In lieu of Christmas gifts, we here at Buk decided to embrace a great America commercialized holiday and send our clients and partners Valentines instead.

If you did not receive one of these little diddys, one of three things could be possible:

1. We totally blew it and forgot you

2. You are on our shit list

3. We just started hanging out and we are not on kissing terms yet

Either way, much love. josh

WebGrind is a great tool for analyzing your PHP app and finding where slow down is occurring.  As stated on the Google Code site for the project, it is a “ Xdebug profiling web frontend.”  Here’s the steps I took getting it working in MAMP.

Install xdebug (taken from debuggable):

1. Download the latest Xdebug binaries for your OS from Komodo.  They will be labeled as “PHP Remote Debugging” for Mac OS X.  When you unzip it, you’ll see the xedbug.so file.
2. Copy the xdebug.so for your PHP version to your extensions directory (/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922/xdebug.so)
3. Find your php.ini file (Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/php.ini)
4. Add the following lines to your php.ini configuration (MAMP):

[xdebug]
zend_extension=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922/xdebug.so

Enable xdebug
Note, you don’t want to do this in a production environment.  Add the following to your php.ini file:

xdebug.profiler_enable = 1

Install webgrind (from the install wiki)

1. Download webgrind
2. Extract to a directory in the web root
3. Browse pages of your site
4. View the directory webgrind lives in.

That’s it!  There is some useful additional ini settings I found in this blog post:

# Set the filenames generated by xdebug to use REQUEST_URI instead
# of the apache process number
# so all requests to the same page end up in the same file.
xdebug.profiler_output_name = cachegrind.out.%R
# Set xdebug to append data to files instead of overwriting,
# this means you can view aggregate
# function calls over multiple requests.
xdebug.profiler_append = TRUE

I’ve already found some major instances of slowdown that can be cleaned up in the application I’m testing.

The SEA office flew down to Sacramento before the holidays to meet in person as a group, plan the next year, and have fun together over 4 days.  My shoulder was (and is) out of commission (bike accident) so I missed this years ski trip to Tahoe; it sounded like everyone got along fine without me though.  Going up to Tahoe is sort of a BKWLD tradition at this point, I think this was the 4th or 5th time.   Of all the photos I took, these came out the least blurry, which is pretty sad.  If someone with more skills and a better camera has some shots, please replace mine in this post!

Happy New Year everyone, looking forward to an amazing 2010!

Amen!

From here.

SODA's Click 2009 - 10/01/2009

This past thursday (10/1/09) our creative directors, Jeff Toll and Demetre Agres and I had the pleasure of attending the Click 2009 SODA event at the Art Directors Club in NYC.  There we got to hear from amazing boutiques like Unit9 (particularly loved them), Syrup, and Poke, as well as from some of the agency juggernauts like Goodby, CP+B, JWT, and Ogilvy, all introduced and hosted by the after-hearing-him-talk-I-truly-get-why-he’s-such-a-likable-force-in-the-industry Michael Lebowitz (which I am pretty sure I learned is “lEbowitz, not lEEBowitz) from the infamous Big Spaceship.

The topic and discussion points varied from more granular subjects like “Branding with numbers” (which I found surprisingly intriguing) to more general monsters like “What is the future of entertainment”.

First off I have to say what a pleasure it is to hear from such talent in one room, on one day, and in person.  I mean Jason Zada, Lebowitz, and Mike Geiger to name a few…truly a pleasure.

Of all the nuggets of wisdom I can take away from the discussions, what is interesting to me is that despite agency head-counts, annual billings, specific focus, country of origin, or AOR vs. project-based orientation, we are all facing similar issues; digital agencies finding their autonomy from the traditional ones, an ever-changing set of tools, an even more-changing option of techniques and services we have the option to render should we decide to, and a myriad of ways we can manage the whole damn thing.  But here in-lies the beauty, though facing the same obstacles and issues, the lot of us are choosing completely different approaches to the hurdles, and its working.

We have the luxury of working in an industry that is defining itself each day, and that works for me.  After all, what are we if we are not problem solvers?  At the end of the day we are simply choosing what tool we want to solve the problem with.  So I welcome and embrace the luxury of being able to re-define, re-shape, and re-focus. What fun it is after all.

So after a wonderful day with our peers, and a couple others enjoying an amazing city with good colleagues and friends, I am glad our industry is a kid.  It has many options, and oh so much potential.  Im not sure if its the couple cups of coffee, or the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack I am listening to as I type this, but I love this kid and want what’s best for him too.  So let’s keep talking.

Art Directors Club NYC

We use Amazon S3 as an easy and cheap CDN on many projects. Here’s some interesting things I learned recently while researching how to stop direct downloading or linking to media files:

1. Any file on S3 can be turned into a torrent by adding ?torrent to the filename.  As in http://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/myfile.zip?torrent.  I read about this over here.
2. S3Stat looks like a useful tool for viewing your S3 logs.  In particularly, checking for direct linking from other sites.
3. You can make auto expiring links using S3 (documentation here).  This is the meat of what I wanted to find out.  Using the Query String Request Authentication (page 24 of the PDF) you can specify an expire time for a link.  As I take it (and we haven’t implemented this yet, so I’m not positive), you would set the read access of the file to “Authenticated Users.”  Then you would construct the URL to the file using your public AWS access key, the expire time, and then a signature that includes a hash of your request with the expire time and your private key.  So if you set the expire time to something only a few seconds after the current timestamp, that link should not be useable again.

Campaign Monitor, who we use for our mailing list, recently put up this great post about the effectiveness of banners they ran.  They provide real numbers on conversions for each of the banners and landing pages they built.  And it’s interesting to see which ads provided the greatest conversions.  So far they’ve recovered 25% of the cost.

Check it out: Promoting your product or service with banner ads – is it worth it?

I found an issue when trying to tell an instance of JW Player what to do from jQuery.  Here’s my code:

$('#broadcast_player').get(0).sendEvent('PLAY', false);

This video wasn’t stopping like it should.  I found a thread with the answer:

For Linux, add the flashvar id=player1 to match the name and id in your object code. Jeroen added the idflashvar specifically for Linux.

I did that and it worked.

http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLwalker.html

It’s pretty amazing how little visual information is needed to convey to us that a shape is “human.”  And moreover, to convey emotion.