links for 2010-06-17

  • The Department of Energy is giving an $800,000 grant to JMU for their Small Wind program. That's great news—I'm a big fan of their work. They're the folks doing the research about where wind energy is viable in Virginia. Particularly sensible is their anemometer loan program, which I gather hasn't been up and running for a couple of years due to funding problems. Hopefully this will fix that.
    (tags: jmu energy wind)
  • Indoor cats like to go outside, too. Hence catios.
  • A fellow with a hyphenated last name laments lousy website registration systems that inform him that his name is invalid. Also problematic: Systems that require that people have postal codes and systems that require that people enter a last name. Ireland, for instance, has no postal codes (outside of Dublin). And millions of people hail from cultures where there are no last names, such as Javanese Indonesians. I wonder if somebody has put together a list of best practices for data validation in registration forms?
  • A reminder about the fundamentals of FOIA in Virginia: You don't have to invoke FOIA, the scope of the request can be as broad as you want.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

2 replies on “links for 2010-06-17”

Comments are closed.