Boring Tech Stuff

For people without a life.

(The ones who are too intelligent to let their shallow existence revolve around sex, booze and football.)

This site is now hosted by a startup company in Tasmania, running a custom Linux installation on a distributed network of original IBM PCs and Archimedes servers. It hooks into the Internet backbone in Turkey via a superfast infra-red duplex link operating through a surplus Russian satellite. Since Tasmanet don't provide a nameserver facility, our DNS host is located in New Guinea. Partially resolved DNS requests are vectored through the Cuban national network to a final DNS lookup facility in the Falklands, which now handles 90% of internet packet routing for the UK, and provides major employment opportunities for the islanders. Our Guatemalan server is now used exclusively as an overflow buffer to cope with unexpected peaks in demand.

OK, OK, I'm joking. What did you expect from an English site? An irony alert for Americans? I'll start again. This site is now hosted by Freeola (www.freeola.com), and I'm happy to recommend them. Naturally, their free service is limited, but it's perfectly useable for low-maintenance sites. They provide php, cgi and perl for free, a cheap MySql database, and you get fast and efficient email and phone support from humans. You'd have a job to beat their prices on domain registration and hosting.

The main address for this site is www.diabolus.org and my main email address is paul@diabolus.org
 

You can also use www.diabolus.co.uk because I grabbed it pronto when a Slayer fan finally decided that spending hours hacking HTML and Javascript wasn't in keeping with the core ethos of thrash.

I'd like to get www.diabolus.com, but when Sony dropped it, it was snapped up by a bunch of speculators in Massachusetts, who at the last count wanted about 1600 quid for it. Yeah. Dream on, guys. I notice they haven't sold it yet.

There's also a REALLY OLD domain name, www.diabolus-in-musica.freeserve.co.uk which might still be floating around on the back of a fag packet somewhere. It's been dead for years, but no doubt there's some ancient website in Latvia or Bognor that's still quoting it. If you do see it, we'd be really grateful if you would email verbal abuse to the webmaster and a polite note to us. Or the other way round, depending on what sort of a day you've had.

The site is developed using HTML-kit, or whichever hand-editor hasn't yet succumbed to binning through frustration. They're all just glorified versions of Notepad.

I test it in Internet Explorer and Firefox. If I get time, I run it through Opera, Google Chrome and anything else I happen to have installed. But the code is mostly pretty simple, so I usually trust to the reliability and consistency of modern Web standards. Stop laughing.

I try to make it cute and fluffy on any resolution down to 800x600. If you're viewing on a mobile phone, tough. Getting this lot to display on an earwarmer without horizontal scrolling would take the next six months, by which time it would be out of date.

At least I've now completed Morrowind and Oblivion, so my development time has increased markedly. So far, my mate Emily hasn't persuded me to buy anything else addictive, and waste my life exploring fantasy worlds other than the one I already live in.

Enjoy!

shim