So, this is my blog... If you are reading it I guess you probably know me as High Treason from the internet, maybe from Vogons, YouTube (HighTreason610) or the Duke Nukem community... Maybe somewhere else. Either way I'm going to blog about stuff I do - mostly computer, synthesizer or other electronic related bullshit - as that's what blogs are for right? Plus I can update it when I'm effectively dead everywhere else.

It's funny, blogs have really been and gone and the server software doesn't even have the word "blog" in it's spell checker, there's no CMS here so I expect I'll destroy the page layout eventually. On the plus side, this should be somewhat viewable on an older computer with an outdated browser. I loaded it in Arachne successfully.

October 31st 2016 21:15 - Blog Retirement

Well, it lasted longer than I thought, in fact, it's still working and I hardly broken anything! But times change and this Blog page has served its useful life, it will remain online for historical reasons, but I feel it is definitely time to move on. Where are we moving to? Well, I've decided that my blog posts would be better if they were on a two-way platform, a platform that allows more than blogging, a platform where you can join in and make your own posts too... Plus, it was becoming very difficult to use the editor in modern operating systems, especially after the servers were virtualized. So without further ado, I give to you, my forum; http://forum.dxzeff.com/ where you can post about whatever you want, especially if it's computer related. I'll be there too, so don't by shy and feel free to drop by - umm, that wasn't meant to rhyme, honest - so now you know this, you will probably want to know that my Blog will continue in this thread; http://forum.dxzeff.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=4 

Oh, well, old blog, it's been fun... mostly, it wasn't fun when the server borked, but then, that was my fault for ruining the SMTP Server back when that happened - yeah, that whole thing was down to setting the forum up. Anyway, I'm off to image these disks, then I guess I'll see you around.

- High Treason

September 16th 2016 00:45 - Now what!?

The move is completed, but not without a decent number of items being stolen by council contractors, items I will never get back and many I cannot replace. Also, working and filming in the new house is going to be difficult, but I am working on a solution. This is currently irrelevant as equipment is missing and I won't be able to really work on videos until the new workstation is running.

At the time of writing, the new Xeon workstation is probably around 10 days away from running (Assuming the delivery service gets my hard drives here on time) but it does not feature a capture solution yet, I am still researching what is available. It is likely I will use a StarTech device because thus far, they are the only company who have bothered to reply to my questions. Note to budding businessmen out there; Customer Support is important, if you're dealing with the public you need the support in place or else your sales will suffer, treat the customer like crap or ignore then and they will never come back. This might be why the local distributors stock StarTech parts, but not the competing product. Either way, props to StarTech on this one.

I will be back to videos as soon as I can and have a few planned already.

There is a chance that this Blog is going to retire next month in favor of something else, the DXZeff.com landing page will be updated to reflect this.

- High Treason

June 27th 2016 14:24 - Ugh... Still moving...

It probably escaped nobody's attention that I hadn't updated this page in a while. Truth be told the server repair didn't go as well as it should and the new implementation is horrible, so horrible I locked myself out and couldn't be bothered with the hassle of fixing it. I'm back for now, but I don't know if it will break again and I am having serious issues with folder permissions and meta to name a few.

I have also been banned from Vogons because some people can't accept responsibility for their own actions, I refuse to be a part of such a community anyway so I'll leave them to enjoy their little cesspit. Their choice to (without any community input or election process) appoint a moderator who cannot read, dislikes being social and attempts to bully others only to play a victim card has shown me exactly how they intend to operate things over there, perhaps I should start my own forum?

I have signed for another house and it will appear in a vlog at some point, but here are a few images for now. I'm not really going to talk about the place very much right now, but at least I've actually posted an update here now.

- High Treason

April 3rd 2016 23:11 - The server is back!

As you might have seen in the previous post, the server decided to shit the bed. I started using this opportunity to do a few upgrades and repairs, but then I just kept falling asleep (Slept 20 hours without waking up_ and then got sick with a stomach bug. Right now the server is back up with a different configuration. Some things probably won't work and here's a breakdown;

Blog

This blog isn't going anywhere and has had very few alterations. Still looking into CMS but I don't think I will ever actually do that as it isn't hard to update manually (when it works) and I like the simple style it has. The only real changes are that I fixed some cell fonts (which were incorrectly defaulting to Tmes New Roman) and added a link back to the landing page on the left.

DNA

DNA is going into retirement. It will still be available on the server, but it will be disappearing from the landing page and shall also be excluded from search engine robots.

