I was recently browing the MacRumors forum thread on the ProtonVPN app update. Inside it was a question on if Apple has a monopoly in the app market that needs to be unlocked. The question is the balance and at which point is a company like Apple compelled to do something for the greater interest of consumers.

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For the longest time I’ve used an AirPort Extreme as my gateway router. When I moved to the US, I purchased an Airport Extreme 5th Generation and it worked well. It tied in with a Mac Mini Server I purchased at the time and the Mac OS X Server application integrated nicely with the device to handle port forwarding. I also set up Cacti in a Linux VM to monitor this device over SNMP and that worked reasonably well. Then Apple redesigned the AirPort Utility to become a much simpler interface. A lot of the settings and control that used to be there disappeared with the version 6 release. AirPort Utility 5.6 provided extra details like logs and a list of wireless clients with their relative connection strength. For a while I continued on using Airport Utility 5.6 with various levels of hacks to keep it working. Somewhere along the line I also ended up picking up a 6th Generation Airport Extreme to play with the 802.11ac support and found that it lacked many of the features like SNMP that the 5th generation supported. In a recent move I ended up coming across the 6th generation first, unpacked it and set it up as my main gateway but was disappointed by the lack of introspection into the device which put me on the path of looking at pfSense.
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Another post that floated through my Facebook feed was a Forbes article on employees who stay in companies longer than two years get paid 50% less. These are always interesting because I’ve seen everything posted in this article including the too many jobs too soon. If you are in an industry in demand then that gives you flexibility though not everyone has that flexibility. Silicon Valley has a lot of competition for everything so it‘s likely a bad example more broadly. For example I wouldn’t expect a teacher to be able to make the same sort of beneficial changes. Which makes me wonder for the future of many of these jobs: if there isn’t upwards pressure on wages then it’s likely they’re stagnant or decreasing.

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A while back a posting from the Singapore Business Times entitled “Start-ups risk ‘going astray’ in two scenarios” came into my Facebook stream. I commented with the following:

Governments are rarely good at leading investment in these spaces. If you look at the story behind Silicon Valley, it’s pure luck. A bunch of brilliant people got stranded in the south bay and then went on to build lots of iconic companies from a single very profitable company. These people also paid it forward to the next round of start ups that they felt would be successful.

The reply that I got suggested that Silicon Valley wasn’t luck and it wasn’t lead by government. The reply implored me to review the Wikipedia page stating it was very good. So I did just that and here is that analysis in addition to some insight from a report on How Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley.

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The other day I created a bundle for Sequel Pro that exports a series of rows in DB Unit format compatible with PHPUnit. This means that creating test data can be easy when you have existing data. Sequel Pro is a great extensible MySQL tool for Mac OS X and this bundle makes use of one of those extension points.
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