Sunday, December 6, 2009

Get started with managing Facebook App ads through OpenX

To manage your Facebook App ads through OpenX Hosted, you must have an OpenX Hosted account. If you don't already have an account, it's free to sign up.

Once you have logged into your OpenX Hosted account, follow these steps:

1. Add a website to represent your Facebook App.

Add a website


2. Add a zone. A zone represents a location on your Facebook App page where ads will display.

Add a zone


3. On the zone's Invocation Code tab, select the type "Facebook App Tag" then follow the directions to
get the demographic targeting script and the OpenX zone tag for your Facebook App ad.

zone invocation code


4. Add an advertiser.

Add an advertiser


5. Add a campaign. A campaign represents the collection of ads you will be delivering.

add a campaign


6. Add a banner. To add demographic targeting to your banner, select the desired targeting criteria on
the banner's Delivery Options tab. For your Facebook App ads, you will be able to select demographic
targeting criteria such as Age Group, Education, Gender and Relationship Status.

add banner


7. Link your banner to your zone. Go to your banner's Linked Zones tab and select the zone you created in step #2 to display your Facebook App ad.

add banner

That's all it takes to start serving Facebook App ads through OpenX.
Sign up for your free OpenX Hosted account to get started!

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That's all it takes to start serving Facebook App ads through OpenX.
Sign up for your free OpenX Hosted account to get started!

Posted via web from sdn's posterous

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Paa

Is intelligent and entertaining

The one crew member from Paa I hurried to look up on the internet, apart from the make-up artists, was the dialogue writer. Turns out, it’s director R Balki (of Cheeni Kum fame) who’s written the film’s crisp conversations.

Talking about the internet, there is a charming dialogue in the movie when 11-year-old Auro (Amitabh Bachchan) looks up an errant politician on the computer saying ‘Google se bach ke kahan jaoge’ (you can’t run away from Google).

It’s difficult then, not to fall for Auro, the possessor of a dry humour that consistently produces gems like the one above. We flashback to his mother, medical student Vidya’s story (Vidya Balan), who, after an affair with a political science student, Amol (Abhishek), gets pregnant and is disappointed when she is asked to get an abortion.

She speaks to her mother (Arundhati Naag, superb) who had brought up Vidya all alone after her husband’s demise. When plainly asked whether she wants to keep the baby or not, Vidya decides to go ahead with the pregnancy. Already wondering how she’ll bring up a child all alone, she’s shattered to know her newborn is suffering from progeria, a rare disease causing premature ageing in children.

At that moment, when you see Vidya Balan’s expressions on learning that her child is likely to have a life-span of only 13 years, you feel every bit of her anguish. All grown-up now and studying in a school, how an adolescent Auro rediscovers his Paa after 11 years forms the rest of the story.

The finest quality of the film is its refusal to coax pity out of the viewer - either for Auro or for single mother Vidya. A successful gynaecologist, Vidya is shown to provide Auro with all the comforts - from a nice car to a computer and even a play station. Together with Vidya’s mother, they form a cosy unit always good-naturedly ribbing one another. The inclusion of the Paa happens only after the interval, reminding you of Taare Zameen Par where Aamir enters the story around the middle.

You adore Amitabh Bachchan’s performance while applauding his commitment to his craft. Reportedly, it took a 60-plus Bachchan five hours to wear the prosthetic make-up for six hours of shooting, with another two hours to take it off. So truthful is this performance, you begin recognising Auro as an existing character with flesh and blood and forget you’re watching Amitabh Bachchan.

Abhishek Bachchan is also excellent as the do-gooder politician, who never agrees with his father’s (Paresh Rawal) seasoned opportunism. The story is as much Vidya’s as Auro’s and Vidya Balan is fabulous as the proud, independent single mother. Kids playing Auro’s friends, especially Pratik as his best bud, are fabulous.

In the technical department, the first mention must go to make-up artists Christien Tinsley and Dominie Till for painstakingly and expertly converting Amitabh Bachchan into Auro. Cinematography by P C Sreeram, editing by Anil Naidu and art by Sunil Babu are top-notch.

