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
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#
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
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…