Slax downloaded more than 2 million times

written by Tomas M. 13 days ago

All downloads of Slax 6.x from the download page were always secretly counted, but it was only several weeks ago when I realized that it could be interesting to publish the counter under the download links for the general audience. The counter stated something around 1800000 downloads at that time. Today I've just realized that the counter is far beyond 2 millions!

Thank you everybody who download Slax! Especially all the people from United States (16%), Russia (7%), Poland (5%), Germany (5%), Italy (4%), Czech Republic (4%), France (3%) and United Kingdom (3%). 8 comments

What happens if a chimp sees magic (jp)

written by Tomas M. 22 days ago

1 comment

God loves us - really

written by Tomas M. 24 days ago

2 comments

lzma for official squashfs is here

written by Tomas M. 139 days ago

Just few days ago, Phillip Lougher added the long awaited LZMA decompression to his squashfs tree (here are the patches).

I'm not sure what kernel version will incorporate these changes. I guess 2.6.32 is in the -rc state already so we will have to wait for the next one. 5 comments

ORDER BY RAND() replacement

written by Tomas M. 149 days ago

From time to time, I need to select a random row from MySQL table. The official documentation suggests SELECT * FROM table1 ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1, but this is very dangerous. It can take ages to select a random row from a table with millions of records. The reason can be noticed after running the same query with 'EXPLAIN' keyword at the beginning: Using temporary; Using filesort. It's the worst situation which could happen.

I'm always looking for as best optimalization as possible, so I had to come up with something faster. And here is the result:

SELECT @r:=RAND();
SELECT @i:=
 (SELECT MIN(id) FROM table1 WHERE id>=
  (SELECT (@r*(SELECT MAX(id) FROM table1))));
SELECT * FROM table1 WHERE id=@i;

Squashfs LZMA support

written by Tomas M. 151 days ago

In the last few days, Phillip Lougher (squashfs author) published several patches, which is a very important step towards the new lzma support. In short, the patches move the decompressing functions to a separated file, and replace the zlib_uncompress() call by squashfs_decompress(). This is exactly what had to happen in order to provide a decompressor framework for Squashfs, 'allowing multiple decompressors to be easily supported'.

Since it (lzma) is already in kernel for some time, I think that we should see LZMA support in squashfs very soon. 9 comments

Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie

written by Tomas M. 170 days ago

5 comments

What is the purpose of life?

written by Tomas M. 194 days ago

In the previous post's video, Richard Dawkins discussed the purpose of purpose: a human mind needs a purpose for everything, and most people think that everything HAS a purpose, even things without one. For most people the only way to see the absurdity is to think about the purpose of purpose.

When I was young, we were told that the purpose of life is to live our lives the right way to go to heaven after we die. Religion gave us the ultimate answer of the purpose of our lives - to test our conformance to God, in order to be rewarded by a pleasant afterlife.

But lets think a little more about it. What would be the purpose of the afterlife then? After we finally made it to the heaven, we would enjoy our afterlife and be happy. What would be the purpose of our existence? It doesn't make sense. Couldn't we just enjoy our lives just right now for the same purpose? The ultimate answer provided by all religions is a mental fallacy. We don't need a purpose. We make our purpose ourselves. 29 comments

The purpose of purpose

written by Tomas M. 204 days ago

Have you ever wondered why are we here? You may find the answer in the following video.

During Richard Dawkins' American tour in March 2009, he gave a talk titled "The Purpose of Purpose". The talks were filmed and edited together here. The content of the talk remains intact, while the editing moves between the different locations and Richard's Keynote presentation.

17 comments

What is atheism?

written by Tomas M. 204 days ago

The following picture explains that clearly :)
17 comments