What I Learned Yesterday-

When my brother and sister and I were all in our teens, the family dinner table became a very quiet time with one another. It wasn't an overnight switch from jovial joking to dead silence but every night we spoke a little less and finished our meals a little quicker. Our main objective: to return to our other semi-social lives outside of the family unit as soon as possible. At one point, my dad, out of desperation more than design, instructed us to go around the table and say one thing we had learned that day.

We each tried, "Nothing, I didn't learn anything" to no avail, and once one us answered then we made sure that everyone had to provide an answer. If one of us had to endure the torture of racking our brains to find some family-friendly life-lesson then everyone was going to have to suffer through it as well. Eventually though, our dissent and aggression passed and when silence set in at the table someone would interject "Okay, I learned today..." and then carry on.

Yesterday by happenstance I came upon a website called "Today, I Learned..." and the author's posts were short, sweet little tidbits of info in reference to programming, web design, and other miscellanea. The coding portions were way over my head but I loved the concept.

And as it has been plain to see I have been struggling for some time now on what I could offer on a daily basis to my readers that would have consistency and some educational merit. So I've decided to invite all my readers to pull up a chair at my family's virtual dinner table, so to speak, and partake in the discussion of daily learning. It has become my very late “New Year’s Resolution” of sorts; to consistently post every day this year, or rather for the rest of this year, "what I learned yesterday..." because more than likely I will be writing the post in the evening and then posting it the following morning. I know that some micro-bloggers have the ability to update their readers on a consistent minute-to-minute basis; unfortunately I am not one of those people.

So to conclude this is what I learned yesterday:

After having problems with my Mac and its spotlight indexing in 10.6.6, I learned how to force it to re-index through the terminal app from the above mentioned website, using the following commands:

sudo mdutil -i off /

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo mdutil -i on /

But that didn’t work. What I had to do was make all my main folders under the hard drive private, which prevents Spotlight from even working at all. Then restart my Macbook and remove one folder at a time from the privacy section and let Spotlight index just that folder. Rinse and Repeat. The order I went in was “Applications”, “Developer”, “System”, “Library”, and lastly “Users”. At the end Spotlight was fixed and that MDS process stopped skyrocketing to 99.9 % CPU usage. Problem solved.