I hadn't anticipated this one, It seems that more people are interested in trying the game out than perhaps is good for the poor little privately run public server!
exe had to take the server down due to a relatively large number of connections being made. So I would like to make people aware that it is possible to run your own server, and also it is just as easy to play a single player game, albeit not as social. For details on how to go about it please check the sourceforge forums.
on behalf of exe, i'd like to apologise for the outage.