As luck would have it, the guys at Java Code Geeks wrote about using Oracle/Sun Microsystem’s Virtual Box, which I have extolled in the past. So, I’m going to follow their tutorial, download the live CD, and have a go. If it’s really all that great, maybe I’ll even try my hand at developing an app for that platform, perhaps as a warmup to writing an iPhone/iPad app, who knows?

The good news about the Barnes & Noble announcement is that they plan to make their ebooks available on many platforms. Here’s what the company president had to say about that:

“Today marks the first phase of our digital strategy, which is rooted in the belief that readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time,” said William J. Lynch, President of BN.com.

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:

I haven’t been keeping up with what other users are seeing (on Twitter, of course) because I was doing school work like a good girl, but now I think it’s time to check it out. I have even followed @ATTNews, all to no avail. One article I read (but have since misplaced) said they got a message in iTunes saying activation could take as long as 48 hours, but I got no such message, probably because my account is already active. I’m sorely tempted to try switching the SIM cards, but might hold off a little longer.

In the meanwhile, I have been having fun playing with all the apps that don’t require the phone service. Since I have WiFi here, that’s just about everything except the actual phone. This puppy is fast! How fast, you ask? Have a look:

Connecting to iTunes and restoring from the backup I made from my old phone has gone well, but I’m still waiting for AT&T to activate the new phone. I haven’t seen any information about deactivating the old one yet, and it is still working, so I’m not sure what if anything I need to do to change over to the new one. Maybe that will be automatic, but I suspect I will need to switch sim cards between the two phones. I don’t want to mess with that without some instruction telling me to do it, though. If I don’t find some info on the Web about it, I may have to call customer service. Like, I really want to sit on hold for hours, with all the other half-million new iPhone owners also trying to activate their phones!

Although the new phone isn’t activated on AT&T yet, it is connected to my WiFi hotspot. All my apps are installed and updated over WiFi, so I assume next time I sync the old phone any purchased apps will be deleted from that one. I wonder how that will work. Perhaps I’ll have to rename the old phone to avoid confusing their libraries?

Ah, ha! I found the answer. Apple, bless their hearts, have a support page for people who are changing out an old iPhone for the new one. That answered my question. “In the US, iPhone 3G includes a SIM and your original iPhone’s SIM is not needed. Your original iPhone account information will be transferred to the SIM included with iPhone 3G when you purchased it. Keep your original iPhone SIM with your original iPhone.” Oh, and the compass works fine, thank you. So, I just need to wait for activation to happen when it happens. As usual, trying to activate a half-million phones in one day has the system a little bogged down, so I’ll just be patient.

Oh, about that alternaCrafts thing. That’s the new epublishing company I’ve started with Suzanne Tourtillott and Susan Huxley. If the blog isn’t live there yet, just wait a day or two. We are nearly ready to let ‘er rip.

Meanwhile, back to the iPhone. The 3.0 software was installed before I finished typing the last paragraph, with no problems at all. The first thing I noticed was a new icon on the home page called “Voice Memos”, and next i realized there are more app pages available. I was counting them backwards from the last one, got to eleven on the home page, but there was one more. That isn’t an app icon page at all, but a search page, and is it fast! Since we had just been through a tornado watch here a little while ago, I did a search for “weather” and before I even finished typing the word it found three instances, two of them application names and the third (actually, first to show in the list) was a record in my Contacts app.

So, I’m pretty impressed, and more eager than ever to see the new phone later this week.

Right now we have the router (with the USB modem sticking out the side of it) sitting on the dashboard of our RV:

Connected to the modem is the coax cable from the antenna, which is presently propped up at the middle of the windshield on top of the dashboard. Our friend, Mark, first told us about using a Wilson antenna to boost his cellphone reception and got us thinking about better ways to manage our connectivity. He says he never has used an external mount for his antenna. Sitting it in the windshield or on a table has worked for him even in fringe areas. While internet data at broadband speeds may require it to be placed higher, partiularly in hilly areas, right now having it on the dashboard seems to work for us here, too. The iPhone was having trouble getting a good EDGE network signal, but with the antenna it’s doing just fine on WiFi. Oh, by the way, if I understand it correctly even though the iPhones aren’t connected to the router, just having the antenna and router running and rebroadcasting the signal gives us the benefit of stronger cellphone reception.

To avoid having to lay the antenna down while we’re driving, we will attach it to the windshield center post with velcro loops. We do want to have it available over the road instead of stowing it away. In a few days I’ll be able to report on how well it works in a totally mobile setting as we drive to Amarillo and on toward Tuscon.

If all goes as well as it has been so far, I will be able to restart my history ebooks website, and perhaps change the distribution method from CD-ROMs to online downloads. I have an antique history book, the Standard History of Essex County, Massachusetts, that I’d scanned several years ago and converted to PDF files, then indexed every proper name and loaded them into a database for easy lookup. At one time, when I had the website on a Lasso™-based server, we were able to make the database available online, but I’ll have to learn more about MySQL (or some similar opensource database system) and PHP to do that again.

