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User Name Da Bear
Member Since 2002-08-13
Total number of Feedback Posts: 22
Total number of comments: 6
Last 10 Feedback Posts by Da Bear [ Search for All ]
Fugu 1.2.0 (Mac OS X)
Love it... except for this one thing 
I've used Fugu for quite a while, and it's great. The automatic switch-to-SCP for directories, for example, is really slick. The interface is wonderful, and all in all it's a pleasure to use. BUT. It has this one annoying habit that keeps cropping up. It won't let me delete remote directories -- apparently, as long as there's anything in them. So I have to go through the directories and subdirectories and sub-sub-etc., deleting everything as I go, and there's probably still at least one .DS_store file somewhere in there that will throw a spanner in the works even if everything looks OK. If I want to delete or replace a directory, I generally need to ssh in, go all the way to whatever directory I'm trying to get rid of, do rm -r directoryname, and sign off. One genuine pain in an otherwise delightful program. And yes, I realize that this is SFTP's fault, but if there were a "jump to SSH and do this" feature for deleting directories in the same way that there's a "jump to SCP and do this" feature for copying them, I'd be a much happier man. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 3 of 3 users found this helpful
Saturday, May 07 2005 @ 10:23 PM PDT
R with Aqua GUI 2.0.1 (Mac OS X)
A top program at an unbeatable price
It seems that not many people have reviewed this, which is a shame, so let me add my two cents. It's a terrific program. It would most likely be in the top five list of most serious statisticians and would probably top the lists of quite a few. Its strongest point, in my opinion, is that it makes hard things easy: if one needs to implement a nonstandard model and estimate it via maximum likelihood, for example, doing so is trivial, and the available optimizers are among the best in the business. Because R is a group effort, quite a few canned routines are available -- though it can't match Stata or SAS in this regard -- but even if something isn't available, you can do it yourself without much trouble. The downside is that it also makes easy things hard. It's not menu-driven, the syntax is sometimes non-intuitive, and it's an object-oriented programming language rather than a statistics package... so in order to run a basic regression, you must first learn how to create data objects, regression objects, etc., and query them. It's a weird way to think about doing statistics if one hasn't encountered it before, but the advantages are soon apparent. Moreover, because it's a group effort, sometimes the routines that one considers standard might not be implemented in a standard way: it could take some time, for example, for a first-time user to realize that there is no separate command for a probit analysis, but rather, a glm() command that implements logit, probit, Poisson, and a host of other models. Perhaps the best part about the program, though, is the people who donate their time to put it together. They've done an absolutely amazing job. Moreover, they selflessly donate more time to reading the R-help list and offering detailed answers to difficult questions. (Warning: few things are more irritating than receiving a question after having answered it in detail, and even the most diplomatic people can become surly under such circumstances, so don't treat the R-help list as a help line that you can just call before doing any of your own research: search the R-help archives, and of course, read the manual, before you write. That will dramatically improve the probability of a rewarding outcome all around.) The handful of people responsible for the Mac OS X implementation of R are also terrific. They've been very responsive, and the implementation has grown from two separate versions (one for XWindows and one for Aqua) into a full-featured Aqua version that's a pleasure to use. The graphics are top-notch, and they've recently developed an editor with some very useful R-specific features. In short, it's a program that demands a lot of the user, but if the user is up to the task and doesn't mind a bit of reading (I'd personally recommend John Fox, An R and S Plus Companion to Applied Regression; Dalgaard, Introductory Statistics with R; and Venables and Ripley, Modern Applied Statistics with S), learning and using it will be immensely rewarding. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 11 of 11 users found this helpful
Thursday, April 07 2005 @ 03:18 PM PDT
MacHouse Quotes Screen Saver 1.1.4 (Mac OS X)
This is a great idea. Period. That said, I just have a few kvetches about implementation, in the hopes that they'll be helpful. One, some of these quotes are pretty long, and they disappear from the screen pretty quickly. One has enough time to read them but perhaps not enough to appreciate them. Would it be possible to include a parameter that varies the amount of time that they remain on the screen? If not, perhaps just shorter quotes? Two, some of the quotes are in italics. Especially for long quotes, that's a little annoying to read. Other than that, no complaints, and nice work! [alert admin]
Monday, March 07 2005 @ 01:21 PM PST
CoMa X 7.1 (Mac OS X)
Before chastising s/one for being rude and ignorant, see e.g. http://www.send2fax.com/ .... [alert admin]
Read Comments (3) | More Info | 2 of 4 users found this helpful
Saturday, February 19 2005 @ 11:02 AM PST
ScientificAssistant 0.8.9 (Mac OS X)
There is a new version of this software downloadable at their website -- click here -- version 0.9.9c -- but no one has updated VersionTracker in over two years, there are no FAQ, etc. Has anyone used this? Any new reviews? It requires a TeX installation as well as Frontbase (?!?), and the ScientificApplication program costs $129 (plus whatever Frontbase costs), so it's not cheap. [alert admin]
Thursday, January 13 2005 @ 08:49 PM PST
SubEthaEdit 2.1.1 (Mac OS X)
