trying to do too many things with one computer

I ran into some issues this weekend that made me ask myself, "Am I trying to do too many things with one computer?". The disk on my MacBook got full, and somehow using fetchmail and postfix to flush my inbox made bounce messages go out to everybody in my organization from whom I was not able to store mail. Hooray. Then the NetBeans IDE that I use to do mobile java development for my hobby project, talkLock, decided that since the disk was full, it should explode. Unfortunately deleting some files did not fix it. Then I remembered that since I use home folder encryption, I have to log out for my encrypted are to get shrunk. That didn't fix it either, it didn't complain, but any disk write operations zombied out. A reboot didn't fix it either.

So the next logical step would be to uninstall and reinstall the IDE. But I quit using Windows to avoid stupid crap like this, frankly. If I was using vi and gcc it wouldn't care that at one point the disk was full.

Maybe trying to use one computer to do work like logging in via xterms, running heavy java mail clients, watch movies, listen to music, develop hobby projects, browse the web, edit spreadsheets and documents, play games, etcetera is all too much to expect from an end user desktop system.

Or maybe I should expect postfix to react like that (in UNIX land you would want a mail server with a full disk to fail noisily), and the only real problem is that no one at NetBeans bothered to test what happens when your hard drive gets full.

Of course if you have a few computers then you have the issues with synching things up, and of course you cannot bring clipboard items over from one to another while working.

Or maybe I just need more rest :) One of my tools that I learned in counseling is HALT. Whatever you're thinking about when you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired, stop thinking, halt. Take care of your hunger, anger, loneliness, or sleepiness, then you will be clear to deal with things.

Regardless I packed up the Mac and wrote this post on my Linux laptop. Maybe tomorrow I'll try and fix Netbeans on the Mac.

But I just did a new fix in talkLock so I want to test it! Hopefully it'll work fine on the Linux machine.