The current free ebook is located at this link:
http://haggishell.com/ridgeproject.pdf

For details about the ebook, click here.

131123. This is a Minetest Cat Building constructed by John of Minetest. Inside the building, there is a short poem:

I am living in a cat
Eyes are green and mouth is red
Fur is darker than the night
But inside there burns a light

John of Minetest offers another poem related to an airship building. A screenshot may be posted at a later date:

In the morning it will fly,
forth to forgotten places.
No more tethers, no more laces
And the world is passing by
Soaring through the rain and sun
Always seeking, always going
Never resting, never slowing
and the journey has begun.

131122. This is a drawing by the Masked Lua of a Flame Fish. The drawing is distributed under the following license. For attribution purposes, the creator and rights holder is Masked Lua:

Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0

To explain the story behind the Flame Fish, here is the:

FLAME FISH POEM
A flame made a wish
Be a different sort of fish
Wish was granted
Flame and Fish found a niche
Flame Fish will not end on dish

131122. This is the OldCoder Cow Song. Extemporaneous doggerel as usual:

Everybody likes cows
At cows they goes wows
On a leash or on a plate
As friends or food cows are great

Cows are friendly and fine
Cows are hard to define
Cows feel needed when milk you take
Happier than when burgers you bake

Cows do not dance they simply graze
Cows never fail to amaze
Cows we should nows all praise

Mr. Meow adds:

wow
much cow
very taste
many milk
cows are cool

The cow illustration is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0. For attribution purposes, the creator and rights holder is asiapasek.

Bedivere has written a new OldCoder song fragment:

i wrote a song
OldCoder, lays on the bricks, but not too quick
Takes his time, before he does, checks for a sign
All is good, all is well, takes the poor, helps those that fell
OldCoder

A real-life (IRL) exchange from the other day:

<KatterinaKoder> So, you need to make like a tree and leaf?
<KatterinaKoder> I used to have a friend who said things like, “I need to make like a bakery truck and haul buns”
<OldCoder> Well, I will make like a condiment and ketchup with you tomorrow
<Rhiannon> If you mustard

Apotheosis coins a great word: medicatted, short for medicated the cat. Note: CeilingCat's closing remark is a Linux-related joke.

<apotheosis> I've gotta go. It's bedtime, and I still haven't medicated the cat.
<OldCoder> apotheosis, medicated the cat? Surely, that is a usual bedtime step.
<CeilingCat> is that an euphemism? ;)
* apotheosis is waiting for the cat to stop eating so he won't interrupt dinner with medicine.
<OldCoder> (medi|)cat(|ed)
<apotheosis> medicatted
<OldCoder> We have a winner: medicatted
<CeilingCat> medilessed?

131122. This post is for old coders and/or old hackers. Ken Kiraly, you'll probably remember this.

Recently, Fusion directed my attention to the post linked below:

http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/

The post in question discusses an old computer font. The writer managed to recreate it as a TTF, which can be downloaded at this link. I thought I'd explain how to use the font in xterm:

1. Start an Xorg session. Install the TTF. The details are distro-specific.

2. Execute the command:

fc-list | grep -i glass

The output should include a line that contains: Glass TTY VT220. If this is not the case, stop here; something is wrong.

3. Execute the command:

xterm -fa "Glass TTY VT220" -fs 20 -fg "green" -bg "black" &

4. This should produce something similar to an old-fashioned VT220 session. The screenshot below shows what it looks like on my system.

131122. Last week, I was asked if I could donate any children's books to a charity drive. Due to the Kiraly Cases, many of my own books were gone and I didn't wish to part with the books that remained. So I purchased books to donate instead.

Some of the books I chose are shown in the tall picture below. I thought it would be fun to share the selection.

Four of the books in the picture are from my era: Curious George Takes a Job; Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile; Sammy the Seal; and Little Engine that Could.

I used to have a lot of books. Thousands. They were important to me. I have a fair number left but most of them are gone now. Taken by the Kiralys.

