MacBook upgrade

Posted on November 28, 2010 by spgennard

My home laptop is my beloved black macbook which has a reasonable Core Duo 2.2 ghz but unfortunately the hard drive is getting a bit full due using as my digital photo album…

After a bit of research I decided to replace the 250gb drive with a new shinny 500gb from Seagate.

Preparation

After receiving the drive I needed to clone the drive to new drive, which is pretty straight forward if you have a “SATA/IDE Adapter Kit with Power Adapter for a 2.5 drive” and “Carbon Copy Cloner”.

After cloning the drive you can checkout the drive by booting off the external drive to see if everything is as you expected (press right alt on bootup)… Note: cloning the drive too hours… so perhaps leave it overnight..

Installing the drive

Then you can follow apple’s own instructions, which are kindly documented below, though my drive housing required the use of my trusty torx security drivers bits because it had one of those security screws….. thanks apple.. 🙂 Ohh.. you might want to leave your macbook turned off for a while to ensure it is cool as the drive is a snug fit.

Anyway, the outcome is I have a larger, faster drive and zipper little macbook… it feels quite nice… why didn’t I do it earlier…

References

  • Apple’s drive replacement instructions
  • Seagate ST9500420AS, 500GB Mobile SATA Momentus, 7200RPM 16MB Cache
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    Attachmate acquires Novell for $2.2 billion

    Posted on November 23, 2010 by spgennard

    Over the last decade I have gained quite a lot of respect for Novell mainly due to their SUSE Linux platform and Mono.

    Strangely one of the companies involved in the acquisition is “Golden Gate” from San Fran, looks like it is the same company that also help us “Micro Focus” become liberated from Merant back in late 2001… if it is then Novell… sorry “Attachmate” have a really good chance.. Gosh.. its a small world..

    I really hope that their fortune changes under the new leadership of Attachmate… anyway good luck old Novell..

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20023535-264.html
    http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/758004/000119312510265964/d8k.htm
    http://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/6732038669340672#

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    Programming languages on the rise: Cobol

    Posted on November 13, 2010 by spgennard

    Although the article/quote below is so true….

    Programming languages on the rise: Cobol

    It may not be fair to call Cobol a niche language as it was once the dominant language in the enterprise. Grace Murray Hopper, famous for finding the first bug in the early mainframes, helped create the language in 1959 and it’s been enhanced hundreds of times since. Cobol jockeys today get to play with object-oriented extensions, self-modifying code, and practically every other gimmick.

    That never earned it much respect in some circles. Or as famous academic Edsger Dijkstra put it: “The use of Cobol cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” The folks in mainframe shops everywhere ignored this note and soldiered on. IBM calls one of the latest releases “Enterprise Cobol 4.2,” but it could as easily be numbered 147.2 or maybe even 588.3. Cobol programmers like the syntax that’s more like a natural language with actual nouns and verbs that form clauses and sentences — a technique that might call Ruby to mind.

    While fewer schools are teaching new programmers Cobol, the language is far from dying, with many corporations continuing to invest in their Cobol stacks. A recent search of Dice.com showed 580 jobs mentioning Cobol and 1,070 mentioning Ruby. The bulk of the jobs seemed to involve counting money (“asset management”) and counting doctor’s visits (“Health IT”). While these are some of the same areas that first adopted computers for back-office processing, the work still needs to be done.

    Versions of the languages run on JVMs and .Net virtual machines making it possible to migrate code stacks away from mainframes to Linux boxes. Programmers who want to use a more modern IDE can search for plug-ins to Eclipse, a project that is gaining new support.

    http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9192822/7_programming_languages_on_the_rise?taxonomyName=Applications&taxonomyId=18

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    Java… does it have a future? Well not for me..

    Posted on October 22, 2010 by spgennard

    As someone who has used Java for my own development needs for years, I find it sad the Java platform appears to be falling apart or at the very least getting some bad press.

    Lets consider the recent events, we have Oracle flexing it muscles and suing google over it use of Java on its android platform, IBM moving over to OpenJDK which does not help the chances of Apache Harmony ever getting license. Apple is dropping Java on the desktop… a loads of security flaws… The JCP process seems to failing.. which is a shame since at one time I was part of the JCP process when I worked in the J2EE connector group and the people I worked with where very good and dedicated to doing the best for the platform.

