A new year has dawned again, and it is that time again when many people take resolves and plan to reboot their lives. FYI – there’s no typo in the post title. Depending on how you see it, a ! or ? will be befitting to you. If you’re the kind who think that New year resolutions are lame the ? is for you. If you think the new year isn’t the only time to take a resolve the ! is for you. I am running behind a little as I haven’t written down my resolutions for this year. And I have a very interesting tale to tell about yesterday (the 1st day of the year), but that’s the subject for another post. If like me, you do resolve at the beginning of the year, I will highly recommend reading How To Press The Reset Button On Your Life. Even if you don’t like the post or necessarily agree with it, do scroll down to the end and read the Popular Posts by Category, I’m sure you’ll find something interesting or useful.

And if you're interested in more, here's The 80 Best Lifehacks of 2008.

The TED conference organizers have graciously uploaded the video of the presentation made by Dr. Roy Gould, an astrophysicist from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, introducing WorldWideTelescope in partnership with Curtis Wong, principal researcher of Microsoft’s Next Media Research group and head of the project (you might remember him from the Media Browser video on Channel9 with the sexy transition effects and cool sorting and organization features). Besides the streaming Flash video there's a .mp4 video is available for download on the same page.

I remember when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronomer and we couldn't afford a good telescope and what my father bought for me was barely powerful enough to be able to see the bigger planets; like Jupiter. But thanks to Microsoft Research, soon children who can get online (ofcourse on broadband) will have a whole new universe to explore on their fingertips and right in front of their computer screens. Now, isn't that exciting?

On a more personal note, my long hiatus from blogging can be best explained from the fact that starting from March, 10th 2008 - I'll be joining isango!. The preparation and my commitment towards finishing my last project kept me really busy. Couldn't find time for socializing or even blogging

My 4 years’ stint with MediaWeb India ends this week. It's like an end of an era for me, have so much memories from this place. It saddens me that I'd be getting away from regular interaction with PHP code, but then I'm glad too that I'd be working fulltime on ASP.net.

I'm not a fan of bandwidth throttling even though my bandwidth is under 1mbps and I don't think any consumer would be happy if his/her bandwidth were being throttled. But the recent cable accident in Egypt would make a pretty strong case if an ISP in India were to throttle torrent traffic. If it gives businesses a little more breathing room why not do it? The ISPs can send emails to consumers informing them of the throttling being done and the reasons for it. It's not the end of the world if you don't get to watch your favorite TV show the same week it got aired in the US!

Many technology enthusiasts like to share the cool its and bits of the UI from the latest & greatest software that has become their new favorites, among each other. And yes, many a times they do cross the legal boundaries.

So what do you do when you get a cease & desist notice?

Well, if you're a tech-enthusiast and do not have affiliations with some factory-based piracy operations or much worse - a shoddy design team that's gonna rip off the very company (read Apple/Microsoft or your favorite company) that built your new favorite thing. There is not much you can do but comply. But hey, do it the Long Zheng way when the Microsoft A-Team served him a notice about this blog post.

Sometimes it becomes hard to find things that otherwise seem blatantly obvious. I was searching on Google to backup the search engines my Firefox and realized that this information isn't easily reachable. Of course hardcore Firefox users would tell you this even when they're half asleep, but me; I don't fall in that category.

Updated!
The information below has been updated for Firefox 3.6.

So here is what needs to be done. Get to your profile folder of Firefox, if you don't know how to get there, you need to know how to reach Firefox's profile folder.

Inside the Firefox folder, there is a folder called searchplugins which contains all the engines, one XML file per engine. Use your discretion to backup the engines, you may want to backup the entire folder or you may want to export/backup engines selectively.

Firefox 3.5 and above: Besides backing up the searchplugins folder, you also need to backup search.json & search.sqlite (if exists).

For details on the various files and folders in the profile folder, read the KB article on mozillazine.

The Ultimate Aero Twin Turbo built by Washington State based Shelby Supercars (not affiliated to Carrol Shelby's Shelby Automobiles) now holds the crown of the fastest production car in the world. To help you understand what an incredible feat it is; to attain such speeds on a production car, I'm going to quote Captain Slow from Episode 2 ,Season 9 of Top Gear (Feb.4th 2007) - "And when you think that the Veyron has airbags, air conditioning, stereo, a boot and all the other stuff F1 cars aren't burdened with, you realize what an incredible machine this is".

One thing that I found quite interesting with Ultimate Aero is that given the Bugatti Veyron is 987 HP and Ultimate Aero TT is 1183 HP, with its Lamborghini Diablo kit-car appearance it looks deceptively half as powerful as the Veyron does.

Bugatti Veyron image clip from Top Gear 9x02.

Ultimate Aero TT image courtesy of Shelby Supercars.

I have never wanted an iPod before! But now there's a reason

Awesome!!!

At the time of writing this post TV viewers in India are awaiting with great anticipation & excitement the exploding conclusion to Heroes in Chapter 23 - "How To Stop An Exploding Man" due to telecast in 1 hour. Among the little nuggets they will learn today the most trivial yet interesting will be the first name of Mr. Bennet when he tells Peter to call him Noah.

As I am about to race down home to watch the season finale on Star World, I must admit watching it for the 3rd time with the only excuse that this will be the first time it will be on TV I was asked by a friend, who I just handed over my copy of The Incredibles; what is it that I find so magnetic about super hero themes. To answer his question I simply answered:  watch The Incredibles and instead of the metaphorical super powered characters  bound by law to hide their true selves think it in the context of marriage & how many people including yourself (he's married) think of it as a bounding force that makes you feel as if you lost your true identity. And the moment you make that connection with Mr. Incredible perhaps not in entirety, but you will at least to some degree; understand why I am a sucker for Super Heroes.

I recommend everyone who has seen even one of those Get A Mac commercials by Apple to have a look at the ones by TrueNuff. They are darn funny, if you're a Mac lover and are aware of my blind love for Windows - let me recommend a more neutral video just to prove that these videos are not funny just because they are poking jokes at Mac. My personal favorite will have to be this video on gaming.

Credit to Mike Stanclift's blog on Neowin.net for sharing this great comic series.

Last night I when I reached home and switched on my machine it froze at the BIOS OEM Logo screen. I panicked but only for a second as it all seemed all too familiar to me. Recent memory of a post on Scott Hanselman's blog helped me fix the problem in under a minute. Turns out my brother had brought a Kingston DataTraveler 1GB USB disc of a friend from his MBA class. He told me he was unable to unplug it as Windows was reporting it as still being used and he forgot to take it out after he switched off the machine.

Although this hasn't happened when either of my Toshiba or Transcend USB drives are plugged in before boot. Had I not read  System won't pass the BIOS POST - Yank external USB drives on Scott Hanselman's blog a few months back, I probably had to waste a couple of frustrating hours before realizing that a simple thing as checking for any plugged external USB drive would have solved the problem pronto. Just wondering if anybody reading this post has ever had a similar experience, where you've benefited in such a way quite simply because you read about a similar experience on someone else's blog?