blog@tomauger.com

Development news, browser quirks, design factoids. Good stuff.

Archive for January, 2009

Western Digital MyBook Locking Up Windows

Jan 28

Posted by admin in Hardware, Technology, Tips and Tricks | No Comments

Apparently, the Western Digital MyBook line of external USB/Firewire hard drives have their share of problems. Fortunately, I haven’t had (knock on linoleum) the sorts of hardware failures that many have reported.

However, when using the MyBook via 4-pin firewire attached to my smoking Dell XPS Notebook, I have intermittently experienced complete lockups as the Plug and Play driver kicks in and craps out. It hasn’t helped installing the WD Drivers that are highly suspect, so in fact I uninstalled everything on my computer that smacked of “Western” or “Digital” (well, sort of) using Add/Remove Programs.

One trick that appears to be working is quite simple: don’t plug the power into the hard drive until AFTER you have plugged the firewire cable into the computer. Could be blatant superstition, but so far, so good. Okay, to be honest, I’ve only tried it the one time but that time it worked!!

Anyway, just a tip. Try it out if you’re experiencing troubles. Let me know how it turns out. Then buy Seagate.

Flash CS4 Motion Tween – Weird Symbol Swapping

Jan 26

Posted by admin in Flash / ActionScript, Technology | No Comments

So, with great trepidation I unleashed just a tiny little portion of CS4 on my primary production workstation a few weeks ago: Flash CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4. I foolishly decided to work on what was supposed to be a dead-simple mini project (with a mini deadline) using Flash CS4. Sort of a “trial by fire”. Well, I got burnt. Badly.

Turned-on by the new Timeline / Motion Tweening model (they finally listened and brought back the AfterEffects-style animation model from LiveMotion – remember LiveMotion?) I jumped into a very simple project: I was going to do a little “slideshow” of images that would simply fade in, grow a little on the screen and then fade out. Sounds dead simple, right? And in CS3 it would have been a snap. Turns out that it IS a snap in CS4, it just took me over two weeks to figure it out, with Jen DeHaan of Adobe’s patient help. Sounds like the cats on the Adobe Flash team made some pretty funky decisions regarding the new timeline. Let me walk you through what I’ve learned.

Or you can just follow the threads on the Adobe Forums here and here.

In a nutshell the problem is this: by default, the behaviour of the new motion tween in Flash CS4 is that it takes over the entire layer that it is on. As much as the Adobe guys claim that this is “object-level” motion tween, it still completely consumes the layer it’s on in the timeline. What’s worse, by default, it’s actually very hard to mix two different movieClip or Graphic symbol animations on the same layer of the timeline. What occurs is that if you have one symbol with a Motion Tween attached to it in a layer, and then on some later frame in that same layer you try to add a Motion Tween to a different symbol, that symbol gets hijacked and actually physically becomes the earlier symbol. That’s right. You drag a symbol onto a layer that already has a Motion Tweened symbol on it, and as soon as you add Motion Tween to the new symbol – BAM! it becomes the other symbol. In fact, even if you look at that symbol in the Library, it’s been changed!

Don’t believe me? Read on…
Read the rest of this entry »

Updates Gone Bad: Adobe Acrobat 9 and Mozilla Firefox 3

Jan 9

Posted by admin in Software, Technology, Web Development | No Comments

 I don’t like wasting people’s time (what few readers I may have) with rants and raves, but I got hit in the gut twice recently by unfortunate updates.

Being the progressive guy that I am, I upgraded my Adobe Acrobat Reader software (upon ceaseless prompting by Adobe Updater) to Acrobat Reader 9. I also installed Adobe Acrobat (the full version) 8 within a short timeframe. At some point in that flurry of acrobatic upgrades, I lost my ability to display PDFs in my browser window. Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera – nada, zilch, bubkus, zeeero. Like so many other busy (lazy) computer professionals, I ignored it and did the Ctrl-click Save As… workaround.

Then today, after having been adamantly refusing to upgrade Firefox 2.0.0.19 to 3 (for a host of reasons – though it is installed on my web development testing laptop), I caught, out of the corner of my eye, Firefox unashamedly installing FF 3.0.5 without my consent. I cancelled, went to my prefs, ensured that “automatic updates” was OFF(!!) and happily went about my business. In due course I shut down Firefox, and later re-opened. To be greeted by the message “Firefox is installing updates.” And that was all there was to it. No choice in the matter – bend over this won’t hurt a bit. Of course that meant that my plugins stopped working (what would I do without Firebug??) and since then Firefox has been crashing like Amtrak in winter. Thanks.

So naturally, the next time I was trying to open up a PDF in a browser and got the friendly error message to the effect of “error – The Adobe Acrobat/Reader that is running can not be used to view PDF files in a Web Browser. Please exit Adobe Acrobat/Reader and try again.” I LOOOOOSE it. I grabbed my computer in a figure 4 headlock, deaked it out with a headfake to the GPU and slammed an uppercut right up the USB.  “Is that ‘can not be used to view PDF files in a Web Browser’ enough for ya?” I gloated.

Solutions, Tom, not problems please. This is a constructive blog.

Right. So, after reassembling my GPU and rubbing some vaseline on my USB ports, I did some research. Many complains, some very bizarrre solutions (from Adobe) involving clearing out some registry keys, everything quite suspect. The most promising option was to open the Reader Software, go to Preferences > Internet and make sure “View in browser” was turned on. It was – so I turned it off, quit the app, relaunched, turned it on and tried again. Nothing. Not even re-loading the browser solved it.

So I uninstalled, and re-installed Acrobat 8. I found a very helpful Adobe Acrobat 8 standalone installer which has worked without a hitch. So until Adobe gets their act together (I’m completely flabbergasted that their Acrobat 9 for Windows is so crippled and hasn’t been fixed yet), do yourself the favour and do not upgrade. If you have, and are experiencing the same issues, do uninstall Acrobat 9 and then install Reader 8.

Happy surfing!