OSX Spotlight Hogs CPU

For the past couple of weeks, the fan on my PowerBook would just start spinning like crazy out of the blue. Checking the CPU usage didns’t really yield any satisfactory results. But I finally found the culprit — Spotlight.

According to Many Ayromlou, sometimes Spotlight does hog the CPU, most likely when it’s trying to index corrupted metadata. So I applied the fix suggested by the site:

1) Using the mdutil command-line utility in Terminal, turn off indexing for each of your drives. example:

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$ sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

2) Then use mdutil to remove the indexes from each drive

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$ sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

3) Physically remove the .Spotlight directories from the root of each drive.

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$ cd /
$ sudo rm -fr .Spotlight-V100

(do the same for your second or third drive) BE CAREFUL WITH THAT RM COMMAND! One typo could ruin your day.

4) Use mdutil again to turn indexing back on for each drive

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$ sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/<i>your_hard_drive_name</i>

5) Spotlight will now re-index all drives and should behave in a normal fashion. (No longer uses 60%-80% of your CPU)

As Spotlight tried to re-index my entire hard drive again, I snapped this shot…
Spotlight indexing

Even though it estimated 10+ hours to index all of 23GB of files on my hard drive, the actual time it took to index everything was more like 2 hours — a far more acceptable time.

All this was done while I was trying to feed Bryan, change his diaper, check my email, read the online forums from SCAD eLearning, browse through the news and send a homework-related mass email.

One More Try

Ever since my entry on the U.S. Green Card Lottery, my consciousness has been bugging me to submit the application. The fact that it’s now an online process makes everything much easier. This must have been our third or fourth year trying to apply for the lottery. Chee-hoi graciously let us use his home address for mailing purposes. I often wonder if one of us actually won the lottery only to have moved and not received the notice. Some official documents, I suspect the U.S. Green Card Lottery notice is one of them, are required to be returned even if the receipient requested mail forwarding.

Green Card Lottery submission

And Still More eBooks

Earlier, I wrote about a project that’s set out to digitize books in the public domain. The Open Library Project is working on doing just that as well. Google is also working on Google Print in an effort to digitize all known human knowledge. Yahoo and Microsoft, again late to the party, is playing catch up by leveraging the Open Library Project. It’s always fun to see for-profit enterprises hiding behind non-profit efforts only to find ways to make profit out of the venture later. But that’s not to say what Google is doing is all for the good of mankind either. They’ll probably find ways to stick unsuspecting ads in the reading of “Declaration of Independence“.

News.com has a facinating article about the whole war on digitizing the human knowledge.

Another project referred to in the article worth mentioning again is LibriVox, an open source project that is working on free audio books. With so many open source projects going on, it seems like the world is moving towards a StarTrek Economy where things are not driven by money, but the common good of all beings. Sounds like a socialist movement to me.

Blog Spammers

Boy, was I glad that I turned on the spam moderation feature that came with WordPress earlier this month. A couple of other morons kept posting more spam links to their sites. When I went to the WordPress control panel to see if any “potential” spam comments were awaiting for moderation, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw “96”. God damn it, spammers.

Blog Spammers

Google Humor

Google has been serving ads in its free Gmail service (2.5GB+ free space and counting). Not too long ago, Google started experimenting running short clips of news on top of the messages, with which I assume is going to be another way for revenue in the future.

I was deleting spam messages in my Gmail account when I noticed that the clips feature links to various recipes instead of news. A bit of Google humor there…

Google humor

Working Father

No, I usually don’t let Bryan sleep on my shoulder while I work. I was just holding on to him while Grace was getting ready to give Bryan his formula. But if any image can sum up the tight shifts Grace and I run on with Bryan, this is it. Sometimes I rock Bryan to sleep while fumbling to read the required reading for class. And when Bryan refuses to talk to his buddies on the mobile, no worries, I have excelled in the skill of one-hand typing — an artistry all computer using fathers must master.

Click to get a better look…
Bryan sleeping on my shoulder