Chris Taggart » General

2012 Resolutions

Chris — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:20:37 +0000

I don’t normally make New Years resolutions, but this year, I’m going to set a few goals and see how I do. I’m so far off to a really good start with most of these.

Move active projects to a Continuous Deployment system with Jenkins and write more unit tests.
Increase my use of actionable metrics with Mixpanel, Optimizely, and Adwords.
Build at least one really cool Arduino project.
Launch Robot Rescue Headquarters.
Go to more django-ottawa meetups.
Update this site more often.

Have other ideas, want to do the same, or just have general words of encouragement?

What are your 2012 personal development goals?

Merging forms from django-formwizard

Chris — Mon, 02 May 2011 15:48:06 +0000

On a recent project, I was making use of the django-formwizard app and needed to be able to pull out any one of the fields from the series of forms. On the final step of one of the sample apps, it is suggested that you do something like:

form_list = [form.cleaned_data for form in form_list]

to get a combined dictionary of all the form elements.

The problem is that each field is still part of its parent form, which is annoying if you want to treat the series of forms as a single dictionary.

To combine them into a single dictionary you can use the update() method, which updates a dictionary with key/value pairs from b, overwriting existing keys:

d = {} # new dictionary
for forms in [form.cleaned_data for form in form_list]:
d.update(form)

Now you can access any number of the form fields from a single dictionary:

name = d.get('name')
email = d.get('email')

Update from @davidwtbuxton:
One-liner for merging several forms’ dictionaries:

d = dict((k, v) for f in forms for k, v in f.cleaned_data.items())

Another Update from django-formwizard author @stephrdev:
There’s actually a method called get_all_cleaned_data that will return “a merged dictionary of all step’ cleaned_data dictionaries. If a step contains a `FormSet`, the key will be prefixed with formset and contain a list of the formset’ cleaned_data dictionaries.” Perfect!

OpenBlock for Ottawa

Chris — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 03:55:29 +0000

Ever since the open sourcing of Everyblock last year, I’ve been really keen to get an EveryBlock site setup for Ottawa. With the latest project from OpenPlans, OpenBlock (based on the Everyblock code) makes this a lot easier to get rolling. I’ve got a demo site up, and am in the process of parsing CanVec data into something the OpenBlock code can deal with. Tweet me if you’re interested in helping out.

Google goes OpenSocial

Chris — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:45:43 +0000

Given that Zuckerburg has already indicated that they want to continue to open up Facebook, I think we can expect Facebook to rollout support for OpenSocial API calls in addition to their existing methods very shortly.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/177470827/

Collected Works on Wellington selling books at US Prices

Chris — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:33:42 +0000

From a story in the Ottawa Citizen, The strength of the Canadian dollar — and of the complaints of
customers — has led at least one Ottawa bookstore to cut prices, even
if it means selling at a loss.

Collected Works on Wellington
Street decided this week to sell books at their listed U.S. prices,
said co-owner Chris Smith. He described the cut as a promotion that
will end Dec. 31.

“A lot of people have been appalled by the
spread between U.S. and Canadian prices,” Mr. Smith added. “The
industry has been quite slow in responding to changes in pricing.”

Al Gore using PowerPoint? Not likely.

Chris — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:36:28 +0000

Vancouver Sun columnist Miro Cernetig might want to check his facts – the last thing Al Gore, an Apple Board member, would be caught using for a Presentation would be PowerPoint. Keynote all the way! Miro may have also just discovered PowerPoint last week, as he mentions it at least 4 times within the article.

The Search for Wikinomics Continues

Chris — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 01:24:23 +0000

On my way home today, I decided to stop in at the Chapters on Rideau St. and see if I could pick up a copy of Don Tapscott’s new book Wikinomics. A quick check on the Book Search terminal, and I discover there’s 19 copies in the store. “Great! I’m in luck.” Off I go to the Business / Business Technology section, and the book is no where to be found. A helpful Chapters employee asks if they can help and point me in the general direction and mention that it’s displayed quite openly – and therefore one would think it easy to find. I scan all of the Business sections I can think of, check the Technology section, and happen to glance at another Book Search terminal which someone has left on the Wikinomics search result as well. I have competition. As I walk past another Chapters employee, I overhear that another individual is also looking for the book, and that she is unable to help him find it. Another quick scan of the shelves, and I leave empty handed.

Would it be so difficult to tag each book with an RFID tag and then place a mesh network of RFID transmitters on each shelf so as to keep track of every book within the store passively. A Book Search would display exactly where each book was located within the store, and avoid the ridiculousness that was today’s bookstore experience. I’ve slowly stopped going into Chapters/Indigo as much as I used to as they either tend not to carry the book I’m looking for, or its simply too hard to find a title.

Update: As you may have noticed from the comments, both the Rideau Store Manager, and Heather Reisman have been in contact offering to right the situation.

New Theme for a New Year

Chris — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 18:27:08 +0000

I was really not into how the last theme was working out, and my changes started causing some cross-browser compatibilty issues, so I’ve moved to this one and am just integrating some of the features that its missing. I’ll probably have to add the Gravatar comments back in, and some other things. Comments and suggestionsContinue Reading

Which Superhero are you?

Chris — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 08:16:49 +0000

I just finished this quiz over at http://www.thesuperheroquiz.com/ and I seem to be most like Spider-Man. Cool!

You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man		60%
Superman		55%
Iron Man		50%
Robin		45%
The Flash		45%
Supergirl		30%
Green Lantern		30%
Batman		25%
Catwoman		20%
Hulk		20%
Wonder Woman		15%

You are intelligent, witty,
a bit geeky and have great
power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Best Ads Collection

Chris — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 18:29:51 +0000

In what I’m hoping will become a regular feature, I’m going to be posting some of what I consider to be some of the best tv spots or ads that I’ve come across. To start, we’ve got (perhaps an older commercial) and Stavros for Mr. Sub’s Chicken Souvflaki sub.