Sideblog
Police announced this afternoon that their investigation into what was initially believed to be a fatal fire on Rugby Avenue is now a homicide investigation. #
The Virginia Supreme Court has denied George Huguely’s appeal. His second-degree murder conviction will stand, WRIC reports. #
In a carefully worded story, and not citing specific sources, WTVR reports that forensic evidence belonging to Jesse Matthew Jr., the main suspect in the disappearance of Hannah Graham, matches forensic evidence collected during the investigation of Morgan Harrington’s 2009 murder. #
In the wake of Hannah Graham’s disappearance, and the evidence that came from private security footage, city officials are revisiting the question of installing security cameras on the downtown mall. #
Both Charlottesville Registrar Sheri Iachetta and former Electoral Board member Stephanie Commander have turned themselves in to the police on
foursix and four felony counts of embezzlement, respectively. #Ten years ago, the National Institutes of Health budget doubled and schools like the University of Virginia built massive new research facilities. A decade later, those buildings remain largely underutilized. NPR visits UVA in this story on the effect of federal binge and spurge spending in the sciences. #
In 2012, Council approved a new student housing complex on West Main—now some council members are questioning whether what they were shown matches what was built. #
The Architectural Review Board has approved a bike-themed mural on West Market, below the McGuffey Art Center, although at least one member expressed concerns that it might look like the bicyclists were riding away from Charlottesville’s downtown. #
City Police Chief Tim Longo is meeting with city leaders to work on protocols regarding the use of military surplus police weapons in Charlottesville. #
A 100-year-old Colonnades resident received military honors for her service in the WWII Women’s Army Corps #
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For the record. And that includes the tax record… there is a portion of the town of Scottsville (within town limits) which used to be taxed in Fluvanna county but which by joint agreement between Fluvanna and Albemarle County is now taxed in Albemarle County. My residence is one of those. So I imagine that this bill is simply about formalizing those new boundary agreements.
No, Just Bob; HB992 proposes extending the boundaries to include the land in deed book 3803, page 75, on September 30, 2009. And to give Fluvanna County Courts jurisdiction over that land.
Wonder what Bell has to say about this. I imagine something weird was discovered in the deed books during a recent property sale. Or a Fluvanna judge is planning on committing muuuurrder in a home in eastern Scottsville and wants cover!
Waldo, if you are pasting bills into the Richmond Sunlight site, you might want to convert the characters from Western (ISO-8859-1) to Unicode (UTF-8). Your template has Unicode, but the bills chapter marks show up as question marks in my version of Firefox. Then clicking in the Firefox menu “View / Character Encoding / Western (ISO-8859-1)” reverses the problem. The encoding is set in an HTTP header, not visible in the source.
If I were pasting bills into Richmond Sunlight, I would lose my mind. :) No, it’s automated, and the character conversion problem comes from significant inconsistencies throughout the legislature’s website. I use UTF-8, but (if memory serves), the legislature’s HTTP server claims to be serving data as UTF-8, but the content encoding is unspecified, while the data is being stored in their system as ISO-8859-1. Basically, they’re serving up data mush, and it’s an absolute mess for me to clean up. It’s on my to-do list to cobble together a system for converting their text into UTF-8, but my initial efforts (some months ago) just made it worse.
What about searching for “0x20A7” (space §)? That sequence will never appear in UTF-8, so the document should be treated as ISO-8859-1 or Windows.
Damn foreigners, I thought English was the official language here.
Now that everything online to some extent could someone please provide a link that would show the proposed boundary adjustments on a map? Since I won’t be going to the Fluvanna Clerks office to look it up manually.
Part of Scottsville has always been in Fluvanna County. A lot of real estate that gets sold down near Scottsville (in Albemarle, Fluvanna, and Buckingham counties) gets advertised as “Scottsville”. So I guess I fail to see what the controversy is about.
You’re quite right, but then there’s still the conversion to be done, and that’s been the trick. I’m yet to find a reliable tool for converting ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 in PHP. Surely they exist, though, so I’m totally open to recommendations if you’ve got any!
Waldo: The base functions in php (iconv, utf8_encode/decode) don’t work?
Nope. They make it much, much worse. :)
Since I’ve got the day off, I’m spending it working on Richmond Sunlight. I figured I’d just nuke my existing work and start over again, this time seeing what would happen if I just let MySQL do the work, and stop overthinking it. That actually worked pretty well. I let cURL grab the quasi-Western text and stuff it into a UTF-8 column in MySQL. There are some goofy characters, but very few, comparatively—I just tracked down all of the ones that I could find and wrote a script to fix them up upon each hourly import of new bill texts. It’s a bit messy (I’m having to refactor some of my queries to deal with these new case-sensitive columns), but it’s a whole lot better than what I was doing. Apparently MySQL got smarter at some point when I wasn’t looking.
Any more news on what this bill is about? Is it a technical thing or a real change in the borders?
{babble mode on}Some people use MySQL for encryption functions too, when the unix calls aren’t available.{/babble}
I thought it was just a technical thing. To formalize what everyone in the area already perceives. However people seem to think I’m wrong about that.