installing flash on mac book pro

I was constantly annoyed by firefox 2.0 hanging on my otherwise sweet mac book pro. Apparently I wasn't the only one having this problem. I finally bit the bullet and uninstalled the whole thing, which involved dragging the application itself and ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox to trash, and started over. And all was well. I haven't had any hangs so far, even after installing a gazillion extensions.

Then I found out somehow the flash plugin was missing. Thankfully Adobe has a Universal Binary for Intel-based Macs for their flash installer, so I downloaded it and tried to run it, but before the install finishes I kept getting a message saying "error creating file", permission denied blah blah blah. Googling for the error message didn't come up with a solution, but permission problem seems a common thread on their feedback page.

Frustrated, I finally tried these:

1. Open up your good 'ol terminal window (I use iTerm by the way);
2. cd "/Volumes/Adobe Flash Player 9/Install Flash Player 9 UB/Contents/MacOS"
3. sudo "./Install Flash Player 9 UB"

And voila, it worked!
Why can't Adobe put this on their FAQ page? Or better yet, fix that stupid installer?!

4 GB per month photo sharing for free

My flickr pro account expired a few weeks ago. All my neatly arranged sets were gone except one. Each one of my big-ass photos were reduced to a paltry 1024x768. My thousands upon thousands of photos are cut down to 200. I guess I could have continued paying for the $24.95 per year pro account, but having recently moved to the Bay Area and saving for down payment on one of those million dollar houses, every dollar counts. So I've been looking around for a free alternative to flickr, but none of them provides the ease of use and huge storage of a flickr pro account.

Well, almost none of them. Today I saw on Techcrunch -- thanks to Google Reader, I am a profuse blog reader now -- that Zooomr now provides 4 GB per month photo upload for their pro accounts; and the best part is you can get a pro account for free if you write blogs.

That's a no-brainer. Tonight when I go home I am going to delete my flick account and upload all my photos to zooomr. Let's see how that goes.