In a way, it's a shame that the authors have promoted this editor as a collaborative text editor to such a degree. True, that's its most unique feature, but it's a very nice text editor in its own right, even without the collaborative part. I am particularly impressed by the real-time HTML preview (based on Safari's WebKit engine). It's the easiest to use and most intuitive of any that I've tried. I've been using Mozilla, which is nice but overloaded with features given what I want to do -- just type in text and have it rendered as HTML!! -- and the features often get in the way (e.g., web links get changed to local links when I'm editing locally; annoying things like that). Here you get HTML code in one window, rendered HTML in another. Nice and clean. (Now, if only the same were true for LaTeX....) [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 3 of 3 users found this helpful
Tuesday, January 11 2005 @ 03:19 PM PST
Camino 0.8.1 (Mac OS X)
I almost forgot one niggling detail: I do find the placement of the bookmark icon to be annoying. If I stack windows rather than using tabbed browsing (which I often do), and I switch from one to the other, I run the risk of accidentally clicking on the bookmark icon. That and the fact that the Google-search window is a bit short (I regularly search for sets of words that are at least twice as long as the window, and fine-tuning can be a real pain) suggest to me that moving the bookmarks and maybe even cutting back on the URL window would improve the user experience. I almost forgot something else: thanks, guys, for such a great product. [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Saturday, September 25 2004 @ 06:55 AM PDT
Camino 0.8.1 (Mac OS X)
Fast, clean, intuitive, slick. Best browser out there for OS X, imho. I have only two gripes. One, doesn't work with my online bank -- account transfers just don't happen. But that's the only site I've discovered so far. Two, occasionally it goes into "suck up huge numbers of CPU cycles" mode for no apparent reason -- on sites that I've visited before without any problem, for example. I will admit that I noticed this in the past but didn't connect it to Camino until I installed MenuMeters and set up a little CPU meter in my menu bar. Every once in a while it maxes out for extended periods, and a quick "top o -cpu" in the Terminal reveals that Camino is the culprit. Those gripes aside, really superb work. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Saturday, September 25 2004 @ 06:50 AM PDT
Fluid 2.6.1 (Mac OS X)
Very gorgeous, very cpu-intensive
If you guys still haven't tested on a G5 (which I find hard to believe, bc. you've got a dual-processor option in the prefs), I can tell you, it's gorgeous on my dual-2GHz G5 with 23" screen. To my considerable surprise, though, it sucks up CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow. For many of the built-in modules, it starts to skip at medium resolution, and some take forever just to load at highest -- forget any natural-looking motion. So I stick with lower rez and am happy... and it really is... beautiful... and... mesmerising.......... [alert admin]
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Saturday, September 25 2004 @ 06:44 AM PDT
OSX SkyFighters 1945 0.53 (Mac OS X)
Really slick!, with a few thoughts
Ever since I stopped having access to a cluster of Silicon Graphics machines with their networked flight simulator, I've been missing something like this. It's really, really cool, and the action is so smooth and so impressive that on a 23" monitor it might just make you ill. The rendering is just gorgeous, esp. the planes and the clouds, and little touches like being blinded by the sun are really well done. Absolutely worth checking out, probably worth buying. A few issues: Pausing while using a mouse pretty much means crashing when the program is un-paused, in my experience. I know it says to center the mouse when pausing, and I do, but I still spin out of control afterward. ... Couldn't the author throw a bone to those of us who love such games but aren't devoted enough to have a joystick (or don't want one on the desk at work)?? Even letting us reverse up and down directions when mousing would be a big help. ... On a network game I noticed some opponents' planes hovering in mid-air -- zipping forward, then appearing to bounce off of an invisible wall, then zipping, then bouncing. Paused, maybe?, but there were three or four of them and I had only one networked opponent. ... Otherwise, so far (2 days), a thing of beauty. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 2 users found this helpful
Monday, September 20 2004 @ 04:01 PM PDT
Last 10 Comments by Da Bear [ Search for All ]
(rt*m... hit p to unfreeze)
Original feedback item : Read More
Monday, September 20 2004 @ 04:02 PM PDT
OK, with apologies, let me back up on the above. First, disabling password-on-wake only seems to happen intermittently and may (?) be related to setting sleep action to "remove all keys" in preferences. Since changing that setting, I haven't encountered it. Second, it turns out that SSHKeychain doesn't disable sleep -- it just increases my wait time from 1 sec. or so to about 30 sec. (I only thought it made…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Saturday, February 14 2004 @ 11:28 AM PST
That's "imbeciles," not "imbecils."
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Saturday, August 30 2003 @ 02:28 PM PDT
Sad to see how divided this country is...
Is this principle or partisanship? Did you feel sad when Bill Clinton was savaged in the media, etc.? Reasonable people might argue that the right to criticize the leadership of the country is America's proudest legacy....
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Saturday, August 30 2003 @ 12:14 PM PDT
"Free spirits"? Please. I'll take the comments offered by the "sheep" -- especially if they've actually tried the program.
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Saturday, August 30 2003 @ 12:07 PM PDT
Actually, for me "FTP Full Path" had to be foo.com/blog.html, not just blog.html. Once I figured that out, it worked just fine.
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Monday, August 04 2003 @ 12:18 PM PDT