DARC

The web version is no closer to completion and that probably won't change any time soon. I may even scrap the web idea for that as I feel the FTP version is fine. To cut a long story short, the FTP is still here and should do the same things it did before.

3D Realms Mirror

As an extension of DARC, that will still be available as I don't trust anyone in the gaming industry today. If their FTP goes down my mirror should still be here in the same place it's always been.

???

A new and more interesting project is on the way. The new configuration allows me to bring in a second server and that server along with what it will host should be very interesting indeed... You won't see that for quite a long time though, so forget about it for now. The tests have worked however. Another, smaller project is currently being tested.

Server itself

Is now virtual with some dodgy trickery. Nothing much of any concern to the average reader as it is fairly straight forward and you can't see the difference... That's literally about it, the server hosting the blog and FTP is now split into a few different virtual servers. This makes it easier to manage as well as easier to back up. Otherwise all I have done is replace the drive with a larger one - 500GB vs 250GB, this was not really necessary as I had loads of space left - and replaced some dying fans that have been making noises for over a year. I shall upgrade to 4GB of RAM in the coming months as we currently dip into the page file by about 5MB when under full load. Server #2 is currently a bit of a secret and as I said, you won't see it for a long time.

The point remains, expect a few things to not do what they are supposed to do (if anything at all) for a while until I get everything back up to speed.

- High Treason

April 1st 2016 01:29 - The server is busted!

For some reason the server (Dave) randomly fell off the face of the earth last night. I managed to get remote control of the system briefly before I was disconnected and could no longer talk to it at all, it was late so I had to leave it overnight. Today I went to investigate and found the CPU usage through the roof on one of the IIS processes and no matter what I do, I can't get it back down again. The problem here is that I changed nothing, so if I restore the disk image it will probably only happen again. This means that there may be a patch where this site is offline for a while or is served from a different machine with reduced functionality, but this will only be temporary. For a while I have considered scrapping the current configuration because it is old and has been changed so many times, it was getting slower and temperamental anyway, so the chances are I will do this at some stage. The plan? Move over to a completely virtualized environment, the server has the power to do this and the ease of control and backup for this technique is vastly superior to having nearly everything on bare hardware as the system is now.

To be clear, there will be no hardware change except a few fans that need replacing - Dave is presently very noisy and needs a steady supply of light oil - so you'll still technically be served by Dave, just that the IIS server will be in a virtual environment. This should improve security and manageability. It is entirely likely I will max out the RAM too as it is cheap, originally it was maxed out but a stick died and the only reason it was never replaced was that it wasn't needed, the hard drive will likely double in size too as I have a spare one. It is a Seagate so I wouldn't want to do anything important with it, but I figure that the contents of the server are stored on more reliable disks for off-line backups anyway, so if the Seagate fails I wouldn't really lose anything. At the time I write this, Dave is currently locked at 100% load with the hard drive crunching continuously, by the time you read this you may be being served by a different machine.

In other news, it looks like I may have to take Ranitidine for the rest of my life. It tastes gross but it sure beats my stomach feeling the way it did before, there's still some way to go before it's back to 100% but I feel better than I have in a while even with the limited effect this early on. Actually, it has been fairly effective this first week, but I over-ate today and now feel a bit like I did before I started taking it, it's my fault and I'm sure I'll start feeling better again after my next dose.

Back to computers. The funny thing is, I have been playing with another server, it isn't suitable to run this site really but I do have a planned use for it and, I assure you, if I can get it doing what I want and complete work on the project planned for it - a humongous undertaking - it will prove to be one of the most awesome things I have ever done. I also plan to incorporate Easter Eggs, something I have not done with anything I've put on a server in some time. Some people out there probably know a bit about the machine already... I also managed to get hold of something else - not my Xeon motherboard although that is now here - no, I got something very awesome and extremely rare. As I lack parts and at the moment lack the funds to complete it, well, you probably won't see it for a while. It features a CPU I have not previously owned or used plugged into a slightly unusual motherboard.

My spider's eggs have hatched and I am currently looking after a bunch of tiny spiderlings, they are eating and growing, so hopefully they do well. I will let them go when they are old enough to disperse, but I might get another tank and keep one as that would be cool. I may post photos later.

