art taylor

Unsurprising to most, I was foolish enough to buy an iPad. After some unpleasantness this morning, I ended up picking up one later in the day. I grabbed the dock and case, because I find it terribly annoying to prop up my iPhone to watch videos.

I also set it up with a wireless keyboard for grins. I have a desktop computer, an iPhone, and a Macbook Pro I am using with less and less frequency. I am entertaining the notion of getting rid of the laptop altogether, and using the iPad when I need a portable with more typing throughput than an iPhone.

Obviously, it would require the ability to edit code, etc., and I'd love a web-based IDE, but failing that, I think ssh would do in a pinch. I could pack all of this gear in my bag and not weigh it down half as much as the MBP, which doesn't fit in my preferred daily carry bag (or "murse") anyway.

One thing I am finding a little tough to deal with is the lack of a mouse. The whole notion of reaching out and using the touch screen is not yet intuitive and reminds me of the gorilla arm warnings from the jargon file.

And, because one has to do these things occasionally, here's a shot of my home office workspace. The resolution is low because the iPhone takes grainy pictures with relatively low inside lighting, so I scaled it down to avoid looking completely bletcherous. However, if you are sharp-eyed, yes, that's a scientific calculator (HP-35s) on my desk, right next to a computer with Mathematica, SAGE, and Calculator.app. No, I can't really explain it either.

9:30 PM: Start Parallels and create a pre-configured instance for Windows XP, modifying RAM allotment to 512MB, relocating the data files to an external FireWire Drive, and changing the CDROM from an ISO file to the Mac's SuperDrive DL.

9:35 PM: Put Windows XP disk in drive, start VM.

9:46 PM: Windows XP installer says,"39 minutes left to install," as it copies files, probes hardware (probably especially easy with a virtual machine with constrained virtualised hardware), and tells me how much better life will be with XP. On my last install (on a PC), 39 became 23 which lasted for FOUR HOURS.

10:01 PM: Installer asks for configuration information.

10:02 PM: Installer finishes and reboots.

10:04 PM: I'm logged in and ready to go, looking at what I swear is Palouse country.

I installed the "Parallels Tools", (similar to the VMWare tools and the Virtual PC tools) which make the mousing smoother if nothing else. However, window movement is still a little flaky (I resized the window to 1200x800 or so, so it might be fine at 10x7 or another "natural" resolution.), but everything worked as it should. Surprisingly so, and so, so much faster than Virtual PC did on my G4, which is no surprise.

Again, much to my surprise, it used about 510M RSS and 1.25GB VSS to manage this, much less than I expected. Of course, I'm running IE right now and not Outlook, Office, Visio, and streaming video.

On the other hand, I thought I'd try a simple test tonight, and went to http://www.dslreports.com to try the speed tests, using the SF-based Megapath server. I expected there to be some cost to the virtual bridging in Parallels.

Captive Windows using IE and the latest Java 5 JRE plugin:

dslreports.com speed test result on 2006-04-07 01:42:14 EST:
4887 / 503
Your download speed : 4887 kbps or 610.9 KB/sec.
That is 197% better than an average user on pacbell.net

Your upload speed : 503 kbps or 62.9 KB/sec.
That is 38.5% better than an average user on pacbell.net

Host Mac OS X using Camino 1.0 and the craptacular Apple Java 5 JRE plugin:

dslreports.com speed test result on 2006-04-07 01:54:00 EST:
4896 / 499
Your download speed : 4896 kbps or 612 KB/sec.
That is 197% better than an average user on pacbell.net

Your upload speed : 499 kbps or 62.4 KB/sec.
That is 37.4% better than an average user on pacbell.net

Not much difference, and what difference there was, the Mac came out behind. So much for BSD networking! (Yes, that's a joke.)

I'll continue testing later this weekend with two of the PC games I keep my T40 around for: Scrabble and Age of Kings II: Age of Empires: Conquerors Expansion: Can we add more colons?

Regardless, at $49.95, I can't wait until they get out of Beta so I can buy the Intel Mac version. Based on what I've seen so far, I'd buy it in its present state.

(This is what is known as "foreshadowing". Be prepared for a raft of "Bloody hell this sucks!" posts in the near future.)

Edit: Wow, that was quick. Attempting to eject the Windows XP CD from inside the Windows VM caused a nice kernel panic in OS X. As my pappy used to say, when life gives you poop, make poop juice! So I used the forced reboot as an opportunity to install 10.4.6.

Oh, and I can't upgrade to SP2 because I don't have enough disk space (I went with the default disk size) and I can't find the resizing tool they talk about in the control panel.

Beta. Now I get it.