Dragaera

The Gypsy

David Silberstein davids at kithrup.com
Sat Dec 6 16:53:32 PST 2003

On Sat, 6 Dec 2003, Jose Marquez wrote:

>I've been wanting to read The Gypsy for quite some time, and because I 
>couldn't find any copies anywhere, I bought Songs from the Gypsy. I was 
>very excited to hear the songs, of course, but I also was looking 
>forward to reading the text of the novel. So here's the problem. I don't 
>know how to get to the text of the novel. Anyone know what I need to do 
>to get to the text?
>

I recall having problems with the CD before.  Let me get it and try it
now.

[...]

Weird.  I can't see the data portion in Win2K at *all*.  Not even
using tools like Nero to look at the track; all it sees are the 10
audio track.  OK, when in doubt, try Linux.

[...]

Ah!  Linux sees the data portion with no problems.  And looking at the
files, I now recall that another problem I was having is that
apparantly the book was meant to be read using an ancient and ugly
version of Quicktime.

Still, I can see that the files are there.  There is a "media" 
directory, which contains files chap1-chap17b.txt, and I can even
look at them.  The txt is not pure text, though.  It appears to
be some kind of Mac editor file; there is a header with a bunch of
junk (RIFF<DA>z^@^@STYLMAC "^A^@^@^FGeneva, and ascii nuls), and the
text is CR terminated.

It also appears that parts of the soundtrack were meant to play as the
book is being read.  Or at least, there are a bunch of .mov files.

   "Stepdown" [soundfile 6]


It would not be too hard to write some scripts to massage them down to
plain text with DOS or Unix line-feeds.