Having fulltime high-quality internet access is going to open up a lot of possibilities. The only potential problem I can foresee is that we are likely to need more than 5GB of throughput per month if we use this system as much as I expect we might. It’s possible to run over that allowance very easily the way we use the ‘net, with two computers and two iPhones. Every megabyte over 5 gig will cost us US$0.25, which can add up very quickly. Whenever it’s available and not too frustrating, we’ll use the WiFi provided by RV parks, roadside rest areas and internet cafés, and at least until we get an online account with Verizon that will let me keep track of our usage, we will play it safe.

Oh, I didn’t mention the problem I had with Verizon’s website, did I? When I tried to sign up for their online account, it turned out that to enable it I have to enter a code they text to the “cellphone” the account number is connected to. Except that we don’t have a cellphone, we have a wireless modem. Doh! The site says that if they aren’t able to text the code, they’ll mail it to our billing address. Lovely. That means we won’t get it till our mail is forwarded to us in Tucson, at least two weeks from now. Sigh! Maybe if I call Verizon, or the 3GStore.com who sold us the gear, it will be possible to get around that. Verizon ought to have a better arrangement for modem customers since they have been doing this for several years already. It being a weekend as I write this, the call will have to wait until tomorrow, and hope the 3G Store doesn’t observe MLK day.

More details will be forthcoming here as we acquire more experience with this stuff, or watch my Twitter feed (“follow katlemieux”) for minute-by-minute comments as things happen.

Maybe, just maybe, now we have an answer.

Yesterday, after reading an article by Tony Cornett on RV.Net, in which he discusses some of the essentials for fulltime RV living, I called up the 3G Store, which was referenced in Tony’s blog post, and ordered a wireless modem (“AirCard”), router and booster antenna. Of course, this entailed signing up for a 2-year contract with yet another provider, but there’s no escaping that. Following the advice of the sales rep, I decided to go with Verizon instead of Sprint since after asking where we would be traveling he said Verizon probably offers better coverage for us. I had already researched the data only plans offered by both companies, and they appear to be just about the same right now, with 5GB/month bandwidth allowance for $59.95/month.

The gear should be waiting for us by the time we get to our stopping point in the Dallas area later today, according to FedEx. What we’re getting consists of a Novatel USB727 AirCard, Cradle Point MBR-1000 mobile router and a Wilson Omni RV antenna, along with all the attendant cables, cards, instructions, etc. 3G Store will have activated the AirCard and installed all the latest firmware updates, so we should be all ready to plug it in and get started. It was a real pleasure to talk to a sales guy who knew what he was talking about, too.

As well as simply being more reliable than other people’s WiFi, with this set up we can stay at places that don’t have even poor internet connections, which ought to save us quite a bit on RV park rentals and frustration. We can even “drycamp” or “boondock” while still staying connected. Oh, and we should also be able to get online even while driving down the road. Since we travel most of the year, but I still try to run an online business, this ought to elminate a lot of stress.

I will report here on our experience with this setup as we go along, and will probably also tweet about it as things happen. My name on Twitter is katlemieux if you’re interested in following the story blow-by-blow.

First I should define WiMax. It is the abbreviation for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. Similar to WiFi, the two technologies are implementations of different standards. WiFi is described in the IEEE 802.11x family of standards, while the WiMax definition includes IEEE 802.16 as well as several other standards. Obviously, the two are related, both falling into the IEEE 802 book, but my most burning question is how interoperable are they? Will a device such as a laptop or smartphone that has WiFi capability be able to seamlessly connect to a WiMax transmitter, or do we have to go through yet another iteration of hardware upgrades to take advantage of it? In particular, should I wait to upgrade my first generation iPhone to see if the new 3G version is WiMax-capable, or should I wait for iPhone 3.0?

So far the answers are elusive. I found an article that purports to explain WiMax “to da max”, but it didn’t tell me explicitly. There was one sentence that hinted around about it, though.

“You could even combine WiFi with WiMAX by having the router send the data to the computers via WiFi.” [Brain, Marshall, and Ed Grabianowski. "How WiMAX Works." 02 December 2004. HowStuffWorks.com.]

So, existing WiFi enabled hardware probably will not be able to connect to WiMax directly, but will require a router to translate the signals from WiMax to WiFi and vice versa. And since Sprint is the major cellphone carrier involved in WiMax development, not AT&T, it is unlikely that our iPhones will be WiMax capable anytime soon.

I’ll keep following this technology as it develops. Several manufacturers promise new hardware in 2009, and Motorola actually introduced a USB WiMax adapter for laptops last September, and promised to ship products in 4Q 2008. Intel has an integrated WiFi/WiMax adapter for computers based on their new Centrino chip. This new year may be the base of the hockey stick for WiMax.