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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Recently I’d been having hardware issues with my Mac which resulted in quite a few hard shutdowns for the machine. Once I got up and running I found to my surprise that I’d managed to lose all of my Safari windows and tabs of which I had in abundance. This was rather distressing as I have far too much research on topics open at any given time for anything from stream processing systems to certificate authorities to research on containerisation to creating grids in AngularJS. Suffice to say I wasn’t excited at the prospect of losing that information.

A quick Google search gave me a bit of hope. There was an article on Mac OS X hints about “Safari loses all your open tabs: recover using Time Machine“. It suggests using a tab backup extension but failing that you can recover it from Time Machine. I have Time Machine backups so this one was easy.

The steps to get this sorted were:

• Stop Safari.
• Connect to Time Machine backup.
• Look for ~/Library/Safari/LastSession.plist in the Time Machine backup (if you press “SHIFT+APPLE+G” and then paste that address, Finder will take you directly to the file).
• Restart Safari and go “History” -> “Reopen All Windows From Last Session”

Once I did that all of my windows and tabs were restored! As an aside I got curious to see what was in the file and if you are curious too there are a few ways to open up a plist file like this one.

So recently my NAB account popped up a little option to “review” my account and put it on the website. I was invited to review my “NAB Classic Banking” account but I got an email back saying that it was rejected for the following reasons:

• Your review contained a reference to a customer service interaction that is not specifically related to the NAB product under review.
• Your review contained content that was inappropriate or unrelated to the product or service you reviewed.

They have a whole heap of review guidelines so I figure if that’s the reasons it’s not been published the other reasons are likely not why they’re not going to publish it.

So I figure if NAB won’t publish it, I’ll publish it myself for the world to see and make up their own mind. Perhaps “customer service” isn’t something they feel is related to their product. Or perhaps reviewing the internet banking bundled with their product wasn’t what they were expecting and wish to exclude internet banking as a product that isn’t a part of the product they offer. Confusing! Onwards to the review!
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So I don’t have access to my old Huawei modem with my new Mountain Lion box however some comments on my earlier article indicate that the same steps that go Huawei Modems working on Mac OS X Lion also work for Mountain Lion as well. I’ve updated the earlier post title to reflect this and put an update there. Very cool however that it does appear to mostly work.

Building on my previous post about knowledge, understanding and complex reasoning I’d like to present a practical example of how taking basic knowledge and piecing information together to form understanding helps to resolve problems. And how building understanding of multiple connected areas allows for complex reasoning and complex problem solving.
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One of the concepts that has perhaps stuck with me most from high school is the differential between knowledge, understanding and complex reasoning. It is perhaps the piece that stood out for me from high school maths and it really was the composition of the exam. However I feel it’s a valuable distinction to make and helps guide that learning process. Essentially the three form a pyramid with knowledge on the bottom, understanding in the middle and complex reasoning forming the capstone. The exams were functionally composed of these three sections: knowledge, understanding and complex reasoning. Each tested different aspects of learning the topic and appeared proportionally to where they existed on the pyramid.
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For the most part I’m usually happy with NAB Internet Banking. They have a reasonably nice web interface and it also scales down reasonably well onto a mobile device. Functionality wise it has a lot of capabilities including some I wished Wells Fargo had (international transfer being the primary one) and I’m yet to find myself wanting from it. However there are some quirks and it seems just recently, I hit all of them.
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Today Apple announced their plan on changing the way the textbook industry works. To achieve this they’ve released a new tool called “iBooks Author” which provides a WYSIWYG interface to building ePUB files. Essentially the rub is that while you can use it to build content and you can give it away for free in any of the formats you want, if you want to sell it you have to use the iBookstore. But let’s take a look back at the product for a second.
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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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Once upon a time I was a happy Telstra customer. I had switched to Telstra from Optus after the release of the iPhone4 having realised that I was paying Optus the same amount of money as Telstra was charging to effectively get the same level of service, perhaps even a little less from Optus than what Telstra offered.
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