I opted to pick up our iPad at the Apple Store in Austin, since we’ll be in that general area when it’s released, and it might be fun to shop for accessories at the same time. We’ve shopped at this store before, and know the parking is exceptionally easy, which is why I picked that one. We may be staying in New Braunfels, which is closer to San Antonio, but what the heck? Either way we’d have to get in the car and drive for an hour, so the direction we head in doesn’t make much difference.

Apparently I was not the only person a little bit excited about getting my name on the list of early adopters. Mashable said there were an estimated 51,000 iPads sold in the first two hours, and 90,000 on the first day of preorders! Not too shabby for a device the pundits kept wondering why anyone would want one. I know why I want one, of course. I’ve got a Kindle DX, and I have been very disappointed with it. While we do use it, most of the time I prefer to fire up Windows 7 in a VirtualBox window and use Kindle for PC to read my Amazon ebooks. When my iPad arrives, I’ll just use Kindle for iPhone on that instead, unless Amazon has a native iPad app ready by then. Color and a backlit screen make the reading experience so much better for me than eInk’s grainy, low-contrast screen that requires a strong reading light. I really don’t understand at all those people who say it’s harder to read an LED computer display than an eInk device or paper. They seem to get their data from the bad old days of CRTs with flickering, unshielded UV-radiant screens. Silly.

As an ebook reader, I certainly expect the iPad to be the best of the breed, but that’s not the only reason I want one. It will be a superb portfolio display, too. And using Reunion for iPhone combined with a collection of family photos, it will be the star of any family gathering. Oh, the possibilities just keep growing….

One of my primary objectives for having this device, especially the 3G version, is to supplement our very pricey VerizonWireless Mobile Broadband account. While that has been a real lifesaver on the occasions, like this past week, when we are in a place without acceptable internet connectivity, only 5 gigabytes of throughput for a month just isn’t enough, not by a long shot. Figure that only two Netflix streaming video movies would use the whole month’s allowance and you’ll understand. We simply use the internet too intensively to be happy with that kind of parsimony. AT&T’s iPad unlimited data plan, which we can turn off when we’re happy with local WiFi, will be wonderful. Phil will be able to watch movies, I’ll be able to get all the video tutorials and podcasts I want, and all the rest, without paying Verizon twice their already excessive monthly fee for using 1/5th more bandwidth, like we have the past couple of months. After all, as many people around the world have said, internet access is a basic human right.

So, we expect to really, really, really enjoy this device when it finally arrives!

However, while it is not possible to get the hardware accelleration normally available from the GPU, it is still possible to use vReveal to clean up shaky, low-contrast videos. It just takes longer since it will be processed by the CPU instead of the GPU. Much longer — in some cases it can be up to 20Xs slower on the CPU. But if you have the time, it can be done with just one click of a button.

While investigating CUDA, I was bemused to see a whitepaper in the Nvidia CUDA Zone called “Fast N-body Simulation with CUDA”. If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you may recall an item I wrote about a year ago, called Virtual Worlds Galore, that included a video made by the guys at Genkii in cooperation with the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, or MICA, on this subject. Apparently n-body simulations are all the rage now that desktop computers are capable of displaying them, thanks to virtualization and graphics acceleration architectures like the Nvidia CUDA. They’re a bit over my head, since I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a 3D visualization expert, but its fascinating to follow what’s being done by people who are. And it is more than a little interesting to see how so many of the topics I cover are connected one way or another in unexpected ways.

The problem I was trying to correct is that the video card emulator in VirtualBox 1.5 was not up to handling a high-end graphics task like video editing. Version 3 does a much better job, especially after I read the User Manual (gasp!) and followed the suggestion there to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions, a package of device drivers and applications designed to optimize the guest operating system’s performance. It did indeed do that. Before installing these Guest Additions, I was unable to resize the window where Windows 7 beta was running, and when I clicked the cursor inside that window it was “captured” by the VirtualBox application until I tapped the “Host key” to release it. With Guest Additions installed, I can stretch the display window as large or small as I want it, and the cursor moves smoothly from one OS to the other without requiring a keystroke to release it.

There are a few other enhancements as well, including shared folders, which allow access to any designated folder on the host system, time synchronization between host and guest systems, and of course better graphics support.

So, with all that, does vReveal run? Yes! So, I will be testing it using some videos I’m shooting on my new iPhone 3GS, and will have some before and after examples here soon. It still might not work, because even though the application did open, when I tried to look at a sample video I got an error saying it could not find a compatible GPU (Graphic Processor Unit). Even though the iMac has an nVidia GeForce GT 130 on board, the Windows 7 installation may not be able to take advantage of it if the correct drivers are not available. Cross your fingers!

vReveal is a MS-Windows® program. Normally this would not be a problem, since I have Windows XP Pro®, Vista® and even the Windows 7® beta operating systems running in virtual machines on my Mac. I use both Parallels Desktop for Mac and Sun Microsystems’ opensource VirtualBox. But my new 24″ iMac apparently has some hardware not supported yet by either of these VM systems, and it’s possible that vReveal itself does not support my video card, even though it’s made by their partner, nVidia (nVidia GeForce GT 130). Maybe upgrading to the latest version of Parallels will help, too.

So, I have some more work to do before I can try out vReveal. Luckily, nVidia has a nifty tool, shown below, that can help locate drivers for their video cards. By having it here in my blog, I can use it from within the various VMs I have running to see if I can get them optimized to take advantage of the nice graphics I enjoy on the Mac OS side. And of course you can do the same; enjoy! The sound card issue may be isolated to Sun’s VirtualBox, and if that’s the case I’ll have to spend some time on the users forum over there to see if I can resolve that issue. But at any rate, here’s the nVidia widget:

However, now I’ve gotten a little crazy. I heard in a podcast that MicroSoft has a free beta release of Windows 7 that will run until June 2010, and since I’d just bought another 2.5″ external hard disk drive and had plenty of storage space, I decided to see what it’s like. Well, this is what it’s like to run Windows 7 in a Sun Microsystems VM on Mac OS X:

Now, is that geeky, or what?