Why is it that the dozens of digital audio player makers that try and make their living fighting over the relatively small number of people who aren’t buying iPods are fixated on competing with each other, rather than Apple?

I mean, if they were serious about winning away the increacing numbers of iPod owners who might be looking to upgrade, they’d support the unprotected AAC format that most iPod users have ripped their CD collection into.

Instead they support MP3 (because it’s ubiquitious), Microsoft’s WMA standard (because Microsoft has given them strong incentives to), and maybe the odd other format.

Why are they behaving in such a clueless manner? I suspect that Microsoft’s WMA licensing arrangement has something to do with it.

I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2 last night, and now I’m trying to get Dave Winer’s OPML editor working with it. It seems to be working, I was able to do a test post. Now I’m experimenting with it a bit more.

I’d tried to get it running with WordPress 1.5.3, but had given up when it didn’t work. I’d assumed I needed to use a more recent version. I now realize that I’d missed a setting. I think it was probably trying to connect to WordPress.com.

Hmmm, the OPML editor seems to be munging my textile markup. Bummer. Paragraph spacing with my stylesheet also looks horrible. Looks like a break is getting inserted after each paragrah. I’m not sure why. Seems to be an intereaction with Textile, because it goes away if I disable the Textile plugin.

In other news, It’s almost a month after the launch of Oblivion, and I’m still contemplating doing an upgrade to my nearly brand new 3D card.

I’ve got a eVGA 7800gt now, and I could upgrade to a 7900gt using eVGA’s “step up” program for only about $60, but it’s pretty clear that Oblivion is running better on ATI cards at the high end and down into the mid-range.

I’d originally contemplated getting an x1900 xt, but it’s pretty clear at this point that a x1800xl would do the job nicely. The x1900 gt should be announced next week, which might also be an interesting option.

If I go that route, I’m going to have to eBay my existing card, which is more of a hassle. I’ve considered doing the trade-up and then selling the brand-new card on eBay, which is even more of a hassle, but might cut my economic losses.

In still other news, I’ve been banned from the official Oblivion forums for a day because of a post I made pretending I was an infant who could do nothing but cry. It actually feels good to have expressed myself, but it hardly seems fair that people who behave similarly don’t get the boot. They’ll make multiple posts asking vague questions and then expect other people to do all the work of figuring out what they are really asking asking, much like a baby who cries until their parents figure out what they want. Only these posters aren’t babies, and the other forum members aren’t their parents.

In a suprisingly pragmatic move, Apple has “announced support for dual booting”:http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/apr/05bootcamp.html the new Intel Macs into Windows. They’ve updated the system firmware to support booting WindowsXP, and they are also providing Windows drivers for the core peripherals. This comes just a few weeks after the hacking community managed to accomplish the “same thing on their own”:http://onmac.net/.

I suspect that this could be very popular with gamers, especially once the tower Intel Macs are released. It’ll give them the chance to have a nice groovy apple multimedia experience without having to spring for a separate PC to have access to the large numbers of Windows-only games.

So, I’m probably 60% complete, in terms of lines of code, working on a script to parse data out of a bunch of HTML pages, but I’m probably 90% complete in terms of time spent. I’ve figured out the basic form of the regular expressions I need to use, now I just need to write more of them — easy as pie!

So, of course, I want to change my approach now to something more “elegant,” rather than creating a regexp for each piece of data I want to extract, I want to create a sort a more generic parser that will extract all the fields in the documents, and let me easily query to get the pieces I want. It will be cool to figure out how to do it, even suboptimally. It’s also going to take me probably another day, or more likely, two more days.

The right thing, in this case, is to just finish the damn script the way I started it and be done with it. Sigh.

Update: I ended up splitting the difference because I was having trouble getting things to work with my original approach.

North Dakota is loosing population. South Dakota’s population is growing in absolute terms, but shrinking relative to the entire population of the US. South Dakota’s legislature is confronting the issue. They are banning abortion and, no doubt, lining their pockets with contributions from right wing pressure groups.

I am, once again, abandoning my attempt to use my linux server to share my HP Deskjet 880c among the Windows computers in my house. I find CUPS, the common unix printing system ( trademarked by “Easy Software”), uncommonly unintuitive and impenetrable. Or, if not CUPS itself, then the way it is deployed on Ubuntu/Debian.

Maybe the next time I experience a trancendent state of bliss I’ll try setting it up again. For now though, I don’t need the aggravation.