All people have the 'believing in things' hardcoded, because it helped us in the evolution process. It was very important during our childhood to 'believe', because only those who believed their parents' statements like 'these fruits are poisonous' or 'fire will burn you' survived and reproduced. There is no space for own experiments, we must have 'faith' in things which are said by our parents or other people who are close to us. Religion is a side product of that. If you were told to believe in god as a kid and to never question that, you are not going to give up.
I was fortunate to be taught by our secular school system to think cricically and form my own opinions, so even if my dad made me a christian, I was able to quit that madness. 5 comments
As you surely noticed, my passion regarding Slax doesn't seem to be the same like in the previous years.
For almost an year, I am building a new house for my family, so it takes a lot of time and I don't work on Slax so hard like in the past. But our house is almost finished and it should be ready in two months, so I hope it will be possible to put my passion back into Slax again :)
Slackware is now officially releasing a 64bit version, so Slax will be available in 64bit too (if there are no fatal problems). Just today I downloaded the slackware64-current tree to check it out. Unfortunately I can't provide any fixed release cycle, since I don't even know what will happen tomorrow :) 2 comments
People usually tend to believe in many irrational things. When I was young, I believed that there is some kind of energy, called soul, which separates from our bodies when we die. I believed that after we die, our soul (our consciousness) lives forever.
I have no idea if that happens or not, but since it is not possible to find out the answer, I don't believe it anymore. We simply don't know what happens when we die. The most probable thing is that we switch to exactly the same state we were in, before we were born. But perhaps it is the best to leave the question unanswered, until we find a method how to answer it with a reasonable certainty.
Anyway, if I were told at that age to believe that killing infidels in the name of my god would transfer my soul to some martyrs heaven, where 72 virgins wait for me, I would believe that too.
I am happy I realized one important fact: it is not a virtue to have faith. It is not a virtue to believe in something just because you were... more12 comments
I'm sure you heard about the old testament's story regarding Noah: For some strange and masochistic reason, the God of the old testament decided that the man (who was created in His image) was not a good design at all, so the almighty came to a resolution that people are not worth a shit so it's time to KILL'EM ALL.
(You would be surprised to discover how much people actually believe that the story is literaly true.)
To accomplish that pleasant task but preserve all the other species, God selected Noah and told him to build an ark. The proportions of such ark are described in the holy bible as: 300 yards long, 50 yards wide, 30 yards high. I prefer the conevrsion to metric system: 275m*46m*28m.
If we wish to fill the ark by all known species, male and female ones, we'll end up with 2x 1 milion creatures = over 2 milions of animals.
It has been pointed out to me several times, that in the list of modules at 'Build Slax' interface, it is not clear how to remove pre-selected modules. Today I just added small delete icon, which shows itself after you hover the mouse cursor above the given module icon.
This makes it much easier to remove the base modules, which are selected by default. 5 comments
Some time ago, I wrote about a feature implemented at slax website - to save a selection of modules from your build for later. Today, I finally coded the second part, essential for the whole process - so you can now upload your build.txt back, to restore your selection.
It is also possible to use a GET address to achieve the same, so after a little work you can easily create links to selection of modules. The URL looks like this:
As you can imagine, you may put any ID numbers in the URL and it will recreate your selection. This way, you can send a tiny URL to your friends with your preselected modules, and they can see them directly and download the ISO or TAR easily with modules from your selection.
I hope somebody will find this useful.
As usual, thank you very much for using Slax! 3 comments
Few days ago i stumbled upon a website called Wolfram|Alpha. What an incredible piece of work! At the first sight it seems like just another search engine. Not at all! Wolfram Alpha identifies itself as a computational knowledge engine, and it is exactly that.
The Build Slax feature now supports resume operation. That means you can now use your favorite download manager which supports resume, and it will finally work. You'll download correct build even if the connection to Slax server is broken several times during the download.
I thought it will be a big problem to implement this feature, and the first attempts failed due to incredibly bad performance.
What is actually so difficult? My goal was to get the output from mkisofs or tar, and before it is sent to the browser (to you), to strip (throw away) the leading and trailing part which is not needed. I do not like to cache the ISOs on server, and I don't also like to store all the data in RAM just in order to process them further. So a pipe has to be created, which filters the output.
My first attempt proved to be wrong, since I tried to use 'cut -b'. Unfortunately cut works on line-by-line basis, so the output were not correct. This... more15 comments