Styling, too, deserves special mention. Vidya Balan’s lovely saris are matched by a thick-strapped ‘working-woman’s’ wrist watch and subtle earrings. However, it's a little odd that the foreign-educated doctor doesn’t have any contemporary western clothes in her wardrobe. Abhishek’s clothes are delightful as is Auro’s oversized hooded shirt that he picks up for a special occasion.

Music by Illayaraja and lyrics by Swanand Kirkire make for hauntingly beautiful songs. Just for the Ittefaq song and its wonderful picturisation, this writer intends to watch the film again.

Some might fear Paa would be a depressing, melodramatic film or a shadow of 2005’s heavily emotional Black. It’s not, and neither does it have any link to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

For a couple of moments, the film does turn your eyes moist, but there are dozens where you’ll enjoy Auro’s antics. Of course, you wonder about the film’s anti-abortion stand and it’s propensity to encourage child-bearing - in a rather awkward scene, Dr Vidya tells a couple, who confess they’re too busy to have a child, that they ought to have one as life changes for the better after a baby.

The melodramatic finale, too, seems unnecessary and it appears that the director, who had so boldly shown a mother raising her child without getting married, cops out towards the end.

These are minor complaints still, in a film that holds you from the first scene to the last. R Balki outdoes himself with a film that’s intelligent, entertaining and visually arresting.

It’s indeed a pleasure presenting four stars to a film after years. You don’t want to miss this one.

Rating: Four stars

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Developer tools: what's in your box?

Hey software/web developer friends,

I've been keeping a list of the software that should come standard on our developer boxes (ya know, on the off chance Dustin and I ever get around to hiring someone), but I'm curious what tools other people are using that are sweet/useful. Here's what we've got (excluding SDKs and Unixy tools):

Windows and Mac
gvim
Firefox 3.0, Chrome 1.0, Safari 4
Firebug
FireScope [great find by Star]

Windows specific
cygwin
IE6, IE7, IE8 (is there something better than MultipleIEs for this?)
Microsoft Script Editor (for IE<8 debugging)
PuTTY
SharpKeys by RandyRants (for remapping Caps Lock)
Pixie by Nattyware (for determining the color of a pixel on the screen)
PrintScreen by Gadwin (for screenshots)
Free Extended Task Manager by Extensoft (task as in "OS process," not "project to-do")

Mac specific
Parallels (for IE testing)

Any additions? Any substitutions, cases where there's a better tool for the thing we're trying to accomplish?

Posted via web from sdn's posterous

Name Our Company (1000 dolla bounty)

NOTES OF FACEBOOK "http://www.facebook.com/rosenstein"

I'm quite serious. Dustin and I have been trying for months, and it turns out we're just not very good at naming things.

If you successfully name our company, we will give you (a) our undying gratitude and admiration and (b) $1000, if you're into that sort of thing. Here's everything you need to know:

Desirable properties


- Can unambiguously determine spelling from pronunciation
- Can unambiguously determine pronunciation from spelling
- Shorter is better
- Doesn't sound "Web2.0"-y
- .com doesn't have to be available, but can't be a well-established website/brand

Brand qualities we'd like to convey


- Solid, but not heavy
- Professional, but not stodgy
- Dependable
- Deliberate
- Powerful (as in "powerful tool", not "powerful President")
- Empowering
- Transparent / honest / straightforward
- Pervasive / invisible (like the telephone)
- Background / invisible (like the piece of paper on which something's drawn)
- Progressive
- A new way of doing business, a breath of fresh air
- Fast (as in responsive)
- Bringing people together
basically the qualities of Barack Obama

What does your company do again?


Our startup is developing an extensible productivity suite that we'll sell to organizations, and make free to consumers, to solve the group collaboration problem. We're addressing the same problem space as Microsoft Office/Exchange/Access/VBA

, but our solution is tightly integrated, focused on structured data, and built for the Web from the ground up.

Our product will ship with a set of core applications -- including project management, calendaring, discussion lists, sales CRM, customer support ticket management, and others -- as well as a development toolkit in which third-party software developers (and even power users) can add new applications and functionality seamlessly.

Though our business model is focused on enterprises and other organizations, there will also be a free consumer version that we hope will become a natural part of every day life, just as productivity tools of the past (email, spreadsheets, etc.) have made their way from the office to the home.

Posted via web from sdn's posterous