It will take some thought to decide what to say about my books. Not sure how it will come out. But I doubt that I'll be able to put aside my feelings about their loss.

For today, I'll focus more on Kiraly Family reading in general.

(this post continues after the tall picture below)

Tom Kiraly or Ken Kiraly may have read Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile in the 1960s or 1970s. I seem to remember the book's title being mentioned or joked about.

I think that Tom Kiraly had a copy of a kids' book named “The Bad Cat” as well. Also a copy of a religious book named “Little Pilgrim's Progress”. I'm not sure who that belonged to.

But I don't recall that my Brothers were into books much. Despite the presence of numerous books, the Kiraly household wasn't a place where there was much discussion of reading or where children were encouraged to read.

The kids were not supposed to read to be challenged, to stretch their minds, or to imagine. Reading was there to serve practical purposes.

There was a great deal of reading material in the place. More books and magazines than average. Both old books and new ones. On the surface, the household seemed to be quite interested in reading.

The Kiralys had a series called “The Great Books of the Western World” on one set of shelves. Plato, History of the Roman Empire, etc. I went through those books starting at about age 11.

There were also Sherlock Holmes books, history books, and books of other types.

The most impressive part of the library, possibly the centerpiece, was a set of ancient books called “The Universal Anthology”. The set had belonged to my Grandfather Ivan Kmeta before World War I. I inherited “The Universal Anthology” but the books were lost this year due to the Kiraly Cases.

It wasn't enough for the abuser Jim Kiraly of La Gaviota, Pismo Beach, California to take my past, my future, and my health. He took my books. Lied, smashed my life, and took my books.

I don't remember seeing either the adults or the children reading the old books in the household.

Grace Kiraly told me decades later that Ken Kiraly expressed interest in the “Great Books” set as an adult. He may have taken them in the hopes that they would be useful to his sons James Kiraly (not the abuser James Kiraly but Ken Kiraly's son) and Paul Kiraly. I don't know. But, decades ago, I think the old books were there largely for show.

Grace Kiraly purchased books similar to the Richard Scarry volume shown above for Scott Kiraly. I bought books for Scott as well. But I have no memories of him reading.

Tom Kiraly had subscriptions to a few magazines, including Boy's Life and possibly Ranger Rick. These magazines were appropriate for a boy who the Kiraly associate and criminal hacker in Dallas, Texas has described as an “All-American Kid”.

By the way, I'd like to hire white hats for legitimate and reasonable actions connected to the Kiraly Cases. If you're a white hat, you know how to contact me.

If Tom did receive Ranger Rick, I think that he may have liked that magazine in particular. I seem to remember that he talked about it. But I don't recall that he spent much time reading.

Oddly, I don't presently recall any of the books that Ken must have owned.

Tom Kiraly, Ken Kiraly, and I all used a World Book Encyclopedia that our Parents purchased for us. We considered the World Book fun because the publisher sent us updates with cool things included. Early 3D holograms and maps of the Moon and stuff like that.

My Parents subscribed to newspapers and magazines for their entire adult lives. It started long before the Web. Until the 1990s, this was the one of the few ways to get current information. The main alternatives were radio and television.

And, from the 1990s on, Jim and Grace didn't quite understand the Web. They imagined it as some sort of static collection of newspaper pages. I'll write about what happened when I tried to introduce Grace to web sites another time.

There were quite a few magazines in the Kiraly house. For the most part, the magazines focused on the views of conservative business-men, Ronald Reagan type politics, and Religious Fundamentalism.

But there were practical magazines such as Consumer Reports. And a venerable general interest publication named Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest chopped up articles from other magazines, threw out most of the meat, and printed the results. Looking back, it was an odd magazine though it did run mildly amusing jokes.

I don't remember any magazines about Science in the Kiraly household. There may have been some but it doesn't seem likely. Scientific American and similar journals talked about evolution. The Kiralys weren't comfortable with the concept of evolution.

Jim and Grace Kiraly had a term that they used to describe people who believed in evolution, the rights of women, the rights of Black people, or, actually, the rights of any minority. The term that the Kiralys used to legitimize hatred was “secular humanist”.

