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17:17 New build of DASher went faster than expected, thanks to NetBeans (SO much better than Eclipse). That means Dave has more tennis time. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Apartment Therapy takes a look at an amazing example of a mid-century modern home in Los Angeles.

Paging through the slideshow, I’m struck by how the changes in depth and texture and the attention to detail show how an open-plan design, even a busier, more complicated one like this, can be warm and inviting.

Sure, some of the color choices don’t age well (although I think alot of that comes from the age of the fabrics), but those could easily be changed out for more modern selections without killing the vibe.

The architect and owner is Ray Kappe — I’ll have to look up some of his other work when I get the chance.

Was I one of those crazies who waited in line the first night to get one?

Uh, yep.

Was that a wee bit of overkill?

Maybe, but much of the world is sold out of the 16 GB black ones, so that’s somewhat mitigating (or at least that’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.)

But what does this mean for you, dear reader? Well hopefully, it might mean a few more blog posts from me, now that WordPress has come out with an iPhone app and I can do it on the go.

In fact, I wrote this post on my iPhone (albeit from a rather immobile supine position on my bed).

The ol’ Repair Permissions trick to fix this didn’t work, and a quick Goog came up empty, too. Anyone out there know what to do?

Today my good friend Todd pointed me to Swivel, apparently being touted as “YouTube for data”.

Seems promising, although most of the datasets are vanishingly small, and too “munged” — not raw enough for reanalysis. For instance, there seems to be a lot of stuff like this:

Billion Dollar Climate and Weather Diasasters, 1980-2006

which comes straight off a website and is already heavily processed. To their credit, you can download their technical paper on this analysis, but it’s scant on methodology and the source data is unavailable.

I guess there’s value in trying to centralize all of these bits of data, analyzed or not, and the already-analyzed stuff is of course far more interesting:

average trans fat in grams by fast food restaurant

But still: where’s the everyone-can-edit part, like Wikipedia? It’s one thing to be able to leave a comment, but the strength of this site could be the ability for those knowledgeable in data analysis, a subject area, or both to come in, review, and actually correct or reinterpret the data. Letting people simply throw up whatever crap they happen to believe could make the problem of data-and-statistics misuse even worse, because there will be no way to evaluate the findings.

I can’t wait to see what Edward Tufte has to say about this.

Update 13 nov 11:46a GMT+1:
I checked out the Swivel blog and (unsurprisingly) it gave me a better idea of the creators’ vision. And some cool links, too, to other data-related sites.

[image courtesy of twid]

I figured there was a way to overcome this problem, but my initial pokes and prods weren’t fruitful and so I abandoned my attempt. This seems to have been a good idea, because in the meantime someone else has solved the problem for me. Bruno De Fraine has posted wrapper scripts which make FileMerge svn-compatible: fmdiff, fmdiff3, and fmresolve.

By the way, I found out about fmdiff because for some reason my installation of TextMate isn’t correctly picking up my PATH variable, so it can’t see that I have subversion installed. TextMate’s documentation says that it gets its environment from the Finder.

Do any of you know how to fix this?