Without a doubt, my favorite browser is Google Chrome. It’s incredibly fast, supports most HTML5 features, has an insanely fast JavaScript rendering engine and it doesn’t follow the large and bloated releases of Firefox and Internet Explorer who feel it’s better to release in “huge stages” instead of constantly releasing every 6 weeks as Google does to ensure that it’s users get the greatest features when they’re ready. In fact, Firefox are now moving to this strategy of smaller, faster releases and I really think it’s the best way to move forward in the browser market. Perhaps Microsoft might even follow suite [otherwise they'll be left behind ... again].

One little trick that you can try if you are using Google Chrome, is to tweak some of the settings to gain even greater performance. To get started simply type – “about:flags” – without the quotation marks into the Chrome omnibox and you’ll be presented with a whole range of additional options to tweak the browser performance for even greater loading speeds. To get started I recommend enabling:

1. GPU Accelerated Compositing
2. GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D [only on PC for now, sorry Mac users]
3. Web Page Prerendering

and then hitting the “Restart Now” at the bottom once you’ve enabled the settings you want.

There are a whole lot of other nifty little addons that will speed up your performance but the current release I am using 9.0.597.107 is quite stable when these 3 additions are enabled. When you then visit any of your most favorite websites you’ll notice a substantial increase in your browsing speeds. There is nothing better than moving around the web at lightening speeds on a browser that loads faster, supports the latest technologies and is consistently improved every six weeks. If you don’t use Google Chrome or your Company is still stuck on Internet Explorer – I strongly urge you to update to Google Chrome.

You’ll never look back.

Just a short and quick post for those out there that follow Phil Haack and his awesome blog – [if you don't - become a fan if you're using ASP.NET MVC - great stuff from the lead architect]. Anyway, Phil posted an article a while ago on using jqGrid with ASP.NET MVC and the solution simply hasn’t been updated to the latest libraries and has required a few updates here and there in the code.

I’ve updated the solution and made it available for download via this link. Click to download it and you’ll get:

1. jqGrid 3.8.2
2. .NET 4.0 Updates
3. VS2010
4. jQuery 1.4.4
5. jQuery UI 1.8.7

Let me know if there are any problems with it otherwise – enjoy!

Why do people do what they do ? I am reading a fascinating book at the moment that I encourage everyone to go out and read to really discover what they want to do with their lives. It’s a book by Carmine Gallo called The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success – and it’s a fantastic read. I suggest you definitely check it out. One of the people the book mentions is a person called Bill Strickland – who is the author of Make the Impossible Possible [who also, in my opinion, looks like Denzel Washington] – and has a inspiring story. After doing a bit more research about Bill, he has a quote that I think is amazing and something that everyone who reads this blog should paste up on their wall.

What’s truly awesome about both the book and Bill’s Story – is that in some sense it focuses entirely on KAH Conceputalization (at least in my opinion) – but perhaps most fundamentally – the message is simply one of doing what you love – that is, the concept of attraction. It’s amazing that the most successful people in life – and increasingly as a function of their success – are doing what they absolutely love and are passionate about it. Many people live their entire lives in a job they ‘like’ or ‘they enjoy’ but never ‘truly love’. While I completely understand that many people do this for the ‘safety’ of a job and providing for their family – unfortunately they are missing the obvious – nobody ever said that doing what you love would be easy. The truth of the matter is that doing what you love is entirely related to how much effort you are willing to put in, how much you want it to succeed and how much you are willing to do anything to ensure that your passion exceeds the odds. Every successful entrepreneur will tell you the same story – from Bill Gates, to Warren Buffet, to Steve Jobs to Bill Strickland. Money was never the end goal – simply being passionate about changing peoples lives and doing something that each of these entrepreneurs absolutely loved is consistently the message. I have read each of these entrepreneurs official and unofficial biographies and it’s always the same outcome – do what you love and you’ll always be better off in life.

I have absolutely no idea whether our company and startup will succeed – we’re almost ready to launch –  but it’s what our team absolutely loves and we’re committed to it and passionate about it. So we already have at least one building block in place – passion. The rest is entirely dependent on how much we are willing to give and how much we want it to succeed above other options in our lives. Reading the stories, following in the footsteps of thousands of other successful entrepreneurs always comes back to passion, drive and how much you are willing to give. Following a dream isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either. Many people complain of how hard life is – but the realistic and unfortunate truth is someone has done it harder, done more with less, been less fortunate from the ‘get-go’ and still become successful. Will Smith immortalized the tail of Chris Gardner in The Pursuit of Happyness – a true story about Chris who was homeless, lived many nights in a train substation toilet with his son and still managed to become a hugely successful stockbroker. Chris wanted it – more than anything in the world and despite all the odds – he achieved it. The same story is told over and over by many entrepreneurs around the world when everyone told them they would fail – and they may have failed, over and over – but persistence, passion, drive and love for what they were doing always came through in the end.

