Covariance

Covariance is a concept in object oriented programming. That's all you need to know for the context of this post.

Here is a quote from an article where the author attempts to explain a type of covariance. If you weren't already confused...

Covariant return types on method overrides make this explicit, allowing the use of a type that is derived from the return type of the method being overridden as the return type of the method doing the overriding.

What a mouthful!

Ride for the Roses

The Lance Armstrong Foundation's Ride for the Roses was today. 100.55 miles (162.2 km). 5 hours, 20 minutes. Blustering wind. And now, legs as wobbly as a newborn giraffe.

I have a certain sense of satisfaction having setting myself a goal of riding 100 miles, and finishing in a faster time than I expected. My friends Scott and Peter also rode with me today, so congratulations to them.

You can get all the stats for our ride, collected by my GPS unit, here.

Fun Project

Now that I have a Bluetooth-enabled device that can store over 1GB of music (see previous post), an idea occurred to me. Wouldn't it be cool if I could sit down in my car and have the music from my phone start playing through my car stereo?

The problem doesn't seem that difficult to solve, if you don't mind dropping about $100 on some new hardware. There are a few manufacturers out there that now make Bluetooth headphones. Conceivably, you could buy these and splice the analog lines between the Bluetooth transceiver (or internal amplifier, if the headphones have one) and redirect the analog signal to an auxiliary input of a stereo. Then, simply by pairing the phone and the "headphones", and allowing the devices to connect automatically, I should be able to get in the car, hit "Play" on the phone, and enjoy. I'm not quite to ready to drop the $100 just yet, but I'll document and blog the project if I ever decide to give it a shot.

No iPod Required

My Motorola cell phone really sucks. I came to this conclusion after being frustrated time and time again with its poor reception quality and its absolutely horrible software. I even took it to a Cingular store in hopes that the firmware could be flashed to a newer version (a coworker had his phone updated - but it was a slightly newer version of the same phone). According to the Cingular guy, Motorola says the firmware is fine - no flashing required.

I decided to search for a new phone - specifically a used AT&T GSM phone (since my SIM card was from AT&T, I could just stick it in the phone and voila!), or an unlocked GSM phone that could accept my AT&T SIM card. I did some research, and decided that the phone I wanted was the Audiovox SMT5600. After a few days of looking, an unlocked phone appeared on eBay and I grabbed it.

It finally arrived a couple of days ago, and I must admit - it rocks. I'm not going to list off all the features - you can read about them for yourself. The one feature that I will talk about a little is the Windows Media Player 10 Mobile.

As I discussed in a previous post, I subscribe to Yahoo's Music Unlimited service. Each track downloaded from this service contains DRM, so I can't just copy them to any device and listen. I first copied a track to the phone using Windows Explorer, and when I attempted to listen, the phone told me that it needed to acquire a license for the track, and that it needed to connect to the Internet to get it. I let it try, but it didn't quite work. That pissed me off a bit, but the fact that the phone tried to play it and knew what it needed to do to play it was encouraging. I then tried to synchronize some tracks using Windows Media Player on my PC, hoping that the license might be acquired by Windows Media Player and transferred. Success! I can now listen to all my subscription tracks on my cell phone. So, I promptly bought a 1GB miniSD card to give me quite a few hours of audio. I have most of the album art for my library on my HD and Windows Media Player copied those to my phone too, so when tracks are playing, the phone displays the album cover on the screen. Very cool.

New Domain Name

Not sure what I'll do with this yet, but I registered the following domain:

Technoblogic.com

At the moment, I'm hosting it on my server at home. I think I might set up some kind of technology blog. Crazy I am. Any other suggestions?