So here’s the deal with me and partition naming (no, there’s no useful point to this blog; it’s entirely personal)…

I always split my new Macs into multiple partitions. It’s an old habit that used to be about keeping a partition wide open and unfragmented for capture. Now that I’m doing more development, it’s about having a place for multiple versions of Mac OS X, so I can test pre-releases I get through ADC, or keep an old OS X around for six months to make sure things are still hoopy (for example, I still have Panther with QuickTime 7 on one of my drives just to check for Tiger/Panther issues).

I had intended to use one of my partitions for Debian, but my stupid Samsung monitor doesn’t play nicely with option-starting if the monitor is connected via DVI, so I don’t have a good way to get out of Linux once I’ve made it my startup volume. Oops.

So, when naming partitions, it’s pretty typical to use related names. If you’ve ever admin’ed servers, you probably did the same thing: come up with a group of related names. When we went to video servers at Headline News, we called them “Tom” and “Jerry” out of fealty to the MGM library that Ted bought and which kept us housed and fed. When I was at Stanford, the crash-prone DEC timeshares were named “The Tragedies” after Shakespeare’s tragic heroes: Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet. The nicer Unix boxes were named after Shakespeare’s fair heroines — portia.stanford.edu still resolves after 20 years, though it seems not to be reachable.

On my Cube, I went with the counties of the north San Francisco Bay: Napa, Marin, and Sonoma. This is nice, except for the fact that they’re not different enough to be meaningful. I could never remember the logic by which I decided that Sonoma should be the OS X drive, Napa the OS 9 drive, and Marin the media-capture drive (now the net-shared iTunes library and Subversion repository).

On the last couple of computers, I’ve gone with naming the partitions after the female characters of the Final Fantasy games. This puts a nice block on my spending because now I can only buy new Macs as often as Square puts out new games, and FF XII is way late. The G5 is partitioned with names from Final Fantasy VII: “Aeris”, “Tifa”, “Yuffie”, and “Scarlet”, and since these are characters, they have traits that I can remember in meaningful ways. For example, Yuffie is an immature teen ninja… immature being the key concept, because that’s where I put the ADC pre-releases of new OS X builds. Another thing that’s nice about this scheme is that I use a picture of the character as the background pattern, which is an instant visual cue as to what drive I’ve booted from (and the gaming fan community is generous in cranking out fanart of the FF characters). Continuing the theme, the PowerBook is partitioned in honor of FF VIII: “Rinoa”, “Quistis”, and “Selphie”.

So, I got a new Mini the other day, for the sole purpose of doing Intel testing on my QuickTime and QuickTime for Java stuff — more and more code is turning out to have endianness issues, even in Java (eg, assigning channels for an ARGB raster). With Boot Camp, I get my Intel Mac and Windows XP in one box, so I bought the cheapest, slowest thing Apple would sell me, which has the added advantage of exposing any unrealistic hardware assumptions I might make (what, you don’t have a dual 1.8 G5 with 1.5 GB RAM?).

The mini is my ninth-and-a-half Mac, and following the scheme, I went with character names from Final Fantasy IX. But I didn’t want to burn a cool name on the Boot Camp drive because… well, c’mon, it’s Windows fercryinoutloud. Fortunately, FFIX’s initial villain, Queen Brahne, offers the ideal name for this partition. Here’s her bio from Wikipedia:

Brahne is the morbidly obese Queen of Alexandria, and adoptive mother of Garnet/Dagger. She is willing to stop at nothing to expand the Empire of Alexandria, even if it means the death of her daughter. Previously a kind ruler, her greed arising from the influence of Kuja eventually becomes her undoing when Kuja kills her using Bahamut at the lifa tree.

Morbidly obese? Obsessed with expansion? Greedy? Dies halfway through? Could there be a more appropriate name for my Windows partition? :-)