Cautionary:

If you’re using MobileMe to sync your iCal calendars and decide you’re going to let your subscription lapse, make sure you turn off the MobileMe sync settings on the iPhone first. I failed to do that and ended up with a situation where:

• iTunes said I could change my calendar sync settings on the iPhone

but

• the iPhone wouldn’t expose sync settings for a MobileMe account I didn’t have anymore

and

• MobileMe’s sync preferences were grayed out because my account wasn’t active.

Solution: Factory reset of the iPhone

It didn’t hurt me, but it made me crabbier about this bit of thumb-sucking laziness in today’s NYT:

They’re either hapless pests or the very people capable of overthrowing Windows. Take your pick.

‘It feels pretty clear to me that the open process produces better stuff,’ says Mark Shuttleworth, whose team at Canonical is leading the Ubuntu project. In December, hundreds of these controversial software developers gathered for one week at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. They came from all over the world, sporting many of the usual signs of software mercenaries: jeans, ponytails, unruly facial hair and bloodshot eyes.

But rather than preparing to code for the highest bidder, the developers were coordinating their largely volunteer effort to try to undermine Microsoft’s Windows operating system for PCs, which generated close to $17 billion in sales last year.

1. Ponytails! Beards!
2. “Controversial software developers”
3. “overthrowing Windows”

wtf is “controversial” about open source developers? Do they bite the heads off of live chickens or something?

I think the “hapless pests” are journalists who’ve realized they can get away with rewriting an article that’s been in circulation since 1998. It’s the Christmas fruitcake of tech journalism.

Then you get to the part about it being noteworthy that kernel updates sometimes cause things to go wrong with drivers. Because that problem is, apparently, solved with Windows and OS X.