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.

I would like to offer my thanks to all those who have helped to troubleshoot this site, not only the actual web server, but also the email server and web services.  I am much indebted to you for all your assistance.

Now onto the site news.  Despite some reports of instability and inavailability, the greater consensus is that the site is in fact reachable.  I realize that there are a number of compatability issues (you should see some of the funcky interpretations of Unicode Netscape 6.1 is doing...), but these may eventually get fixed.   For those curious, I have confirmed compatability with Lynx (funny how this is more Unicode compliant then Netscape, isn't it); just ignore the misinterpreted endian indicator character (first character in document).  I also hope to be able to get several more services working, namely Account Request and ClassXDB.  I've narrowed the issues down to somewhere in IIS, so I have an interesting task ahead of me as other IIS admins will undoubtably know.

Email has been an interesting topic lately.  Namely, support for S/MIME encryption and signing has been troublesome.   If any of you use AOL, that seems to be where the only problems left lay.  All other clients seemed to work fine after switching from opaque to clear signing.  If anyone knows of some other workarounds/tips, I would be glad to hear them (not using S/MIME is not a valid workaround/tip!).

Well, I got a new logo from master artist Andy two days ago and finally got around to putting it up.  Of course, this also means that a new color scheme is called for ;). In more infrastructure related news, the JSC Root Certificate Services are now up and running for anyone with a valid account on my systems.  You can find the link under the "Identification" section. Hopefully the account request tools will be up and running soon. Until the next update...

For those who regularily follow this site (all three of you, including Achroite and Gatekeeper), you should note that the site has now moved. Yes, I did finally purchase a domain name, and, as you can obviously see, get it setup and working properly. However, I must apoligize for the downtime that the site has experienced over the last two-three weeks. An entirely different authentication and authorization scheme is now being used, which I hope will allow for the delivery of a variety of rich services soon. The current plan is to have most of these services require certificate based authentication, with a seperate service providing the certificates.

Well, the new design is finally up. The big change: the site now uses XHTML 1.1 for all the publicly available pages.  Frames are also now used across all the publicly available pages, which greatly simplifies the management of the pages.  No longer do I have to muck around with the page layout when trying to add another message here!  I still have to fix all the .NET pages (primarily the Catcher In The Rye project).  The server here has also gone through an entire rebuild, so scalibility and stability should be improved.  Further, I got my email server (EMWAC IMS, MS2EMWAC, Microsoft IIS 5.0 SMTP Server) up and running.  So now you can email me at my private address on this very server.  There only seems to be one problem: my ISP's entire address space seems to be on a DUL (Dial Up List), which can prevent me from replying from my StultsJ address.  So I still have to use my Hotmail account a little.  To conclude this (lengthy) update, I have gone back to school and will probably be adding some more pages geared toward this year (hopefully soon).

There is now a new copy of the equations sheet available. It corrects some errors found in the original copy, and adds support for a unified single page of equations.  Another version, in the form of an image, will be provided if all the symbols don't show up on your computers. Just email me and I'll begin the conversion process.

The equations used this semester in Accelerated Chemistry are now up on the web site.  Click on the following link to be taken to them on the SSL (128-bit) site or in the /public directory.

This frontpage has been completely rewritten and now demos the future design that this site will support.  I have also begun the process of implementing Passport.NET authentication mechanisms, and that project should be completed about the same time as Passport.NET is finally released (sometime next quarter).  This implementation is why there is now the logo at the top of this page.