Firefox OS X bookmarks and History

So, a big problem, but not really that big. But when you load firefox in OS X 10.5 on an active directory account firefox cannot save any preferences including bookmarks and history. But I think these are very necessary for everyday browsing.

I looked up the problem and found lots of complaints but no answers! The earliest complaint was in 2008, and 2 years on no fix.


http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/71305

I personnally tried re-directing lots of folders from the library to the local hard drive, because at the end of the day it's a permissions issues os x has with active directory servers. Folders I've tried to re-direct are:

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox
~/Library/Mozilla
~/Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox
~/Library/Caches

Some success, but only per session. If you re-direct Firefox and Mozilla folders it lets you bookmark and saves history. But on closing and re-opening firefox all is lost. It must save temporarily in the caches folder and not be able to move it to another? Doesn't quite make sense.

Oh well, I shall spend some more time on it.

Safari 5 crashing on network accounts in 10.5.8

Well, thought I'd upgrade to Safari 5 because I love Safari. First off I had to update to 10.5.8. Then I discovered Safari wouldn't even load! I had to revert to Firefox which has problems with active directory and doesn't save history or bookmarks!

Finally got fed up with Firefox and found the solution in an Apple forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2461496&tstart=75

Specifically - defaults write com.apple.Safari WebIconDatabaseEnabled -bool NO

Problem solved!!

Gradient Masks in Flash

So I wanted to create some focal blur in flash using the same technique that I would use in Photoshop. i.e. duplicate the image, blur the top layer and mask it off with a radial gradient.

Flash utilises layers and blur so I thought this would be easy. Unfortunately after trying it didn't work! It just masked off the box with the gradient mask in it. Doh!

After some reading it turns out you need to put one line of action script in for this to work. So, say I have two objects, a gradient and a box (named as their instance names and as the layer names as well. I'm not sure which name it uses?). I first applied the mask, then made a new layer and put a line of actionscript which said:

box.mask = gradient;

Maybe you need to make the layer the mask in the UI, i'm not sure. But fiddle a bit and it should work.

Found most of the solution on this page - http://active.tutsplus.com/tutorials/effects/make-your-flash-logo-bling-with-alpha-gradient-masking/

Go to the section with the gradient thing quite a ways' down.