I found one this morning that has a few mildly heavyish songs on it. It’s style is close to Alice 97.3 - if you’re close to the San Francisco bay area (poppy music, but made with real instruments).

It’s called 华流另类 All China Alternative. To listen, you click on the yellow play button, and then open the downloaded file (play.pls) in iTunes.

I wouldn’t call it “metal, rock, or punk” as the description says, but it’s a nice station to practice listening to if hip hop is not your cup of tea.

Oh, and if hip hop is your thing, the same DJ has a “hits” station that is a bit more hip-hoppy.

I found a video taken by a student during the quake - scary stuff.

A friend of mine went to Africa a while ago and brought me back an odd, but cool souvenir. It’s a soft drink made by Guinness called Malta. Here is what it looks like:

While this may sound like something you may want to try, he said it is a “very acquired taste” (i.e. it tasted horrible to him).

None the less, being a Guinness fan (and knowing a lot of people who read my blog are), I thought you might want to know about this random Guinness product.

(Malta seems like it might be a classification of drink as opposed to a brand name)

I would absolutely love to have this - I can’t even tell you how fun this would be. It would make dict.cn and nciku.com usable when away from the computer. Man… my iPhone wants this badly.

I hope this is true, and I really hope it doesn’t have some sort of regional lock down or something. This would be such a boon while studying.

Ok, enough drooling…

I’ve also removed the manual download. The only way to download Afae now is to use the update site (http://robrohan.com/projects/afae). If you’d used the update site before, you’ll have to uninstall the old plugins and re-setup the update site. You can read more about it on the project page.

Thank you to everyone who’s been using Afae, your feedback, and your generous donations. I really appreciate it.

However, today I came across this uncorroborated post that Yahoo ads might be distributing malware.

Thinking back, I saw a broken Yahoo ad on their site yesterday, and in place of the ad was an iFrame with the typical IIS error message and something about localstart.asp. I thought nothing of it at the time. But today it dawned on me that there was some recently reported huge IIS SQL Injection Attacks… I am not sure if one plus one equals two in this instance, but to be on the safe side I have turned off all Yahoo ads from my site.

My proxy apologies if you experienced any oddities.

(Photo curtsey of Choubistar via his flickr account)

… wait for it …

Ok, it’s probably not really true ^_^. The laptop was likely left over from a previous, non Microsoft, presenter. According to a few comments from people who said they were there, Ballmer’s slides were from an automatic slideshow which was probably not running from the Mac. But still, I find it pretty funny.

According to the story, there are now 220 million Chinese internet users vs. 216 million USA users (USA had the world dominate usage).

The part that is really interesting is the 220 million is only 17% of China whereas the 216 million Americans is 71% of the USA. The growth potential is staggering.

It’ll be interesting times ahead. Savvy people might want to start to i18n their application for 中文…

(All the figures are from the USA Today article)

I woke up Saturday with an idea (which is actually a joke at our house now, “Guess what honey, I have an idea!”). I wanted to have a podcast of news bits that I could listen to while I did my morning routine - the catch being I wanted it daily, and I wanted to control the shows overall subjects at will.

That desire, along with my new found Automator curiosity, led me to throw together Rohan Times Radio News ( :-D ). It’s an automatic process that takes an RSS feed, reads it, and makes a podcast out of the stories. To get the content I want, I am using yahoo pipes to filter and sort the feeds, and then republish the feeds as the shows teleprompt.

Here is a basic overview of how it works (sorry for the oddities with the movie, youtube seems to be doing odd things on upload lately):

One of the coolest parts about this is it basically requires no code (I did, however, use a bit of code to have finer control).

I don’t think I can publish the podcast for the world, as I think it would be seen as a copyright violation, but if you are interested in this let me know.