You may be wondering what is happening with the move. Yeah, I'd like to know too, but I've heard nothing. If I'd known that I would have probably tried to get a video done, but on the plus side I have decided to wait to do a video on the laptop. I recently learned that a piece of hardware I thought to be rare and expensive is actually cheap and abundant today, this piece of hardware isn't really much to do with the laptop but it will make any video about it around 100 times better. In short, I'd rather wait and do a good job than rush and do a half-assed one. I am thinking of doing a video on something else instead then, as I might just have time. I have been weighing up doing something more instructional like how to set up DOS properly or how to network Windows 3.11, you know, just for fun. Not sure everyone knows how that works and there are some weird quirks I think it would be fun to talk about. Or, I may do something different to that, not sure right now. Of course, the announcement I mentioned above before editing it out, was posted as Moving Vlog #3 some time ago.

Hmm, April 1st? Didn't notice until now. Think I'll make a really crappy video for my Let's Play channel as I like doing silly things on April 1st, but I have nothing for the main channel. Not fair. Hopefully I can make up for the lack of such things this Halloween or something, I miss doing April Fools/Christmas/Halloween stuff.

- High Treason

February 18 2016 22:53 - Blast from the past

Influenza is a bitch! Just sayin' but I seem to be getting over it, it has been more annoying than anything. Anyway, I don't really have any news, nothing major anyway, but a big one about the move is coming within the next couple of weeks. I have also acquired a sampler, the Akai S2000 with no expansions which seems like it should be useful, seems pretty straight forward and I seem to get along with it just fine.

Outside of that, I have been rummaging in some of my archives and found a lot of stuff. Some videos, a few predating YouTube's existence, snippets of horrible projects I did years ago, some dial-up era pornography (it isn't very good) and snapshots of my old website. Here you go, hosted previously on this domain - so far as I remember. If you had come here in early 2005 this is what you would have found;

It was in the process of being updated when the backup I have was taken, interestingly one of the updated assets was the image on the right (Originally, the site had very few images at an even lower resolution) and it shows the Pentium D's case when it had (I believe) the Athlon 64 installed in it. Next to it is a Pentium II which was about to head off to storage. I started this site on AOL Hometown, but the primitive ASP code suggests I had moved to DXZeff.com (Sound familiar?) and my own box by then. Sadly, with no internet and no access to my server, plus nobody to pay the bill, the update wasn't completed and the domain was closed... Not before some idiot turned off the server, which was in my house... but I had no access to my house being stuck in the kid's home at the time. Updates were made later but the site was not put back online.

There were two other sites operating on the server. One, a sub-site of my own (DXZeff.com/odds) which just had random crap on it - I suppose today you'd call it a blog, it may well be considered a forerunner to this very page - and another sub-site (DXZeff.com/trax) was for use by some guy who wanted to make a simple site about train spotting. He only had like three static pages running with one low-res image gallery, most images were hosted off-site somewhere else and I didn't give a damn. There was an older site which was still accessible on the server, my old bird watching site which probably started life around 1999 in the AOL Hometown EasyDesigner (Not 1-2-3 Publish, that sucked worse!). Interestingly, both that one and the PC site alternate between DXZeff and my other old alias on some pages (Usually only in the title or HTML) which certainly implies they are older than hell. Obviously these aren't online now so no point loading them as you'll get a 404 - but I am tempted to secretly put them back on the server for oldtime's sake as they would still run, so far as I know, given the content is mostly static. I don't have a backup of the train guy's site, all I could drag up was a very grainy picture of the train station in Hull before they butchered it even more some years ago. Pretty confident I still have archives of my other old sites though, but all of them are only partial copies as they were crappy differential backups. Without finding other backups to cobble a whole one together there will always be things missing.

An interesting point about the PC site, it shows the prices (local) for most components, citing a Quay Tec (local store) price list (these were handed out on paper and I may still have one) which proves I was right and things really were cheaper back then. Also, I think I got better at web design, but I think you would be able to tell without knowing beforehand that the same guy built that page and this one. My ugliest site was probably that color scheme's last outing as late as 2009 if I remember rightly. I did find a backup of that site too as I wanted a preloader I had set up on it, among the archives is a Gopher server I used to run, I am tempted to put one back online as the overhead is so minimal it really doesn't make any difference.

For the sake of it, here are some more random images from that time, including the original source for the sidebar image in the screenshot.

It is entirely possible I will post more later, including the video which the last image was taken from - it isn't very good though.

As a last note, I am now limiting the main page to only five posts to help the loading time. All older posts are still available in the list on the left hand side.

- High Treason

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