A/F

My father was a junior high school science teacher. Long ago, in the days before schools used massive grading databases that serve the entire district and simultaneously index thousands of students' complete history of report cards on big beefy servers, teachers wrote letters down in gradebooks and called it a day. I recall a story wherein one time he gave a student a grade of A/F.

When asked by the principal to explain the bizarre mark, he explained:

The student tried. He really did. My father could see the effort that the student was putting into trying to do well in the class and trying his best to learn the material. Unfortunately, the kid was — as my father put it — "dumber than shit". His test scores and homework were miserably low and it was clear he did not and could not demonstrate a knowledge of the material presented to him.

So my dad had to give the kid an F because his work was poor, but got an A for trying so hard. A/F.

I'm reminded of this story because I recently downloaded a shareware application that warned me "a nag screen will appear after this application has been installed for more than 30 days." A laudable effort, I think, for a developer to ask that people who use his utility should either pay for it or periodically be reminded that they're using a time-limited version. I hate the notion of nagware, but I can certainly appreciate a programmer who is trying to earn a living for himself and his family.

Out of curiosity, I checked the Windows registry. There's one place I'd expect to check in the registry for the easiest way of checking program-specific configuration options such as "this program was installed on March 8, 2005." I am by no means a Windows expert, and there are several more sophisticated ways to encode this kind of data on a Windows box. Putting something in the registry is almost child's play by comparison. It's hardly a serious way to store this kind of thing, especially considering that users can edit the registry to their hearts' content. Sure enough, there's a registry key at HKLM\SOFTWARE\The Application's Name. It's all alone. And it's called "Date".

Sigh. Delete this key regularly and you've essentially got a nagless shareware app.

A/F.