This leads to the obvious question – if you could do anything in the world tomorrow, what would it be ? Of course, the next step is to simply ask yourself why you cannot do it ? You’ll come up with 100x reasons as to why you can’t and frankly this is exactly why you are currently working in a job you ‘like’ but don’t ‘love’. Indeed, if you love your job – then you will be entirely satisfied and you will be ‘driven’ and ‘passionate’ about it – I congratulate you that you are really doing what you love. But to all those readers who don’t have this, I would suggest that achieving your dream is not about ‘liking’ something or being ‘comfortable’ – it’s about being uncomfortable, it’s about testing your limits but knowing that you are doing it because it’s what you love and what you want to do with your life. I’ve spent around 9 years studying and done many different courses with many different twists and turns – the end outcome ? I now know what I really want to do. Some would argue this has been a long journey (perhaps too long I am told) – but I’ve finally discovered what I want and discovering this now – is better than spending 30 years in career only to discover it later. You’re never too old, it’s never too late, it’s never too hard, it’s never the wrong time.

The point is that passion is infectious. If you show this passion – others will want to join you. How you communicate this passion, how you achieve this passion, the story you tell, the goals you want to achieve – this is what will draw the best people to you and around you and with you. If you want to be a musician, a professor, a teacher, a social worker, a lawyer, a doctor or any other type of career and you want this more than anything in the world – nothing will stop you. It’s been documented and shown over and over throughout time through thousands, if not millions, of people.

So it’s a new year – there isn’t anything stopping you from achieving a dream but yourself. The real question you need to ask yourself – how much do you want it ?

For those of you interested in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement – attached is a paper and some research that I conducted in respect to the agreement and the general implications that it holds in my view. I concluded most of the research right around the time the ACTA agreement was finalised – so provide your reading of it in this context. Generally, I do not think it is a worthwhile agreement to adopt for a range of reasons outlined in the paper – but perhaps, most pertinently, despite the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trades insistence that it won’t – it will have a definitive impact on our local laws when ratified. Particularly interesting, will be the Courts interpretation of ACTA – and you can rest assured that intellectual property rights holders (IPR’s) will be jumping on this agreements collective bandwagon if becomes part of Australia law.

ACTA Pre-Text

The growth of technology in the modern age and its unparalleled advance has rapidly altered the transfer of technology between countries around the world. At the core of this advance is the increasing proliferation of technological innovation and the precipitous development of digital systems which have catalyzed the rate of technology distribution across global borders. Evidently, as a corollary of this rapid technology transfer stems the overarching concern from intellectual property right (‘IPR’s’) holders about the adequate level of enforcement and protection of intellectual property in the global economy. The access and value of such knowledge is particularly relevant in developing knowledge-based economies where ‘expertise, innovation, quality and creativity are the main factors for success’. In this regard and as the socioeconomic divide between the developed and developing world closes, the efficiency and effectiveness of existing judicial mechanisms has been questioned.

The majority of such criticism stemmed from the Second Global Congress on Combating Counterfeiting and Piracy (‘GCCC’) 2005 in Lyon, France where Japan ‘proposed for a new international treaty on counterfeiting and privacy’ which was termed the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Counterfeits and Pirated Goods. Japans interest in raising the spectre of such an agreement originated from the then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi who aimed to

‘[e]stablish Japan as a nation built on a platform of intellectual property … and enhance measures such as speeding up patent examinations, reform of the justice system in the area of patents, and reinforced measures against counterfeit and pirated copies.’

Such an aim spring-boarded Japans policy considerations in the area and a new intellectual property framework was developed which lead to the establishment of the Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters.[4] The aim of this Headquarters was to spearhead intellectual property development and protection in Japan and abroad given the country’s heavy reliance on the global economic benefits of it.

Read the entire paper – here.

Well, I intended on posting every few days but clearly that went out the window across the last couple of weeks as I’ve been pretty flat out with work. Today I am proposing a new theoretical social conceptualization model that I have considered and pondered in my mind over a long period of time. I have preferred to present this as a relatively short paper for now rather than a very long blog post with the hope that readers of this paper can print it and go away and add some further thought and critical analysis to it. Best viewed in Full Screen via below or at this link.