Feedback: Spotlight should not prevent volume being ejected

While sitting here waiting to leave, I wrote this to http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

> I often find that I need to go somewhere but I'm not allowed to because my external USB drive is "in use". "Try quitting applications", says the dailog. No, it's not an application, it's "mds", part of Spotlight, that is using the drive and won't stop. (sudo /usr/sbin/lsof | grep mds) I often have to wait 20 minutes. There are no user controls. No way to stop it. No safe thing to do except wait, and be late for my appointment. At the very least, "Eject Volume" should stop mds.

Spotlight is so half-baked it's not even funny. And it's not like it finds files, or anything.

How to make Safari fast again

I got fed up with waiting 45 seconds for Safari to launch. The culprit seems to be RSS feeds. As with most Apple software, it simply doesn't scale.

I did the following:

1. Moved all my Safari RSS feeds to Google Reader, which has a superior interface anyway, using this tool <http://dcostanet.net/wordpress/2005/06/13/export-safari-rss-feeds-via-opml/>.

2. Deleted all RSS bookmarks from Safari. You can see them easily in the bookmarks page because they have an RSS icon.

3. Quit Safari and deleted ~/Library/PubSub. Yes, all of it. Safari doesn't seem to clean this up.

4. Relaunched Safari. One bounce.

Goodness knows how much CPU and bandwidth PubSubAgent was eating.

Also recommended, ClickToFlash <http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/> for two reasons:

1. It stops Flash based ads eating your CPU, bandwidth, and attention.

2. It makes YouTube better -- you can watch the movie directly.