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The site is in stasis. I am being discharged (honorably) from the U.S. Navy and moving back home to New Mexico, USA. For the next two months, very little of the site will be updated beyond my webjournal. The one semi-active project I have, my LiteStep book, is completely on hold until I get settled in.

Thursday, January 15, 2004

I've been doodling a bit and scanned in enough of them to put them in their own section. [ Artwork and Drawings ]

Sunday, November 30, 2004

[ VeriSign's shortsightedness has endangered the 'Net ]
[ VeriSign's reply to public outcry ]
[ ICANN's initial reaction on security and stability ]
[ ICANN's info (and take-action) page regarding VeriSign ]

[ VeriSign calls halt to .com detours (sort of) ]
[ ICANN demands that VeriSign undo SiteFinder's damage ]
[ ICANN Advisory Concerning Demand to Remove VeriSign's Wildcard ]

[ What VeriSign did ] [ Why it's a Very Bad Thing ] [How to patch around it ]

ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the governing standards body for Internet domain names and their assignment. Although it permits many competing companies and organizations to register names within the .com and .net domains, ICANN has charged VeriSign with the duty of controlling and maintaining the records of names within those domains.

The responsibility had originally belonged toNetwork Solutions, Inc. (NSI), under exclusive contract with the U.S. Government from 1992 to 1999, but in 2000VeriSign completely bought NSI for $21 billion . VeriSign is the sole registry through which all .com and .net registrars must register their clients' domain names, including the host and registrar of Thornton 2 Productions, which is NetHere, Inc., for the thornton2.com name.

I had previously urged that the IP address 64.94.110.11 be firewalled, since that was the IP of VeriSign's SiteFinder service and the IP returned on a query for a non-existent .com or .net domain name. (In other words, typo'ing a Web address took you to SiteFinder instead of giving you an error and another chance.) The server at that IP address is still online and listening on the HTTP and SMTP ports (Web and email), but looking up a non-existent .com or .net domain name once again returns the NXDOMAIN ("non-existent domain") error. It's a partial victory, because VeriSign still runs the show, and that invasive and deceptive SiteFinder server is still online, but it's a victory nonetheless.

Friday, August 29, 2003

I have a new database-driven system in place. It isn't as powerful as a SQL-driven system, but it's good enough. With it, I can now create and manage traditional record/field tables freeform using any text editor. To that end, I have done just that. The merchandise database is now fixed and back online, and I have also put my personal hotlist online in the Links section.

Other site news not previously reported:

I wrote a howto essay on dealing with spam, properly known as "unsolicited commercial email" (UCE). The techniques worked for me, and I hope they work for you, too. Spam, anyone?

Saturday, April 12, 2003

The main product catalog is still broken. The system I wrote to manage it was indeed idiot easy to use, but I quickly ran up against the limits. Doing databases without SQL support is a royal pain in the, well, you know. I just haven't had the time to fix it up yet, thanks to higher priority tasks. It's about time I put something up that is actually worth downloading, though, so on that note...

I proudly present to LiteStep users everywhere... My first LiteStep themes. Download and enjoy. Feel free to contact me for praises or complaints.

Tuesday, September 25, 2002

I've unified all the products I offer into the Products section, and everything but the US Flag screensaver is in the main catalog. Writing the code generating the catalog pages was easy, but finding a decent program to manage and maintain the catalog itself was quite a chore. Nevertheless, I've found a very good system: idiot easy to use, even though it was a pain to do right.

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

The site is now all PHP-driven. The PHP conversion took much longer than I anticipated or wanted, but most of the delay was spent learning PHP and experimenting with code and designs. I don't have any site themes or different color schemes that sites like Yahoo! use, so for all intents and purposes, the site is still static. But adding and updating just became infinitely easier.

Sunday, February 24, 2002 - The site is still static HTML, and still being updated, though not as frequently as I had hoped. My day job is getting too much in the way, but that should change fairly soon. In short, the reason I haven't been updating as much is because I actually do have a life. (Yes, I know a comment like that is more appropriate for my Web journal than for the site news page, but I figure I owe an explanation for not living up to my site's published hopes, and the site news page is just the place.)

Friday, January 11, 2002 - My macro files got corrupted, so I had to track down and fix the corruption.

Saturday, December 8, 2001 - The rest of the errors are now corrected. I finally got all the products to show right.

Tuesday, December 4, 2001 - Most errors are now corrected. For some reason, certain products in /usndelivery won't show both sides. (This is just a cosmetic bug; you can see the images on both sides by clicking on the product picture, and ignore the thing about "blank back".) I'm troubleshooting my macros to isolate the cause, because I like the overall result better than the all-on-one-page order form. Other than that, the site should now render correctly in both compliant and non-compliant browsers.

Thursday, November 29, 2001 - I apologize. While I have identified all the errors (discussed below, in yesterday's news), I haven't corrected them all. The server crashed in the midst of trying to upload the files, and some need to be refixed before being re-uploaded.

Wednesday, November 28, 2001 - Thornton 2 Productions is still the effort of one man's spare time, so updates will not be rapid. Updates will occur about once a day, or once every two days. You can tell how long it's been since the previous update by looking at the bottom of any page.

I have identified a good deal of errors and inconsistencies throughout the site, and I have corrected them all. Given time to reflect, I've decided that starting over was a good thing in the long run. It allowed me to rethink the maintenance and evolution of the site. Even though I'm coding straight HTML in vi, one of the oldest text processors in existence, with no enhancements to my authoring environment except a command-line search-and-replace macro processor and some hand-scripted batch files, (Sounds awful primitive, doesn't it?), it has speeded development, deployment, and maintenance of the site to a degree that no other Web development environment I have ever seen can achieve.

And no such environment, except straight HTML coding, achieves compliance with the standards recommended by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Mr. Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium. Not Word, not FrontPage, not Composer, not Pagemill, not Dreamweaver, nothing. (To be fair, Mozilla Composer is awful close to achieving absolute standards compliance, and it might do so soon after, if not in time for, version 1.0.)

State of the Project: Walking on Windows with a LiteStep

The book I'm writing to bring paper documentation to the LiteStep shell is underway. Its working title is "Walking on Windows with a LiteStep", and you can read the full status here. Updated January 11, 2002.

Thornton2.com