About

Welcome to morethanabitoff. (That’s “More Than A Bit Off”) My name is Andrew Newton, but my friends, my family, my boss, his boss, and just about anybody who knows me just call me “Andy”.

I work in the tech sector, much of my experience being in the niche of Internet infrastructure. I’m not a router geek or a DNS nerd (though I know a good bit about both), but a software development / applications guy dealing with those services at the “core of the Internet” that keep everything glued together.

JSON Content Rules

Pete Cordell and I are working on Data Definition Language (DDL) for JSON: JSON Content Rules (JCR). It has a syntax similar to JSON, but takes a lot of cues from ABNF and Relax NG:

{ image }

 image = "Image" {
     width,
     height,
     "Title" : string,
     thumbnail,
     "IDs" [ * : integer ]
 }

 width = "Width" width_v
 height = "Height" height_v

 width_v = : 0..1280
 height_v = : 0..1024

 thumbnail = "Thumbnail" {
     width, height, "Url" : uri
 }

Our Internet Drafts are here:

• JSON Content Rules
• JCR Coconstraints

And, of course, there is code! I’ve got an open source JCR validator on GitHub.

Registration Data Access Protocol

The Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) is the IETF’s replacement for Whois. It is a JSON-based, RESTful protocol. Along with Scott Hollenbeck from Verisign, I am one of the original authors of the specifications.

I have a short article on the Team ARIN blog about it (“Registry Data Access Protocol (RDAP): A Common Whois System”) and another article discussing RDAP bootstrapping (“How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New Whois: RDAP”)

Even better than articles, there is code! NicInfo is a command-line, RDAP client with built-in caching, etc… And the RDAP Bootstrap Server is a small, no-database, Java-based RDAP server designed to help RDAP clients side-step the bootstrapping process with a simple RDAP query.

Other

And I’ve done other stuff… from playing with LDAP to having it out with billing systems. Once upon a time I was a Windows programmer, and chances are good if you live in North America you have been in a building with an automation system running some of my code.

Outside of tech, I’m into strength training and power lifting, self-defense and martial arts (I hold a black belt rank in Judo). I love searching out new music (check out a music blog I run with a friend of mine), and I am a very amateur photographer.