Cheers Web Developers! HTML5 is here

Introduced and owned by WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) HTML incorporates WebForms 2.0 .
If you are kind of new Web developer who has been struggling to create a neat and nice looking web page or blog or website, or a advanced developer looking for an easy and nice way to properly place and manage your web page's page elements, HTML 5 is going to make your life a lot easier.
With introduction to new elements and attributes like

, <header>, <footer> etc., it is going to save us a lot of life while keeping the HTML clean as well.
Also, from it's previous version HTML 4.01, few elements have been either dropped or deprecated like, <font>, <center> etc. These are going to be handled b use of CSS going forward.

Few new elements (as taken from wikipedia) -
- New elements – section, video, progress, nav, meter, time, aside, canvas
- New input attributes – dates and times, email, url
- New attributes – ping, charset, async
- Global attributes (that can be applied for every element) – id, tabindex, repeat

However, this version of HTML 5 has not been officially released yet and still at the draft stage. We could expect few more changes in the final draft.

Download videos from Youtube in your preferred format

Youtube has an excellent collection of videos ranging from movie songs to speeches by Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and so on. If you have been wondering how you could see them offline and if it is possible to convert them in your preferred format like .mpg, .avi, .wmv etc from that strange looking .flv extension. There are many options available over the Internet but few are very straight forward and really easy to use.

One of these website that enable you to download videos not only from Youtube but from other video hosting websites like Google Video, iFilm (now known as Spike) etc, is Video Downloader. It gives you all three solutions to your requirement of downloading, converting and viewing offline it on a media player like Windows Media Player or VLC.
All you need to do is provide the url of the song you want to download and select the website from the drop down box provided, from where you are trying to download the video.

Few other good website are Download Youtube Videos (only Youtube) and http://www.videodl.org/

Another interesting website is OUIDEO that lets you even search for Youtube videos, play and download too as .mp4 file.
One more great website is FilePop that saves you one step for converting the video from .flv to your choice of format. You can simply provide the url of the youtube video and choose what format you want to download it as, and it gets you the video in that format.

Activate Administrator Account in Windows Vista

There were couple of reasons which forced me to enable and activate the administrator account in Windows Vista (Home Premium) otherwise generally it is advisable not to use the administrator account for each and every activity on your computer as it make your computer more prone to virus attack.
1st reason was installation of Anti Virus which required a true Administrator account log on.
2nd reason was annoying (yet useful alerts) UAC (User Access Control) pop ups when you run any executable.
3rd reason was that you don't have to run most of the programs by selecting 'Run as Administrator'.
And there may be more reasons as well.
Now coming back to 'How to enable, show, activate, use, logon to a true Windows Vista administrator account' -

Step 1 - Log on as a normal user to you vista
Step 2 - Click on Start and then Search for cmd.
Step 3 - In the search result pane, right click on cmd and select 'Run As Administrator'.
Step 4 - In the command prompt window, type this command

net user administrator pa$$word

Note: a) This command will set the pa$$word as your login password for administrator account
b) You can type any other password instead of pas$$word that you want
c) If you want to use a blank password you can skip this step # 4 and directly go to step # 5

Step 5 - Type the following command and press Enter to activate and enable Administrator account:

net user administrator /active:yes

It should display the following message

The command completed successfully

If no success message is displayed, repeat the process from Step # 1 again.
Step 6 - Logout from Windows Vista by choosing restart or switch user
Step 7 - Voila! you get an extra icon for Administrator on the login screen
Step 8 - Click on Administrator icon and logon with the password you have mentioned in Step # 4 above

You are done!

Critical Security Update for Internet Explorer MS08-078

On 17th Dec 2008, Microsoft has released a critical security update for Internet Explorer. This out-of-band security update fixes a JavaScript-related vulnerability that's being actively exploited through hacked Web sites. This security update resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
This security update is rated Critical for Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, and Internet Explorer 7.
For complete details see here .

Modify Default Template in MS Word

Here is something i tried while working with MS Word.
The problem i faced was, everytime i used create a new word doc, i had to repeat some of the formatting stuff like inserting page number, setting font etc.
The solution i tried was to find out and modify the default template that MS word offers you to edit andsave as a word document. It's called normal.dot. Here are the steps to modify it -
1. Open MS Word.
2. File -> Open -> In the open dialog box go to this location in you machine C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates
and select Normal.dot (Make sure in open file dialog box you have Document Templates (*.dot) selected against 'Files of Type').
3. Open this template and do whatever setting you want to have by default whenever you open MS Word to create a new doc (like font, font size, page numbers etc.)
4. Save and close.
That's it!
Now next time you open MS Word, you will see all the setting done in effect.