Internet Scofflaw

According to a US Geological Survey report issued yesterday, the Arctic holds 90 billion barrels of oil that can be extracted using available technology and industry practices.  Also 1670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids.  (Via Fox News.)

I finally resolved (well, circumvented would be a better word) my problem with iPhone-Outlook calendar synchronization by switching to use an Exchange server for my calendar.  There was one more gotcha, though.  I found that events I added to the calendar on Exchange were appearing on the phone as invitations.  This is bad because, for example, you can’t edit those events.  A similar issue happens with events you create on the iPhone and then edit on Exchange.

It turns out that the iPhone uses the email address of the event originator to distinguish between appointments and invitations.  If the email address you use when configuring the phone doesn’t match the email address verbatim (i.e., case-sensitively and ignoring aliases), you get this behavior.

More at Apple support article TS1865.

That’s how it seems, anyway.  I just “upgraded” to Office 2007, hoping that might solve my iPhone synchronization problems (it didn’t).  What I didn’t know is they completely changed the UI, into one that’s unusable.  I was hoping there was an “Office classic” option somewhere, but I couldn’t find one.  (I couldn’t even find the old options menu, if indeed it still exists.)  But the fact that you can buy a product for $30 that makes Office 2007 work like Office 2003 suggests that there’s no built-in way to do it.

Looks like I’ll be downgrading for now.  In the long run, running old software and operating system isn’t really an option, though.  If Microsoft doesn’t get its act together, it looks like I may have a Mac in my future.

The upgrade problems were just the beginning. It turns out that with the new software, calendar sync with a PC is broken.

It seems there is something in my Outlook file that iTunes doesn’t like:

1. When it starts to sync contacts/calendar (or even when I so much as select the “Info” tab in iTunes), the CPU usage of OutlookSyncApp (or something like that) goes to 100%, permanently (until I kill it from the task manager). Notwithstanding the CPU usage, calendar does not get synced, even if I tell it to overwrite the data on the phone.
2. Both problems go away if I delete my Outlook file and start fresh. But then, I don’t have my calendar data.
3. When I import my old data into my new Outlook file, calendar sync is broken again (again, even if I tell it to overwrite the data on the phone). But at least the CPU utilization problem is still gone.
4. Delete the file, everything works again. But again, no data.
5. Then I try importing my old data from a CSV (comma-separated-value) file. Now sync works, in one direction. Data goes to the phone from the PC, but not vice-versa.
6. Repeat with same results: Delete the file, everything works, but no data. Re-import the data from CSV and sync works only one way.
7. I give up.

I suppose I could try re-entering my data by hand, but it seems unlikely that that would be any different from importing from text. Besides, even if I were to get it working, I no longer feel I could trust it to stay working. I’d like to say something dramatic now, like I’m giving up on iPhone, but the fact is I’m addicted. So, I’m going to give up on sync, and keep my calendar only on my phone.

But I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about the supposed super-reliability of Apple software. It isn’t.

POSTSCRIPT: The Apple techs were unable to do anything about the problem, but they were able to re-brick my phone for a few hours. It turns out that the “Restore” process isn’t reliable any more either. “An unknown iPhone error has occurred (6).” On the fifth try (at 20-30 minutes per attempt), I was able to unbrick the phone. At that point, calendar sync didn’t seem so important any more.

UPDATE: After some further investigation, it seems that Microsoft Outlook has to share some of the blame.  Events from the iPhone are making it into the database (you can tell this by inspecting an exported text file), but for some reason aren’t being displayed if the database also contains a sufficiently old event.  Very strange.  Perhaps upgrading Outlook will fix the problem.

“Stalk friends responsibly on Loopt’s iPhone app.”

Have you been waiting for a GPS phone that automatically forwards your location to all your friends? Your wait is over.

In all the 3G hype, I never heard that the iPhone App Store went live yesterday.

UPDATE: The software upgrade bricked my phone. Brilliant, guys.

UPDATE: Called tech support. According to the tech guy, iTunes starts applying the update before it downloads everything it needs. Then, due to the unexpectedly (?!) high volume of upgrades, their server crashed, leaving my phone partially updated and unusable.

Lesson 1: For heaven’s sake, don’t write to the firmware until you have everything you need. I would have thought this was obvious.

Lesson 2: When you release the App Store on Thursday and the 3G on Friday, plan ahead for your servers to get a lot of work.

UPDATE: I see everyone is having this problem.

UPDATE: Fixed now.

A recent Economist article reports that wind-power technology has been improving, to the point that wind power now costs 8 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is less than twice the cost of coal power (5 cents/kWh). I think this makes wind power vaguely plausible as a serious contributor, provided necessary advances are made in the power grid. (Existing power grids can’t handle the inconsistency of wind power.) I don’t think anyone has any idea how much those advances will cost.