    Come on Java get your act together…. or you will start to use customers… starting with me…

    I think Java has lost it’s excitement for me, so I been on my own personal quest to migrate my own tools, classes into .Net… after all its going somewhere…

    I have nearly complete my own migration.. using a combination of ikvm, reflector and bit a of patience.. so far it has worked quite well… the upside is I really like mondevelop over eclipse.. it just feels more friendly and yes I do understand eclipse has a lot more powerful but I’m just a developer working on my home time.. I just don’t need the baggage that eclipse or java brings… for work use perhaps… but for home… forget it.

    Next stop the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, WII, Xbox and Android using mono… I might even have a fiddle with Windows phone 7 after all its .Net.. now what language should I use… ahh it doesn’t matter… its .Net.. ummm nice…

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    SQLCLR – Drop Assembly + Dependancies

    Posted on October 7, 2010 by spgennard

    Recently I have had the pleasure of working on SQL Server 2008 R2 using the SQLCLR support.

    Which I must admit it is quite nice to use, though a couple of things have anoyed me while using… one of which is the user of “DROP ASSEMBLY” and its dependancies…. normally this is not a huge problem but when you are write tests, it is good practice to remove/drop everything before deploying.

    Being the sort of person that hates doing repetitively, I thought I would do a quick proc…. so let me introduce you to ‘MegaDrop’… yeah… its a rubbish name and the code is not elegant but it gets the job done..

    Enjoy…

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    Visual COBOL 2010 R3

    Posted on September 22, 2010 by spgennard

    For the last couple of months I have been working on next release which is cunningly name:

    Visual COBOL 2010 R3

    Which is surprising since the previous was called Visual COBOL 2010 R2.

    If you are using any of products in the PC and want to get a sneaky look at the future of COBOL then please apply for our beta program..

    http://www.microfocus.com/promotions/wwtevcbp0110/default.aspx?page=form

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    Good News!

    Posted on September 21, 2010 by spgennard

    I just purchased a look online and got the crappiest message in the world… thanks Amazon!

    Good News! You saved £0.00 on your purchase

    Kindle edition prices differ by country. The price for this Kindle edition is different from the price we originally displayed. This is because you were not signed in when you purchased this item. Since the price in your country was lower than the price originally displayed, we went ahead and completed your purchase.

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    Extruding Light Painting Out Of iPads

    Posted on September 19, 2010 by spgennard

    Maria has a new iPad… perhaps I should pinch it and have some fun with it.. just like these chaps have…

    Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

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    UK Windows Azure Online Conference–8th October

    Posted on September 16, 2010 by spgennard

    As someone who is very interested in Windows Azure, I would like to draw your attention to a online conference being run Microsoft…

    An online conference: “Microsoft Online Cloud Conference: the TechDays team goes online” has had a date change. In my first post about the conference, I said it was running on the 20th September. Well, the registration site was only created this morning and so to give people enough notice of the registration, the date has been changed. It is now running on the 8th October.

    Here are the registration details:

    Event ID: 1032459728

    Language(s): English.
    Product(s):
    Windows Azure.

    Duration: 300 Minutes
    Date/TIme:
    08 October 2010 09:30 GMT, London
    Registration page here.

    reference: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/plankytronixx/archive/2010/09/13/uk-windows-azure-online-conference-date-change-now-8th-october.aspx

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    Posted on August 22, 2010 by spgennard

    Last week I replied to a post about exceptions, it made me think those programming .Net daily take for granted the etiquette of using Exceptions. So I thought I would share some of my thoughts… well it is a sort of a rules’ish list.

    • Exceptions can be expensive, so avoid using them for normal conditions
    • Only catch the exceptions you can handle
    • Don’t hide/swallow exceptions
    • Don’t catch System.Exception as will also catch unmanaged exceptions such as System.Runtime.InteropServices.SEHException
    • Consider using your own custom exceptions or derive them from similar ones
    • Remember inner exceptions when processing an exception
    • Use the Exception suffix on your custom exception
    • Consider using Microsoft’s StyleCop to point out common issues
    • Avoid using System.ApplicationException if you want to use the code in the Silverlight CLR
    • Remember to serialize your own exception types
    • Use xml comment docs for the exceptions a method raises… it helps intellisense..

    I suspect I might have missed something.. so feel free to comment..

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