year, I added a registration key system... one that shuts down the application eventually if it is not paid for. Sales went up by a factor of ten and they stayed there for many years.

The "honest people" might be honest, but they are lazy as hell. This is not surprising: I'm lazy as hell too. I'm certainly not going to get around to paying for something that doesn't stand up for itself.

But as Jeff says, there are right and wrong ways to do DRM. Most DRM says "maybe you've paid for this already, but I STILL hate you." My DRM says "sorry, but you've gotta pay for this. Oh, you did? Awesome. I'll go away now."

Over the years I hit on a policy that has worked well and kept the frustration to a minimum. You may point out that games and web development tools have different audiences, and perhaps not all of this applies to the games market. But I suspect most of it does:

1. On first run, you tell the user how things are going to be (pay in 30 days or it stops working).

2. On the first run after the 30 day period ends (even if that doesn't happen for another 90 days), tell them it's expired... and THEN start a 10-day grace period. This takes care of people who are legitimately ticked off because they took a long pause between installing the program and actually evaluating it.

During that initial 30 days, though, don't bother nagging them.

At one point I tried a stricter policy: you got a small number of startups before registration. How long does it take to evaluate a simple, useful application anyway?

I was excited at first by the immediate uptick in sales, but it was only due to the fact that users were coming to me right away instead of after 30 days. Once the dust settled, it became clear that my sales were not as good with the restrictive policy. Have faith in your software's staying power and its ability to become an indispensable part of someone's day (or a favorite part of their night, in the case of games).

3. During the 10-day grace period, nag unapologetically at startup.

4. Throughout the program's unregistered lifetime, make sure you have easy-to-find "register" and "unlock" icons right in the toolbar, or your application's equivalent.

5. Be EASY TO PAY. Take paypal, take credit cards, take checks by mail. Deliver that registration key by email immediately (on the website would be nicer but it encourages credit card fraud too much). NEVER EVER frustrate the user's efforts to do the right thing.

6. When the user does register, don't demand that they send you a serial number. Just send them a registration key. That key, astonishingly, is good on any computer! Whoa. But you don't TELL the user this. It simply comes in handy in step 7.

This particular policy might not fly in the games world. People do post keys for my applications on the Internets; heck, I just found them with very little difficulty. But fortunately most honest customers hesitate to so explicitly steal something that's business-related. Gamers, perhaps not so much. But even if you do require serial numbers and generate unique, customer-specific keys that won't work on another installation, try to make the process as smooth and un-frustrating as you possibly can. See step 7.

7. Save all your orders in a database, forever. When the user crashes a hard drive and needs their key again, or wants to move the program to another computer, just send it to them cheerfully. Don't make them jump through hoops. They paid once and it is highly unlikely they are ripping you off now. Even if they are, shit, at least they paid you once. Again, NEVER EVER punish the good guys.

8. With all this niceness, you might be tempted to keep the user's registration timer in a .ini file or registry key that is uninstalled when your program is uninstalled.

Don't. It may seem unfair, but you must allow yourself your 100 bytes of eternal space on the user's hard drive. Users might not go to the trouble to Google for registration keys (you'd be surprised how many just don't grasp how it all works), but they will definitely try uninstalling and reinstalling your application. This particular barn door is simply too wide and you must keep it closed.

9. If you KNOW a chunk of your audience is both deserving and too poor to pay, give the software away to that audience. It builds goodwill and undermines the rationalizations that go with stealing software. Mapedit is free to nonprofits and educational institutions. With any luck the same people will buy it later when they hold other jobs.

10. Write an awesome program that doesn't suck in the first place. This is not optional.