We Love Obscure Problems

So, today I woke up with the aim of getting down to some work. I've been holding off as long as possible in the hope that someone I'm working with would send me his work before I start so I can make sure we're going in the same direction, but with the deadline looming (less than 3 months away now), I thought it was probably time to just get started.

So, up at 8.10, scared Laura by waving at her, had a shower, had breakfast, greeted the gas man and pointed him at the central heating that had gone wrong again, and upstairs I went to the computer to begin work.

Having completed the extensive planning stage over Christmas (2 sheets of A4), I opened up Flash and got started writing my ActionScript library. Testing my movie, it didn't work.

Strange, I thought. I am a coding god, things I write do not have errors.

I created several test movies to try to figure out what was happening, and eventually tracked it down to... saving. Well, publishing to be precise - when I published a movie (to test or eventually to finish), the result would be mangled beyond the SWF player's recognition and it would show me a pretty white box. Of course, it worked fine on my local machine, it was only when I tried to publish onto my file server via Samba that it caused a problem. So, I had cut it down to a problem with Macromedia Flash 2002 (version 6) and Debian stable's version of Samba, version 2.2.3a.

The next step, as usual, was Google. Google will save me, right?

You know you're in trouble when your Google search about a problem concerning a Windows program and a Linux daemon comes up with 64 results, and number 21 is a RISC OS products directory...

I found many e-mails to various mailing lists and newsgroups from people in a similar situation as me, but all of their problems were unresolved. Someone said that it worked when you unticked the 'compress movie' option in publishing settings, but that's not a real solution. Eventually (3 hours later) I found the most relevent sentence of the morning in the middle of a post in Google Groups - "Macromedia Flash 2002 does not work with Samba 2.2.3a". Helpful.

In a last-ditch attempt to solve my problem, I hit backports for a newer version of Samba, and upgraded to 3.0.10, and now as quickly as the problem arose, it has gone. I can now publish my files with reckless abandon and they all run as smoothly as a poor analogy slides on its knees through the corridors of time.

I still have not found out why it did not work, and I doubt I ever will. For now, I will settle with the restored feeling of Flashy goodness flowing through my veins and return to my work, leaving you, the humble internet, with a record of my latest journey through the land of problem obscurity, in the hope that my adventure can eventually help someone else in a similar position. Come on, Google, re-index my page.

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