Well, there have certainly been a lot of changes in the last few months.  Er, well, actually, there haven't, but I've been meaning to make some.  Among other things, I need to reverify that the site is XHTML 1.1 complaint, and if it isn't I need to modify it so that it is.  The last few months have taught me a lot about XML, as that is the database format I'm going to use: flat XML files, instead of SQL Server, which doesn't seem to work with my current configuration.  However, the move does mean that I will be getting the services working, as I now have a data backend for them.  All that needs to be done is write my own authorization module to control access to the data.

In related news, Microsoft's .NET Framework has been released.  I highly advise downloading a copy and beginning to program with it if you're a developer.   It's really very easy to use, and I've already begun developing apps using it.  Ximian's MONO project should be finishing in a few months, so those of you that don't use recent Windows releases can still take advantage of the .NET platform.

Lastly, I'd like to apologize to those of you who have been inconvienced by the recent downtime of this site.  As you may have noticed if you have visited the 'Ident' pages, I have changed all the encryption keys.  I do this about every year, on January 20.  This year I sychronized all the X509 certificates to that schedule, including the machine certs.  One of those happened to be the SSL certificate that allows access to this site; upon creation of a new one, the import failed.  It's all due to a bug in the operating system, and should be in a few weeks (I hope).  In the interm, the site is running on the development machine (I know this is a phenomonally bad idea, so don't even think of flaming me about it).   Because of my dissatisfaction with NT's performance during this incident, I'm looking into switching to NetBSD.  Unfortunately, I'm a machine short of being able to do so, so the site may have unpredictable uptime in the future.  Currently, the next scheduled downtime is for 2002-02-09 — 2002-02-18.