I must admit it really looks good… and this kinect thing.. even better!

New Xbox 360 gets official at $299, shipping today, looks angular and ominous (video hands-on!)

At first we were doubtful that a edgy box appearing in a little Flash ad from Italy last night could be legit, but Microsoft just got real with the new Xbox 360. (That’s all it’s officially called — just “the new Xbox 360.”) It’ll launch today priced for $299, while the old Elite will stick around for $249 and the Arcade will drop to $149. The new box is crazy sexy in glossy black with touch-sensitive buttons, and Microsoft says it’s “whisper quiet,” with one large fan instead of two — the new 45nm chipset undoubtedly generates less heat to begin with. On the features front, it’s got integrated 2.4GHz 802.11n WiFi, five USB ports, and 250GB of storage on a removable hard drive, although it’s not a standard drive or same drive as the old console, and older Memory Units won’t work, either. Upgraders can use a USB-to-Xbox hard drive connector cable to migrate to the new box, however. There’s also a “custom Kinect port” on the back that looks like an HTC-style ExtUSB port, and it also seems like the power supply has moved inside the case, which is a welcome change. New Xbox 360 units are shipping to retailers now, with availability expected later this week, and MS conference attendees are actually getting theirs shipped today.

If you’re in Europe, don’t fret, as yours is coming soon. Microsoft’s official Xbox Twitter account has confirmed the console hits there on July 16.

Update: We just got the official fact sheet, check it after the break. Oh, and we’re calling it the “Stealthbox” to keep all the models straight. It just feels right, you know?

Update 2: According to a Microsoft representative, the Xbox 360 Original will still be sold while there’s stock, but they’re not making any more of them. Once they’re gone, they’re gone — and we’d assume a new $199 variant of the new design will eventually be released to fill the void.

Read the whole article at engadget.

Have spare time? Want to lose some of it?

Check out this link and learn what is the best use for browser popups.. a nice game of Pong!

Play pong with your browser and remember to turn popups on

It’s actually pretty easy once you find out how to do it. By having the artist and album name you can fetch the album artwork from Amazon in three different sizes.

With php5 it’s very easy since it has an integrated xml parser. All we have to do is this:

$url = simplexml_load_file('http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&AWSAccessKeyId=12DR2PGAQT303YTEWP02&Operation=ItemSearch&SearchIndex=Music&Artist=ARTIST&ResponseGroup=Images&Keywords=ALBUMNAME');

Please note that in the url I’ve put ARTIST and ALBUMNAME, which you should replace with what you’re searching for. Doing so, we get an xml file from which we can display the image like this:

echo '<img src="' . $url->Items->Item[0]->LargeImage->URL . '" />';

If we want the large one, that is. If we would like the medium one we would use MediumImage and SmallImage for the small one.

That’s it, it’s very useful if you are organizing your mp3 files or maybe building an online community or something.

Hope it helps somebody! If you find it useful, digg it!

ps: I forgot to mention that if you are using php4 this wont work, you will have to use another xml parser to fetch the image location from the xml provided by Amazon.

Have swing!

I started reading some tutorials and books about this very nice and simple javascript framework, with which you can do supercool things in the browser.

It’s actually pretty simple to use for simple effects and gets complex as you try to do magic with it.

After reading a chapter about it’s Tween function, I decided to make a simple menu with a simple fade animation. It’s really something for beginners, since this is what I am, a beginner.

We are going to do a menu with some links that change their position and color with a simple animation when we hover them. Easy peasy. Check the result here.

First: we start the document as always, with a doctype (I still use the transitional xhtml) and include the framework.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="sl" lang="sl">
    <head>
        <title>MooTools</title>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=windows-1250" />
        <script src="inc/mootools-1.2.1-core.js"></script>

Second: we add an event to our window element which is going to start as soon as the DOM (Document Object Model – the browser) is ready (it won’t wait all the other elements to load [big, fat images, advertisments etc]).

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
            window.addEvent('domready', function() {

             });
</script>

Third: when the DOM will be ready we want it to get all the links with a specified class (I made it this way, you could easily make all the links in a specified UL or any other element behave the same way) and apply a special behaviour to them.

                $$('a.click').addEvents({

                    'mouseover': function() {
                        this.morph({
                            'padding-left': '20',
                            'color': ['#1E0CB5', '#94BB06']
                        })
                    },

                    'mouseout': function() {
                        this.morph({
                          'padding-left': '10',
                          'color': ['#94BB06', '#1E0CB5']
                        })
                    }

                });

As you can see, MooTools is very simple and easily understandable. Using $$(‘a.click’) we create an array of all the links in our page with the class=”click” attribute.

Next, we tell the function to Morph the link when the mouse hovers the link and when the mouse leaves the link. We add 10px of padding on the left and change the color to green when the mouse passes over the link and restore the default values when it leaves. Easy.

Still in the head we apply some styles to our menu.

        <style>
            a { color: #1E0CB5; }

            #menu { list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; }
            #menu li { width: 150px; background: #eee; }
            #menu li a { padding: 4px 10px; display: block; }
        </style>

And now we complete our simple page.

    </head>
    <body>
        <h3>Something nice</h3>
        <ul id="menu">
            <li><a class="click" href="#">link</a></li>
            <li><a class="click" href="#">link</a></li>
            <li><a class="click" href="#">link</a></li>
            <li><a class="click" href="#">link</a></li>
        </ul>
    </body>
</html>

That’s it, a nice animated menu to use on your website! If you want to see the whole code in one piece, check the source of the live example.

Hope I was clear enough.

I’ll write again with a new example of what I’ve learnt!

You need to watch this Okay, listen to it actually, because the images are stoopid Bwahaha

I picked an old domain I had and wasn’t used and made… a blog out of it of course

It has a bad rank in Alexa (22M+) and PR0 and small value (except for the domain value that shows to be ~$2M

I read so many things about SEO and earning money with a blog that I just can’t resist the temptation to try some of the tricks.. I will try to optimize it and make it rank better. Let’s see how much work and time will I spend to reach a nice position…

Will you help me? Your comments would be very much appreciated!

http://waka.us/

1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

2. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

3. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

4. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?

5. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

6. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

7. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?

8. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?

9. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?

10. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. if they have a girl, they have another child. if they have a boy, they stop. what is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

11. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?

12. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)

13. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it�s only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?

14. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?

15. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

16. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?

17. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)

Would you know how to answer them?

Taken from Tihomir‘s blog.