Christmas music that doesn't suck

Christmas has a way of being really annoying here in America. I will stipulate that, sure, the crass commercialism is probably responsible for 95% of the obnoxiousness, but  let's not forget about the music. When I hear Bing Crosby crooning "White Christmas" over the lousy PA system at some mall in  mid-November, I tend to want to break things. And as for truly bottom-of-the-barrel schlock like Trans Siberian Orchestra, the less said the better. If, like me, you are  sick of the same old christmas music at this point—when, by dint of repetition, even decent stuff like Brenda Lee singing "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" makes you gnash your teeth, you may find yourself asking "isn't there something that will get me in the holiday spirit that I haven't heard before"?

Yes, yes there is. Forthwith, my list of awesome Christmas music you may or may not have heard before.

Slate had a good idea: provide a way to visualize the bailout. We’re dealing with very large numbers here, so in the average person’s mind it’s easier to put the various pieces of the bailout in proportion to each other if they are represented as shapes with a certain area rather than as a list of numbers. Also, there is the fact that this data is distributed over time; again, it’s easier to represent this data visually as timeline rather than a list of dates. So the task for any visualization of these disbursements is twofold: for any particular disbursement of bailout funds, show the proportion of the overall bailout fund that share represents and also show when it was disbursed.

But what a hash they made of it! This is what Tufte means when he talks about chartjunk: it’s not that the chart data is wrong, but rather that the visual representation of the data that was chosen actually obscures the data itself. So, where to begin...

In the final part of my "About a Blog" series, I want to take a closer look at Django and spend some time talking about what works and what doesn't. Taking the long view, Django is just another MVC-style web framework. (Django devs actually say their implementation should be called a Model-Template-Web system, but that's just semantics for the moment). Now, there is no shortage of MVC web frameworks out there, so why would you want to use Django?

In my last post about this CMS, I promised to write about how I ended up with Django. When I originally decided to roll my own blogging software, I was planning to do it with Zope 3. While Python has a plethora of frameworks— probably more than most languages—I have experience building things with Zope and I like it, so that seemed like a good fit. For the time being, Pylons, TurboGears, Web.py, CherryPy, Django, and many lesser-known web frameworks weren't under consideration.

There's a really common bit of boilerplate javascript code I find myself using all the time. Basically, I'll have a function that, becuase it manipulates the DOM, needs to be called after the page has loaded. Rather than having to assign these functions to the window.onload event manually, I was looking for a shorter way.

This is the first post on my new blog, so I may as well start out by explaining how this thing got here.

So, I've never actually had my own blog before. I've set up blogs for others and I've played around with different blogging software, but when it came time to create my own, it took me a while to decide how to power it. I started with a list of criteria for I wanted for my CMS:

• Is secure
• Allows user comments
• Provides some sort of caching (of DB queries, rendered pages, whatever) to help the site scale
• Can be extended and has a code base I'd actually want to extend
• Stores templates in the filesystem, not in the DB
• Can be deployed in a shared hosting environment
• Is free or inexpensive and is open source

I also had one other sort of "bonus" criteria which I didn't insist on but which would be nice:

• Is written in python