Nuclear, by the way, costs 6.5 cents/kWh, has no greenhouse emissions, and works fine with the existing grid.  (Solar costs 20 cents/kWh.  Good luck with that.)

Next Big Future has an update on the uranium hydride reactor, which Hyperion, a startup company, is preparing to bring to market in 2012.  The reactor would be installed right where the power is needed, and would be fully contained with no serviceable parts, making it more akin to a battery than a reactor.

Hyperion advertises that its reactor should last 7-10 years and would cost $1400 per kilowatt during that time.  Taking the conservative 7-year duration, that works out to 2.28 cents per kilowatt-hour (or a little more if you take into account present value).  By comparison, I’m paying 8.41 cents per kilowatt-hour in Pittsburgh right now.

Their first installations will be at oil sand and oil shale facilities, where they hope their safety record will make people comfortable with installing them closer to home.

ASIDE: My understanding is that the hydrogen atoms in uranium hydride damp the neutrons, thereby slowing the fission reaction.  That’s bad for weapons but good for energy generation.

Potentially exciting news:

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”. . .

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

(Via Instapundit.)

This would be terrific news if it worked out.  Of course, this isn’t the only way to make artificial petroleum; for over eighty years it’s been possible (via the Fischer-Tropsch process) to make oil from coal, natural gas, or (in principle) biomass.  (South Africa manufactures most of its diesel fuel that way.)  The question is whether the process is cost-effective enough to compete with conventional oil wells.

Still, this work sounds like it has two advantages over the Fischer-Tropsch process.  It generates petroleum, which could be used in our existing infrastructure.  And, there’s the environmental advantage of making fuel from agricultural waste rather than coal or natural gas.

iPhone 3G users will have to use AT&T’s 3G network, which is not as extensive as some. In fact, AT&T won’t give you a nationwide map; you need to select particular areas to see what 3G coverage they have. But iPhone Atlas features a nationwide map that someone cobbled together from AT&T’s little maps.  (Via End User, via Instapundit.)

One detail left out in yesterday’s iPhone 3G extravaganza was the cost of a service plan.  Since the new iPhone moves up to 3G from EDGE, one could expect a hike in price.  Now Fox News reports that the extra cost will be $10 per month.

That’s less than I expected, but, oddly, the article makes it out to be bad news.

An engrossing true story, at Wired.  (Via LGF.)

Fox News reports on a terrific new water purification tool:

On the outside, it looks like an ordinary sports bottle. On the inside, there’s a miracle: an extremely advanced filtration system that makes murky water filled with deadly viruses and bacteria completely clean in just seconds.

The Lifesaver removes 99.999 percent of water-borne pathogens and reduces heavy metals like lead, meaning even the filthiest water can be cleaned — immediately.

It will be a boon to soldiers in the field, so it’s winning accolades from the military.

It also stands to revolutionize humanitarian aid. It could be the first weapon in the fight against disease after a natural disaster, like the one in Myanmar this week. . .

Outdoor enthusiasts may find it useful, but the Lifesaver is perfect for the military. The bottle is designed to “scoop and go,” so soldiers won’t have to carry the added weight of clean bottled water. They can pick some up out of any source and keep moving.

As an added bonus, the bottle can shoot a pressurized jet of water from any angle, which will be useful for washing wounds free of contaminants and debris.

There’s video at the link.

DARPA has awarded contracts to several firms to build prototypes for the Vulture, an unmanned plane that would stay aloft for five years on solar power:

What the Pentagon wants is essentially a maneuverable satellite replacement: a fixed-wing, heavier-than-air craft that’s high enough to “see” large swaths of the Earth at once, but one that can also reposition itself to circle over new areas of interest, something satellites in fixed orbits can’t do.

It has to be able carry a 1,000-pound payload, battle stratospheric winds, generate a continuous 5 kilowatts of electricity — and it can’t use nuclear power to do so.

“We want to completely change the paradigm of how we think of aircraft,” Vulture project manager Daniel Newman tells Flight. “We would no longer define an aircraft by the launch, recover, maintain, launch cycle.”

Cool.  It also would fly at 90 thousand feet, higher than most planes but quite a bit lower than satellites, which would give it better resolution.

The National Post has an column by Lawrence Solomon on another edit war at Wikipedia. (Via Instapundit.) In this case, the page is about history professor Naomi Oreskes’s notorious essay in which she reports that she did a keyword search on “global climate change” and found no papers that disagreed with a human origin for climate change. The edit war regarded another analysis in which Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist, attempted to reproduce Oreskes’s results but obtained strikingly different results instead. Solomon writes that the article implied that Peiser has retracted his critique (which is manifestly not the case), but Solomon’s efforts to correct the article were repeatedly reverted.

