Gaming, Programming and Random Rants

Back when I first installed Linux, when I had said I had a 60GB partition to use, the advice I got was: Match your swap partiton to your RAM, use 10GB for /, and the rest for /home .

Yesterday, I started getting errors everywhere. So I turned it off and on again. When that didn’t work, I actually read the errors. “No Space Remaining”. I go “WTF, I only used about 12GB”.

So after spending a while looking at the disc usage program, I notice something. It lists / as full with 9GB/9GB used. Then I realise the problem: My / partition is full. (which is presumably also the location of /tmp , hence the errors).

Luckily my swap partition was in between my / and /home partitions, so I’ve deleted that and recreated it at the end of the disc. (which took a bloody long time, and required finding that LiveCD again).

This makes me wonder: Is Windows’ system of drive letters rather than a defined purpose (which is often a point of criticism) such a bad idea? When on Windows, my C: drive filled up, I just needed to move files en masse to my D: drive. Still slow, but doesn’t require even a reboot, much less depending on where my swap partition just so happened to be because of the order that I used when installing the system.

For those of you wondering how my programs and system data are significantly larger than my files, here’s the amount of file storage I’ve used on programming:

• Eclipse: 130 mb
• Eclipse plugins: at least 20mb, possibly as high as another 100mb
• jdk/jre: ~30mb
• Apache/PHP/MySQL: ~100mb
• Many other programming tools
• Actual programs I’m writing now: < 20mb (Older ones are stored on a network drive)

Representing partitions as drive letters is clearly wrong, because the file system is supposed to be abstracting the actual physical hard drives out of it, but representing them for one use is also wrong. How can I predict when I get a new computer that I’ll need x gb for data and y gb for programs?

An ideal OS would abstract all of this away, so you just have storage and don’t have to deal with the actual drives you have, what partition a file goes in, predicting your disk usage, which partition is on which drive etc.

Many gamers will point to some video of a game on Youtube, and go “Look at how great the graphics are, this is so much better than game . In your face 360/PS3/PC gamers (delete fanboys platform of choice). You’ve lost.”.

This always makes me laugh for a number of reasons:

1. A lot of those videos are pre-rendered. They might be the intro clip, or other movie clip, not actual gameplay.

2. Youtube isn’t exactly known for it’s high quality. Most of these videos are encoded on the default quality. If they come from the company, they might just be high quality, which is still inferior to the video quality actual gameplay on whatever game they’re saying it’s better than. To see just how bad it is, look at the pictures from this blog post.

Youtube

Standard Definition. (Image sized down, click for full size)

And remember, most games nowadays are 720p, twice the quality of the second picture, and scaled up to 1080p by your console, nearly 3 times the quality if you have a full HD telly.