Books and magazines that promoted “secular humanist” ideas were not welcome in the Kiraly household. This would most likely have included Scientific American.

There were plenty of Religious Fundamentalist books in the Kiraly household, though. Books of that type talked a lot about the End of the World. It was guaranteed to arrive at any time! :P

There were Religious Fundamentalist books which said that the dinosaurs had lived in North America. The Indians, it appeared, had hunted the large beasts to extinction at around the time of Christ.

To explain, some Religious Fundamentalists believed that the world had been created in 4,004 B.C. This posed a problem, as the dinosaurs had lived long before that. So books were published that rearranged the history of the dinosaurs. The idea was to work backwards and make the dinosaurs compatible with preconceived notions.

The “Indians Hunted Dinosaurs” concept wasn't the only approach used. A number of Fundamentalists maintained that the dinosaurs had regrettably drowned in the Biblical Flood. I think that one of Jack Chick's religious tracts promoted this concept.

I saw the Jack Chick tracts, remarkable pieces that deserve an article of their own, at the Kiraly house circa the 1970s or at their church in Walnut Creek, California. But I don't remember if the “Drowned Dinosaurs” tract had been published at the time.

The illustration below is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0. For attribution purposes, the creator and rights holder is SharpWriter.

Other Religious Fundamentalist books on the Kiraly shelves talked about child-raising. Those books emphasized the importance of breaking a child's “will” by any means necessary.

There were books and magazines in the Kiraly home that discussed Black people. It was odd. The Kiralys tried to be positive about race. They told their children, “There are good Black people as well as bad Black people.”

I remember being confused when my Parents said that. Why did the Kiralys feel the need to say that some Black people were good when they never said, “There are good White people as well as bad White people” ?

The inconsistency didn't make sense to an autistic child. But I came to understand the answer over time.

Kiraly books and magazines talked about how Black slaves had had better food than their masters, about how racial problems were the fault of Blacks who talked about racial issues, about how Blacks should be happy and not complain, and about how Blacks did not wish to work.

I was literal. It was confusing to see the mixed signals about Black people. But eventually I understood. The Kiralys truly hated Blacks. Not as individuals. But to acknowledge the reality of the Black experience in America would have challenged the Kiralys' worldview. This was not going to happen.

Both Jim and Grace read books at night, in bed, before they slept. This was more common, for the two of them, than marital relations; i.e., intercourse. Surely this was a literary couple. Or was it?

Jim Kiraly read business books. Fiction, too, sometimes. For fiction, I believe that he focused on spy novels and similar books. Possibly writers similar to Robert Ludlum and Michael Crichton.

For Jim, reading fiction would have served the same purpose as watching sports: catharsis. I can imagine him relaxing with a business book but not with a work of fiction. And the notion of Jim reading to grow or to challenge his preconceived notions is incomprehensible.

Grace read a large number of books. Yet she was limited. There was a sameness to the content. She was not able to break free. I read dozens of books that she possessed or that she asked me to read. But, in half a century, I do not recall that she ever read a book I'd suggested. I believe that she started a few but did not finish them.

There was one book that Grace had suggested which I myself never finished. It was a book that said abuse victims should accept their lot. If they spoke about things that others did to them, they were the problem. This was the philosophy that Grace had adopted. A philosophy of hatred; one that assigns blame to the victims of abuse.

The book in question was lost, ironically, to the legal cases that my abuser Jim Kiraly initiated. Legal cases, also ironically, that were intended solely to stop the writing of my own book.

When all is said and done, the books and magazines in the Kiraly home, Jim's spy novels aside, were there primarily for four reasons: for show, to help people earn or manage money, to indoctrinate, and to reinforce preconceived notions, up to and including hatred of the poor and different.

The fact that I read whatever I could get my hands on was not something that was encouraged. It was something that was tolerated.

