The main problem with IE is that it doesn't support transparent PNGs, which this site relies on heavily. While it is "possible" to make these effects without using transparency, it takes a huge ammount of time, and if you ever need to make any changes, you're looking at redoing everything. So apperently, IE is the only major browser that won't handle transparent PNGs correctly. But don't worry IE users, IE7 is supposed to fully support transparent PNGs, when it comes out.

Secondly, our target audience mostly uses alternavie browsers anyway, so it's not a big loss. (Hint: if you're using IE, you're probably *not* a part of our target audience. >;-) )

All of the source code for this website (HTML and CSS) along with the text content is released under the Creative Commons license. Due to copyright issues, all images on this site are excluded from this license and retain their full copyrights. Please ask me before using them. So what is Creative Commons? In short, it grants you, the reader, the right to use copy, modify, and share the materials on this site. The only limitation is you must release your derivative works under a simlar Creative Commons license. For the full details, visit the Creative Commons website. Of course, since this is the web, most people won't hesitate to rip off a site anyway. This way, it's a little bit more legal. Hopefully, someone out there will find this site helpful.

This site is hosted on a custom built server. Here's the hardware specs:

• Processor: Athlon 64 X2 3800+
• Motherboard: Abit NF-M2 (nForce 6150 chipset)
• RAM: 1 GB total
• Storage: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250 GB (boot drive)
  3 x Maxtor 200 GB drives (400 GB RAID 5 array)
• Controller: Promise Ultra 133 TX2
• Case: CoolerMaster Stacker 830
• Power Supply: Seasonic S-12 430
• Optical Drive: Samsung DVD burner

Video output is handled through the integrated video on the motherboard, which is nice because you don't need to shell out for a graphics card and the PCI-E slot is open for future expansion. Having the dual-core processor is nice, not just for having the extra computing power, but also because it includes hardware virtualization support (more about that in the next section). The case is probably something I spent way too much money on, but hopefully it'll be the last one I need for a while (strangely enough, that's what I said about my last case). The controller card provides extra IDE channels so that one HDD occupies one channel. This is incase of the unlikey event that a hard drive failure also knocks out the IDE channel (a dual drive failure effectively kills the RAID 5 array).

Lets turn our attention to the software side of things:

Metaverse (Xen Domain0 - Production Environment)

• Gentoo Linux
• Xen 2.6.18 kernel
• Apache 2 - web hosting
• Samba - directory sharing and domain controller
• Postfix/Courier-IMAP/SquirrelMail - email
• Subversion - revision control

Homunculus (Development Environment)

• Gentoo Linux

Doppelganger

• Windows Server 2003

Simulacrum (Experimental/Unstable)

• Gentoo Linux

Why Gentoo? Gentoo has a nice package management system, called Portage, that makes install programs and keeping your system up to date really easy (it's also a good way to blow it up). As a source based distribution, Gentoo allows you to compile programs to run optimally on your hardware.

As you can probably tell, there is no such compnay called World Domination Inc. And we're not trying to take over the world... or maybe that's what we want you to think.