My scan of the edits reveals that the edit history is a bit more complicated than Solomon’s column lets on. In the end, however, the entire discussion of Peiser’s critique was deleted, thus removing the misleading information regarding Peiser himself, but leaving the critique unexpressed. This was done while the page was supposedly protected.

While investigating, I learned a few interesting things. I’ve always known that Wikipedia can’t really be trusted on matters of controversy (e.g., climate change, NFL quarterbacks, or even the moon landings), but I had thought that one could get some idea of the arguments by reading the talk pages. It turns out, however, that people “referee” the talk pages as well, even there deleting comments they don’t like.

I also learned that the major Wikipedia editors don’t like to follow the rules that apply to everyone else. The antagonist in Solomon’s story violated the three-revert rule and was not apparently held to account. In fact, they even have a policy that says it’s rude to remind regulars to follow the rules.

Any collaborative project needs to deal with a diversity of interests. In a typical open source project, there are two main interests, the developers and the vandals. It’s not hard to see that one interest is legitimate and the other is not. It’s not so for Wikipedia. As a major source of information (particularly since Google gives it a special status), it has many non-vandal interests, and those interests can’t agree on which are legitimate. Plus there’s the iron law of bureaucracy. This makes Wikipedia into a competition, rather than a collaboration, which explains it in a nutshell.

The estimate of the Bakken oil deposit is out, and it’s smaller than some had hoped. It’s still a significant amount, but by no means OPEC-crushing. (Via Instapundit.)

(Previous post.)

Business Week reports:

A long-awaited federal report on oil that could be recovered in parts of North Dakota, Montana and two Canadian provinces is to be released this week. . .

In 1995, the Geological Survey estimated that using technology available at that time, 151 million barrels of oil could be recovered in the Bakken, said Brenda Pierce, a geologist and program coordinator for the agency’s energy resources program.

Pierce said she would not disclose the study’s findings until Thursday. Asked whether the estimate would be an increase from the 1995 figure, she said, “There is industry in there and having success. There’s your answer.”

(Via Instapundit.)

Looks like this is for real.

(Previous post.)

UPDATE (5/20): For some reason, a lot of people are finding this post through search engines. Here’s my latest post on the topic.

Why on earth can’t the iPhone synchronize bookmarks with Firefox?

Another use for the iPhone: Sometimes it’s just too much trouble to get up from your armchair and walk two steps to your computer.

Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall somewhere?  Soon you can.

The New Republic has an article on edit wars at Wikipedia on the pages for Clinton and Obama. (Via The New Editor, via Instapundit.) No surprise: both sides have some juveniles. But the key point is here, I think:

The battles over Hillary’s and Obama’s pages have been so heated because the stakes are so high. The candidates’ Wikipedia pages are their second Google hits, right after their official campaign portals.

Wikipedia almost always comes near the top on Google. Why? A friend at Google once confirmed for me what I suspected, that it’s not simply the result of their page ranking algorithm — they put it there deliberately. “People like Wikipedia,” he said.

True enough, people like Wikipedia, but it tends to be of limited use for controversial subjects. Moreover, you can be surprised by what turns out to be controversial; I once read their article about the “alleged moon landings.” (This has long since been fixed.) I’d rather they simply applied their algorithm and let the chips fall where they may.

I first saw this piece on a huge oil discovery in North Dakota a little while ago, but didn’t pay much attention, since I’d never heard of Next Energy News before. Now that piece is making the rounds of the blogosphere (Rand Simberg, Instapundit) and one of Simberg’s commenters points to this post, which strikes me as credible. (As the very least, it has lots of supporting links.)

If this pans out, the upshot is 100–300 billion barrels of oil in the Williston Basin, which spans the U.S.-Canada border (with the largest portions being in North Dakota and Saskatchewan). By comparison, Saudi Arabia has 260 billion barrels in proven oil reserves.

UPDATE (5/20): For some reason, a lot of people are finding this post through search engines. Here’s my latest post on the topic.

This morning my post on Blackwater Fever was Instalanched.  My first response was to use it to try to draw attention to my ad for John McCain.  My second response was to wonder how on earth Glenn Reynolds found it.  Before today, my blog was known to fewer than 10 people, and I’m not actively promoting it.  According to the stats, I’ve received no traffic from search engines.  So he must have found out via a linkback.

The thing is, Reynolds must get thousands of linkbacks every day.  He can’t possibly look at them all, and also scour the Internet for interesting articles, and also hold down a job as a law professor, can he?  I’m curious, so I’m going to try an experiment:  I have another link to Instapundit in this post.  If I get another Instalanche, we will have empirically confirmed that Glenn Reynolds has no life.

UPDATE: Reynolds refuses to be manipulated into a sending a second Instalanche, but he (or someone at UT claiming to be him) weighs in in the comments.  Hypothesis confirmed!