y.st./source/pages/en/weblog/2015/08-August/11.xhtml

<?php
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$xhtml = array(
	'title' => "$a[CD]s from Marc With a C arrived today",
	'body' => <<<END
<p>
	My $a[CD]s arrived in the mail this morning! I didn&apos;t have them in hand until I was on my way to work though, so I took them with me in hopes of transferring the music from the bonus album to my mobile from the computer at work on my break.
	Before I had a chance to do that though, someone cracked the case on the bonus album! I had left the $a[CD]s on the table, and someone moved them, apparently roughly.
	I&apos;m not sure who did it, but I am not amused.
</p>
<p>
	On my break, I tried transferring the music to my mobile, but it didn&apos;t go so well.
	First, the $a[CD]&apos;s contents seemed to be made up of &quot;.cda&quot; files, a file type I had never heard of.
	I wasn&apos;t sure if my mobile could even play them.
	Second, when I plugged my mobile into the computer, the computer couldn&apos;t figure out how to use $a[MTP], which is odd, considering that the computer at work runs Microsoft Windows and $a[MTP] is a Microsoft protocol.
</p>
<p>
	Once I returned home, I put the $a[CD] into my own computer, and found that all the &quot;.cda&quot; files had been replaced with more familiar &quot;.wav&quot; files.
	While I don&apos;t have any experience with &quot;.wav&quot; files myself, I do remember seeing &quot;.wav&quot; on the list of music file types that Android (and therefor Replicant) can handle.
	If I couldn&apos;t convert to Vorbis, at least I could play them directly.
	However, the conversion process went smoothly and there was no need to transfer the larger &quot;.wav&quot; files to the mobile&apos;s limited-storage $a[SD] card.
	One thing to note is that the music from the $a[CD] has no meta data.
	When sorting my music, there is no way to know the song name, artist name, or even album name.
</p>
<p>
	I did some research to figure out what those &quot;.cda&quot; files were, and it turns out that they are files that don&apos;t exist on the $a[CD] itself.
	Instead, Windows builds these files and displays them instead of the actual music files.
	They act as pointers to the tracks on the $a[CD], and if I had successfully copied them to my mobile, they wouldn&apos;t have been able to play because they do not contain any actual music data.
	As for the &quot;.wav&quot; files that my Debian machine shows me, they might not actually be on the $a[CD] itself either.
	I&apos;m not sure that music $a[CD]s contain discreet files, and Debian may have just been showing me separate files as an abstraction to make the $a[CD]s contents make more sense.
	If that is the case, I like Debian&apos;s abstraction better than Windows&apos; abstraction, as Debian&apos;s is actually useful.
</p>
<p>
	I set up the code to grow pine trees from pine saplings in my Minetyst subgame, but there is a small problem.
	The Minetest engine doesn&apos;t seem to use ordinary, or even predictable, starting angles for the &quot;turtle&quot; used to build the trees.
	Sometimes Minetest uses an angle that aligns with the voxels of the game, but other times, it starts with a skewed angle that causes bizarre tree growth if you are trying to create a tree that blends in with the ones spawned by the v6 map generator.
	Sometimes snow will end up floating above more snow and the tree&apos;s trunk will become cleaved in two.
	To remedy this, I had to scrap the whole tree pattern and start over.
	The second time, I had the engine build the tree&apos;s center shaft, including the trunk and everything directly above it, first.
	I then had it go back and build the branches below.
	This time, the trees came out mostly bug-free, though there still is a problem where some of the leaves and snow spawn slightly-detached from the tree.
	I don&apos;t think this is avoidable though, due to the unpredictable &quot;turtle&quot; starting angles.
</p>
<p>
	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
</p>
END
);