Flash Problems

by | Dec 19, 2007 | Tech Notes

Flash document iconOne of the major reasons Adobe bought out Macromedia was to get Flash. Without a doubt Flash is one of those technologies that makes the whole Internet experience that much more enjoyable for the end user. On the other hand, Flash can quickly become a headache when it does not work properly or if you are trying to work with it and it keeps changing. Given that I have put together the following list of resources and tips on dealing with Flash.

Flash Implementations:

The first thing to understand is that there are really two implementations of Flash. There is the Flash ActiveX control which is used by Microsoft Internet Explorer and the Flash Plug-in. Firefox and Safari use the Flash Plug-in and not the ActiveX control. The ActiveX control is the Flash9x.ocx file and the Plug-in is the Flashplayer.xpt file.

On Windows, Flash is installed to:

  • C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\Macromed\Flash

On Mac OS X, Flash is installed to:

  • /Library/Internet Plug-Ins

Uninstalling Flash:

The best way to uninstall Flash from Windows and Mac OS X is to use Adobe’s own uninstaller. This can be downloaded from Adobe’s Tech Note 14157 page. Proving that nothing is easy on Windows, by default the Windows uninstaller does not remove registry entries. In order to wipe registry entries for Flash, you must run the uninstaller using a clean switch:

uninstall_flash_player.exe /clean

Installing Flash:

Since there are two implementations of Flash, there are essentially three installations of Flash. For IE (the ActiveX control), you can simply go to Adobe.com and look for the Get Flash Player logo and click on it. For other browsers, when you go to the Adobe.com page, it will instead download an installer for the Flash Plug-in. There is a third installer which is only for developers who want to include both the ActiveX control and Plug-in with their applications. You can usually download the latest installers here:

For testing purposes, Adobe does offer archived versions on their Tech Note 14266 page.

Once you have actually installed Flash, if needed you can also disable Flash Auto Update Notifications. This is done by creating a text file named mms.cfg and placing it in the following directories:

  • Windows XP: C:\WINDOWS\System32\Macromed\Flash
  • Mac OS X: \Application Support\Macromedia

The mms.cfg file should have: AutoUpdateDisable=1 to disable Auto Update Notifications. Information on doing this can be found on Adobe’s Tech Note 16701594 page.

Resources:

CPanel Password Directories

by | Dec 6, 2007 | cPanel

Wordpress IconThis week I wanted to setup a protected directory on one of my personal sites. CPanel has a built-in feature for setting up password protected subdirectories via the .htaccess file, so I figured I would just use this feature to setup my protected directory. Of course, nothing ever works when you want it to and I soon found out that WordPress was preventing this from working correctly. Every time I tried to access my subdirectory I received a 404 error page from WordPress. After a couple of days of messing with the root .htaccess file, I found a solution.

Edit Root .htaccess

Edit the root .htaccess file and look for the WordPress code which is how Permalinks are created. It will look similar to this.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

You will need to add a new section above your WordPress code similar to this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/subdirectory/(.*)$
RewriteRule ^.*$ – [L]
</IfModule>

Substitute the directory you want to password protect for “subdirectory”, and then see if you are now able to get your CPanel password protected directory to work.

Still Not Working!

If it still does not work, then you have another .htaccess file that has the same WordPress code. For my domain, I install the WordPress files in a subdirectory named “main”, and when I inspected the root .htaccess file and the .htaccess file under main, I found the same code. The solution is to remove the WordPress code from the subdirectory in which you have the WordPress files. It should now work.

For further information on WordPress Permalinks conflicting with CPanel password protected directories see:

Eudora on Mac OS X 10.5

by | Nov 23, 2007 | Mac OS X

Eudora OS X IconI spent last week upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. I chose to do a clean install, and so the installation went as smoothly as can be hoped for. Once I manually copied back some of my old settings and reinstalled some of my third party apps, I ended up having a few minor problems. The worst of it was with Eudora 6.2.4, which is the email client I have been using for over ten years. It is has hard for me to say goodbye to Eudora. After all this time the email client just feels comfortable to me and though I have tried Thunderbird, I found it lacking. I thought several times of switching to Apple Mail or PowerMail, but Eudora’s multiple personalities and inboxes were hard to let go. Apparently I am not alone in my Eudora issues with OS X 10.5, there are a few discussions on Apple’s Support Forums about multiple the dreaded beach ball problem and Eudora freezing for no apparent reason. The initial fix is to click on the Window Menu and choose Settings – Getting Attention and change your Sounds from the Eudora defaults to a standard system alert sound. This helps but did not quite fix the problem. Here is a list of other workarounds that seem to have fixed all of my Eudora crashes:

  • Settings – Getting Attention: Uncheck Play a sound.
  • Settings – Spell Checking: Check Spelling – Only when requested and select Never make suggestions.
  • Settings – Mood Watch: uncheck Enable Mood Watch
  • Settings – Hosts: Check DNS load balancing.

After implementing all of these, Eudora launches and displays email without any beach ball cursors or crashes.

Related Links:

In the ‘Sounds’ section, for both ‘New mail sound’ and ‘Attention sound’, select a sound OTHER than one that has ‘Eudora’ in its name (ie. NOT ‘Eudora Attention’, ‘Eudora New Mail’ nor ‘Eudora Short Warning’)

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