Graceful failure

I had the equivalent of a serious crash on my TiBook yesterday.

I ran out of disk space on the boot volume during a copy (and I honestly don't know where the last couple gigs went during the previous week or two). Everything began acting flaky, so I started poking around. I tried to kill an application and it complained of the disk being full.

Hmmm.

Running out of disk space on the boot volume under MacOS X is a bad thing. Not that anything will tell you until it's far too late. I completed the process of shutting down this and that with disk full errors popping up left and right as I killed off everything useless I could find (which wasn't much). I finally logged out and given the circumstances I restarted (it had been a couple months).

All the Apple applications (Finder, Dock, iPhoto, others) had an interesting failure mode. They completely trashed the existing preference settings rather than leave along the settings on disk which did work fine.

EyeTV also went bonkers and reset itself.

Stupid.