Being the kind of technical person you are, you most likely identify with the old-time hacker ethic and disdain the popular use of the word "hacker" when "cracker" would be more apropos.

Well, Eric Steven Raymond, co-founder and president of the Open Source Initiative and ex-board member of VA Linux Systems, is of a similar mind. Eric wants you to identify with the hacker ethic and do so in public by displaying his hacker emblem on your Web site, your personal home page, your T-shirt and your coffee mug.

Eric's hacker emblem is the glider formation from Conway's Game of Life set in a three-by-three grid.

It's a nice idea and the meme could well catch on. Then again, given that the term "hacker" has become so thoroughly debased by popular culture, we wonder if what's needed is a new term for the true hacker.

Anyway, a few weeks ago we asked for your thoughts on useful tools. Reader David Coursey wrote, "My CFO's laptop was having some serious problems connecting to the Windows 2000 domain, so I wanted to simplify things and remove the computer account and re-add it. You can imagine my joy when I removed it from the domain and nobody knew ANY password to log back on to the machine after the reboot.

"After a couple of hours of frantic Internet searching I found this tool that will reset any password for any local account on a machine you have physical access to."

David's discovery was the freeware Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, which we will refer to as ONTP&RE. This is an interesting tool for Windows NT, 2000 and XP that can reset the password of any user who has a valid local account, and, most critically, you do not need to know the old password to set a new one.

Because it's an offline tool, you shut down your computer and then boot from the ONTP&RE boot disk (floppy or CD) into a Linux shell. The author, Petter Nordahl-Hagen, says the boot disk includes "stuff to access NTFS and FAT/FAT32 partitions and scripts to glue the whole thing together." The software will detect and offer to unlock locked or disabled user accounts and includes "an almost fully functional registry editor."

David happily notes that "I have since used it many times, often because it is faster to reset the password than hunt for an old password."