There is an amusing note related to this. When I was about 11 years old, one Science Fiction book that I read included a scene of an adult nature. My Mother Grace spotted the questionable passage but did not take the book away from me. This was an attempt on her part to be open-minded and tolerant.

She should have taken away the book. I was shy and passive at the time. Frightened of my own shadow. But I was also so naive that an act of censorship, even by these people, would have startled me immensely. I might have started to seek out the truth about what people are and how they think decades sooner.

The photo above of two Ludlum novels is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0. For attribution purposes, the creator and rights holder is Gio90.

131122. This is a copy of a letter sent on Friday, November 22, 2013 to John Perrott and Michael Bonetto, Family Law attorneys located at the time in San Jose, California.

This is a courtesy copy of a letter to John Perrott, Family Law Attorney, of Thomas Chase Stutzman in San Jose, California. Also to Michael T. Bonetto, Family Law Attorney, of Hoge Fenton in San Jose, California. Note: I'm copying this letter to additional parties for different reasons in each case.

This letter is directed specifically to John, but I thought I'd include some points for Michael.

This letter and any correspondence received from any and/or all parties involved in the Kiraly Cases will most likely be posted publicly. This should simplify things as anybody who is interested in past, present, or future developments will eventually be able to find everything simply by typing names into Google.

To explain the latter point, Google gives me high rankings sometimes. I'm not sure why. Possibly because this isn't a usual situation. Child and spousal abuse, Abuse of Process, Perjury, and a Hacker Botnet run by associates of the abuser. All to stop a book.

And the people involved are interesting. The inventor of the Amazon Kindle, two corporate Vice Presidents, two autistic Brothers, and one of the most respected law firms in the State. A law firm that literally wrote the book on Professional Standards but violated many of the standards that it helped to create in order to protect a wealthy abuser.

John H. Perrott
STATE BAR #213080
THOMAS CHASE STUTZMAN
1625 The Alameda, Suite 626
San Jose, CA 95126

Michael T. Bonetto
STATE BAR #252742
HOGE, FENTON, JONES & APPEL, INC.
Sixty South Market Street, Suite 1400
San Jose, California 95113

Dear John Perrott,

I have not, as of yet, received an acknowledgment of email that was sent to you recently as a response to email that I had received from you. It is possible that there is a technical problem. If this is the case, we will need to correct the problem. As you yourself have pointed out, there are issues that remain to be addressed. Therefore, reliable channels of communication are required. Is this not true?

Michael Bonetto, related points will apply to management and other parties at your firm Hoge Fenton in San Jose. I assume that everybody involved will agree, when legitimate and reasonable communication is involved, confusion should be avoided. If a message needs to be sent, it is important that the message be clear.

John Perrott, you stated to me that Michael Bonetto's firm had provided you, relatively early on, with a settlement offer from the abuser Jim Kiraly of La Gaviota, Pismo Beach, California and/or from Jim's son Tom Kiraly, then Vice President of Humana Corporation and presently Vice President of Sheridan Healthcare. You added that you had made a conscious decision not to show me the offer from my abuser Jim and/or his son Tom. You cited specific reasons for this decision on your part.

I am prepared to repeat the preceding points under oath.

As I indicated previously, I wish to receive a copy of the settlement offer that I was not provided with. You, John Perrott, responded to an initial inquiry regarding the offer with remarks to the effect that you were willing to provide me with a copy but that this would be a “courtesy” to me.

I wrote back restating the inquiry as a formal request. I am not presently aware that I have received a response to the formal request. Which brings us up to date.

John Perrott, is there a problem with email? If there is no such problem, is the next reasonable step for me to have Tom Stutzman and/or you served with a formal request for a copy of the missing offer?

As a point of information, the record of service and the fact that it was necessary for a client to serve you simply to establish communication related to such a minor matter will be posted publicly.

A client, by the way, who you repeatedly charged for work that was never completed or filed and who was forced to write the drafts for some of the material that you did complete himself.

But I'd like to hear your explanation of the fact that the firm of Thomas Chase Stutzman failed to meet deadlines and that the firm charged me thousands of dollars for a single document that resulted in a blunt admonishment by the Court. It's only fair that others hear your side of the story.

