If you’re a Mac OS X user using services like Justin.TV, Ustream, Stickam, etc to stream video online, you could be burning your machine without even being aware of it. There is a nasty bug in Adobe Flash Player 9 for Mac OS X which makes your CPU go crazy.

I discovered this while testing various online video streaming services that use the Adobe Flash Player. I observed my CPU quickly crank up anytime I started to stream content for all the services I tried, so it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t an issue with the service provider.

Probing further, I realized this problem didn’t affect my Windows and Linux boxes: obviously Mac OS X and Flash 9 (the version of flash I was using) don’t get along that well when streaming.

Interestingly, the bug seem to affect only the audio: disabling the audio (while streaming video) brought the CPU usage to normal level, while disabling the video (with audio only streaming) shot the CPU usage right backup gain.

There is no fix for this issue yet, but here is a simple way to go around the problem: simply upgrade your version of Adobe Flash Player to the latest version, Flash 10.

But keep in mind that Adobe Flash Player Flash 10 is still a beta software and is potentially unstable. That said, I’ve been running it continuously for more than 24 hours, and have not had any issues with it. Yet. Within this period, I’ve had both Safari and Firefox crash two or three times each

Here’s what to do to get Adobe Flash Player 10 running on your machine …

First, head over to CNET’s Version Tracker website and download the latest version of Flash 10. As of this writing, he latest version available for download was 10.0.1.218.

Note that Adobe requires that you uninstall any prior installed versions of Flash Player before you install the version 10 beta! You’ll find the link to download the Adobe Flash Player Uninstaller from the Version Tracker website.

Hope this solves your CPU overload issues while streaming audio content with Adobe Flash Player on Mac OS X. If you have any question about this, don’t hesitate to ask: I’m here for you. Leave a comment, or come over to the Chat Room for a live conversation.

For most of yesterday, besides meeting a couple of really interesting people, I was flirting around with my new found love - my new Apple MacBook. So far things have been surprisingly easy-going between the two of us.

The biggest issue I’m grappling with now is how to quickly UN-LEARN my PC habits accumulated over the years. And I think I’m doing such a great job at that, being being the nerd I am. Here are some of the surprises I’ve been dealing with:

Unboxing and Plugging: After I unboxed the baby and inspected everything inside the box, I took the beautiful power adapter and looked all round the computer searching for where to plug it in. Before I could think “this must be it”, I felt this pull, and BAM! - the thing plugged itself in! No kidding, the damn connector plugged itself into the computer! At this point I started thinking: this Apple thing must be damn good — I’ve never been treated like an idiot like this before (get the gist?).

Anyway, I pushed the power button to start the baby. After a few clicks I was up and running with my user account, and the baby politely asked for my permission to connect to the WiFi in the room.

But it seemed like something was missing. Where is the right mouse button? Actually Macs have “right-click” functionality … except there’s no right mouse button — there’s just one mouse button! The “right-click” menu is, you go CTRL+Click. Apple must have a design philosophy behind this, but I’ve not had made time to read on this yet. Trouble is, I keep clicking on the right side of the single button and waiting for something to happen.

The Control (Win) / Command (Mac) thingy: Back in the PC environment, many keyboard commands and shortcuts are done with the control key plus some other characters (eg. CTRL+A - for select all, CTRL+C - to copy, CTRL+P - to Print, etc). There’s something similar in the world of Macs too, except this is the COMMAND key. But here’s the thing: There’s CONTROL key in addition to this COMMAND key, and the Command key is in the wrong position :-). So as you’ll expect, I keep hitting FUNCTION+something, and always getting the wrong results.

Installing & Uninstalling Applications: I’m yet to read on the RIGHT way to install applications. Sure, I’ve installed a bunch of applications already, but it seemed so easy that… I’m left thinking… there has to be something else I’m not doing. How can Apple take me to be such an idiot that they’d make things so easy to do round here?

It’s already Sunday morning, and I’ve not had any sleep within the past 48 hours. So I’m off to catch some sleep now. More love stories tomorrow.