The Xbox 360 puzzle

Xbox360. Solve the puzzle. Be rewarded. Find a secret.

Another cryptic puzzle website, this is a promotion for the upcoming Australian & New Zealand launch of the Xbox 360. Not a bad little promo, even if the reward at the end is a bit lame. Give it a shot.

Oh, and anyone who wants to pre-order me a 360 is more than welcome to.

You should listen to the latest PixelZion podcast. It’s informative, fresh and funny. You’ll learn about AJAX and Ruby on Rails and how they work.

Oh, you might hear some Australian guy on there too

Google just opened up the Firefox referral scheme for users outside the US (as you can see from the button to the right).

I’m glad to see this being opened up, anything that helps spread Firefox is a Good Thing^™

• ZK Component Demo
• AJFORM - World’s easiest AJAX Forms API / JavaScript ToolKit
• FixMyXP.com - Your One Stop Windows XP Fix It Site - 99 Useful Run Commands

THE drive for “green energy” in the developed world is having the perverse effect of encouraging the destruction of tropical rainforests. From the orang-utan reserves of Borneo to the Brazilian Amazon, virgin forest is being razed to grow palm oil and soybeans to fuel cars and power stations in Europe and North America.

Most interesting quote:

The aim is to help meet Kyoto protocol targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

So to meet their own Kyoto quotas, they’ll encourage the destruction of someone else’s environment

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WordPress 2.0 Beta 1 has been released. I’ve downloaded and installed it on my server at home and it seems to work fine. It looks a lot like the interface for Wordpress.com.

The functionality of the admin section seems to be basically the same, with a few changes. There’s no changelog released yet, so no telling exactly what’s new, but I imagine that there’s a lot of code changes and bug fixes, but I’ve noticed at least one thing that will make my life easier:
the error() function has been included in the rss-functions.php file, which is the MagpieRSS interface for WordPress. This function is missing in the current version of WordPress and it means that when you’re downloading an RSS file and it fails, the page crashes rather than displaying an error. I’ve had to include the function in any plugins that use RSS functions.

Most people won’t care about this particular change, but at least I’m happy about it!

Usual disclaimer about this being a beta release and not to use it in a production environment apply. Backup everything 1st if you’re upgrading from an earlier installation rather than installing the beta from scratch.