I would like to post the explanation and to include it in the book that started all of this. The book that Jim Kiraly and Hoge Fenton seem quite interested in stopping.

Regarding public postings, an issue that you have expressed concerns about, Michael Bonetto's vigorous support of the abuser who sought to stop the book has transformed my perspective. In the end, the best way to deal with abusers and those who are willing to violate professional standards to defend them, including firms such as Hoge Fenton, is to do precisely what Jim Kiraly feared so much:

To lift up the rotting log and expose the scurrying insects underneath to the light of day.

By the way, although my life was seriously disrupted by Hoge Fenton and the multiple felonies that Michael Bonetto and Jim Kiraly may now be directly or indirectly involved in, things are settling down a little. I've aged 20 years physically and I can't stand up at times. But I know that I have what it takes to follow through.

Even with the small things. Please tell Lisi that I should have time at last this Winter to review her artwork and offer advice.

And if you have further computer trouble, feel free to write to me about that issue. In my opinion, your boss ought to review his aging IT infrastructure. It is not clear that his firm, Thomas Chase Stutzman, has the resources needed to do reliable work for clients.

A law firm that needs to count on the senior partner's old buddy to stop by now and then to keep email and computers running does not strike me as a stable situation. Or one that is appropriate for people that charge $350 per hour. John, Tom's setup is obsolete.

Regards, Robert (the Old Coder, and he is old indeed)

131120. I am now running Reactor's Minetest world Pripyat at server: minetest.org and port: 30017

Pripyat is a virtual city that is modeled after a city in the real world. The real city is also named Pripyat. You can read about it at this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat

The real and virtual cities are both dead. They were abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

The world is impressive. Feel free to visit. The copy of the world at port 30017 is read-only and will be kept that way to serve as a museum. I will add a read-write copy at a later date for people to build in.

The creator of this version of Pripyat, Reactor, explains the history as follows:

I like Soviet history. I decided to model a city. Pripyat; just for fun.

There were some Pripyats already in Minecraft. None was like real. I started with one of the existing maps. The creator didn't bother to detail the city. But he released a .zip for download.

It took me about a hundred man-hours in the last three years. 30 hours a year. Not that much. But there was some use in it. When I worked on the city, I relaxed.

I left Minecraft because I was deprecating Linux on all my machines. Switching to FBSD. Minecraft is Java. I had no interest of setting up Java on FBSD merely for games.

I decided to to to Minetest because it was more portable. And I think MT is better performance-wise.

131119. This is a piece of Creative Commons artwork that I like. The piece is distributed under the following license. For attribution purposes, the creator and rights holder is PointVision:

Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0

131118. This post is for Linux Firefox users.

I'm releasing a modified extension today that I've been using for over five years. Quite useful and I hope that you like it. The usual disclaimers apply:

 THE SOFTWARE  IS PROVIDED  "AS IS",  WITHOUT  WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
 EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,  INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
 MERCHANTABILITY,  FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGE-
 MENT.  IN NO EVENT  SHALL THE COPYRIGHT  HOLDER(S) OR  AUTHOR(S) BE
 LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM,  DAMAGES OR OTHER  LIABILITY,  WHETHER  IN AN
 ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,  ARISING FROM,  OUT OF OR IN
 CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR  OTHER DEALINGS  IN  THE
 SOFTWARE.

This extension is simply my version of Gomita's ScrapBook. I refer to it as ScrapMod.

I won't try to document ScrapBook or ScrapMod here but I'll note that the extensions provide flexible and convenient ways to save web pages. For more information, see the ScrapBook documentation located at:

http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/

My version makes some minor changes. Partial list of changes: a. It adds support for a number of file types. b. It adds support for two new groups of file types: Text and Docs. c. It disables a status bar that I've had problems with. d. It rewords some menu items to reduce possible confusion.

If you'd like to try the extension, the current link is as follows:

scrapmod-131116.xpi