Being a musician myself, I know it’s not 100% kosher to take copyrighted material and slab it onto a little YouTube action. Still, given the high-scale rampant copyright violation constantly taking place on YouTube, I hardly expected to have my little video muted by the powers that be.

To put this into perspective, my video has 60 odd views. It contains no hidden advertisements or agenda. I know this is YouTube trying to cover its ass, but I think this is going a bit too far.

(WMG is Warner Music Group.)

I decided to do a search for “Tree Hugger” on YouTube. (Note that this was not the name of my video.) So without further ado (deep breath):

• Tree Hugger by Antsy Pants and Kimya Dawson (has over 80,000 views)
• tree hugger by antsy pants (entire song for the purpose of just posting the entire song. over 900 views)
• Tree hugger by antsy pants (over 133,000 views)
• For Kimya. (and Juno) (almost 3,000 views)
• Tree Hugger (over 500 views. I like this one.)
• treehugger (over 500 views)
• tree hugger

The list goes on. Just do a simple search on YouTube for “Juno Tree Hugger” or similar. There are something like 70 listed based on that search. By the way, I did not tattle on (“Flag”) any of these people.

I don’t really see this as an issue of the music industry not “getting” the internet. I agree that artists need be compensated for their work. My problem here is that this is either a bad case of micromanagement, or (worse!) that one of the family members and friends to which I sent my video tattled on me.

That being said, I’ve recently run into an extremely annoying bug which seems to so far be without a fix. About 70% of the time I try to download a file with Firefox the download hangs at 100%, or a “a few seconds remaining”. This has been happening for about one week now and is, as mentioned, very irritating.

I’m not really willing to go without NoScript, though that might be a possible solution. I have, however, found a temporary work-around. While downloading the file, it is split into the file itself and a “.part” file. In the instance I’ve described, the download will stop at 100% and the “.part” file will contain all of the data, whereas the file itself is empty.

The trick is to not cancel the download, as that will automatically delete the file and the “.part” file. Instead, firsty try to pause the download and then restart it. If that doesn’t work, delete the “file” from wherever you have Firefox download stuff and then rename the “.part” file as the real file. OS X will ask you if you’re sure you “really” want to do this, as seen below.

Do it. In the picture above it’s an .rar file, but it doesn’t matter.

I’ll give you an example. Say I’ve tried to download a file named “firsteps.avi” and the download ends at 100% without ever completing. On my computer I have Firefox download things to /Downloads/Firefox. (You can find out where Firefox saves your stuff by going to the Firefox Main Preferences.) So I navigate there and see a file name “firststeps.avi” and “firsteps.avi.part”. The .part file contains all the data, but neither will work. To fix this, delete “firsteps.avi” and rename “firsteps.part.avi” to “firsteps.avi”. (To rename the file press Return when the file is selected or ctrl-click the file.)

I hope there is a real fix for this soon, but I hope the work-around I found will help a few people.

Huh? Other companies ask you to voluntarily join a mailing list or ask you to register, but SmithMicro decides it needs to hide on your computer and access your keychain. I also still don’t get why they need to access my keychain to send me email.

You can get rid of this problem by deleting schedulermailer. If you choose to update any of their software or install new softare from them, it will reinstall schedulermailer. Hard to believe, but true.

Good news is also at hand. Through this annoying recurrent warning at startup, it came to my attention that I have Spring Cleaning (another piece of shi…, I mean Smith Micro Software) installed on my computer. I faintly remember trying to use it once and then giving up. Alas, schedulermailer reminded me that I still had some garbage software from SmithMicro on my computer to trash. So, in a strange way, I guess I can thank schedulermailer.

Since we’re talking Smith Micro here, uninstalling Spring Cleaning was also a bit tedious. You have to keep the initial program installation file, which I had long since trashed. I mean, who keeps all their install files? Alas, I had to download the stupid demo of their product, so I could trash their crappy product. My computer should now be free of their software, and that’s a damn good thing.

Much to my amazement, upon reboot I saw the prohibitory sign and the computer would not load the OS X operating system. I was shocked. This had never happened with Leopard, the latest and greatest OS X incarnation. It had been so long since I had OS X troubles, that I had to look up the manual to search for keypad combinations to reboot PRAM, enter Safe mode, etc.

I also decided to check online to see if this was a known issue. This is a new program and I’m on the latest system on a relatively new MacBook, so I can’t imagine I’m on an untested system. I wish I had checked it out on Version Tracker before installing it, because it gets reamed. Normally, I try out all kinds of software without checking up on it. If I like it, I like it. I wasn’t expecting to stumble upon a program which killed my computer.

So there I was booted in to XP (which I only do if absolutely necessary), fretting having to reinstall my OS. All because of one crappy program. A few hours later, after repairing permissions and my hard disk with the Leopard Install DVD, booting up in Safe Mode, and uninstalling Internet Cleanup 5.0 (which involves downloading two special programs from their website) I was able to use my computer again.

I promised them via email to tell everyone I know to avoid their garbage software. Their response: “Thank you for your comments and suggestions. I will forward them to the parties involved for further review.” Right, not too satisfying.