Some time ago, my T-shirt site Villain Tees was featured in a computer gamer magazine. As it turns out, there’s a reason I’d never heard of that magazine; it’s a European, not an American, publication. As a result fo the article, I’m getting a lot more T-shirt sales, and business has really picked up…but most of the people ordering are in the UK, Sweden, or France.

And, inteestingly, the most popular T-shirt with Americans, “sud rm -r /” and “nanohazard,” is not the most popular T-shirt with Europeans. The most popular design with Europeans? “Machiavelli was Right.” Does that show that Europeans are more literate than Americans, or Americans are geekier than Europeans?

Yesterday, I was contacted by one of the editors of PC Home magazine, asking for permission to include some of my shareware software on a CD accompanying one of their upcoming issues, which is very cool. What’s interesting is that one of the pieces of software they want to include is Registry Permission Tool, a program I wrote to unlock a write-protected Registry file. I wrote it when i was dealing with a virus on a client’s computer; some viruses lock the Registry file to prevent a user from using RegEdit to remove virus calls from the Registry. This program has been banned by several shareware sites (such as TuCows) because these sites are afraid people in corporate or educational labs will use it to unlock a Registry file that’s been locked by the IT department for security reasons. Stupid, really; does anyone actually lock a Registry file as a means of controlling user access to the Registry? Wouldn’t this break, oh, most of the software out there?