Some Hows and Whys

I built MonkeyButton Software to provide a way to distribute tools to people who need them. Not many people will ever need the tools on this site. Maybe as I have time or inclination to do other things that will change. Or if my boss fires me from my day job and I have to get real busy doing other things real fast.

I'm not a zealot when it comes to licensing or open source version this v that. Typically I release tools and toys as freeware. Use as is and at your own risk.  A lot of what I do is plain old hacking. If you are under 35 you probably think this means being a cracker. Old school hackers are not criminals and don't get off on breaking other people's things.  You can read an article about that subject here if you are interested. Hacking implies a curiosity about the way things work and an unwillingness to accept the status quo when there's a better way. Which you have to prove or you're just a whiner. If you made it this far you may be hacker material or at least very bored and you need to get a life.

Some people say you have to be granted the title, not simply assume it. I got the title from an old SUN admin back in 1994. He told my boss "What do you expect, he's just a hacker," because I had bought the rights to the domain names for the campus so I could shorten my email address. My boss thought this was a bad thing. Of course I've long since moved on (or tossed out) from academia. Who was it that said: 

"The politics are so ugly in academia because the stakes are so small?"

Regardless, if you are interested in how some of these tools get built, want some source code, etc., I'll be putting that up in the form of a "Hackers xtalk Cookbook" at my personal site here.

Thanks for stopping by and use all tools wisely. This means don't run them from mission critical servers if they are not clearly marked for mission critical servers. None of them are marked that way if they are free. Probably everything here will stay free.

Or let me put it in a way I used to tell my soldiers: Just because I hand you a loaded weapon does not mean you should point it at your head and pull the trigger.