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User Name Rufus J
Member Since 2002-12-12
Total number of Feedback Posts: 33
Total number of comments: 62
Last 10 Feedback Posts by Rufus J [ Search for All ]
Xerver Free Web Server 4.32 (Mac OS X)
nice idea, but needs some polishing 
First, I just would like to say that there are MANY webservers other than Apache, written in several programming languages, with different priorities and different features and serving a range of overlaping and also divergent purposes. Comments implying there is no legitimate need for any webserver other than the one Apple chose to ship with its OS are irrelevant and reveal far more about the posters' lack of intelligence than they do about this or any other product so unfortunately victimized. Having said that, I can't recommend this as fulfilling its stated aims. The downloads is tiny, but once it's running it is NOT small. It consumes quite a lot of memory.... far more than my Caudium server. The installation and setup readme has a very serious ommision - the setup command must be run from the xerver directory (i.e. "cd [xerver directory]"). The setup sequence is not as clearly or intelligently laid out as it should be, and easily could be. "Help" doesn't really. There is definitely a place for a good, easy to set up gui administered server, but there are others that are fuller featured and easier to administer. I would definitely recommend the free version of LightSpeed as first choice followed by the free version of Abyss from Aprelium. Xerver has some way to go to match them, but we should be applauding and encouraging the efforts of developers who are attempting to provide good alternative solutions, and I hope this does improve. [alert admin]
Sunday, June 22 2008 @ 02:10 PM PDT
Opera 9.5 (Mac OS X)
At this point, most any browser will render most pages at pretty much the same speed. It's becoming a bit silly to reamain fixated on this and in the real world network issues are teh wait to download content are still a bigger issue than actual rendering. It also makes testing live webpages over the internet a fairly useless exercise. I don't find much consistent difference in speed this way. It's interesting to me how much better the final version performs than did the last beta or any of the more recent snapshot builds, although I am still having some problems with some SSL pages. The comment that it's un-mac-like makes me laugh. Such preocupation with nonsense! It has point and click thingies which makes it mac-like. Visual layout is configurable and changeable in a way that other browsers just cannot match. Preferences also are far more configurable than almost any other browser. I have been using various versions of Opera for quite some time and will continue to use this as my default. [alert admin]
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Friday, June 13 2008 @ 03:06 AM PDT
Rumpus 5.2 (Mac OS X)
Ok, this really does pack a lot of features and is quite easy to use, but the price seems really out of line considering there are alternatives which, for most users, will perform at least as well. The only advantage this has over CrushFTP is that it is indeed very much less resource heavy, but if you haven't got a lot of concurrent users, this won't be a problem and in terms of features and ease of use they are virtually equal. If what you're really looking for is a very thorough web interface, you should check out hotscripts.com where you will find several incredibly full featured and flexible perl cgi scripts you can use with your http server, and even include various security and user and directory control features, without the need to run another server on additional ports. One of these could easily be used in conjuntion with a standard UNIX FTP server, for example Pure-FTP which has at least two different and easy to use GUI frontends available for the Mac. As I said, this is great software but just way too much money - even without mentioning the strangely rigid licensing scheme tied not just to concurrent connections, but also to user accounts. [alert admin]
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Thursday, May 31 2007 @ 02:38 PM PDT
7zX 1.5.3 (Mac OS X)
It does work. It's a little clumsy to use and seems slow. Not much competition as far as archiving to 7z format. BetterZip is probably more expensive than most Versiontracker users seem likely to want to pay. Both compress a little better than Bzip2 and quite a bit better than Zip. BetterZip gives slightly better compression than 7zX. Also, 7zX applies the file extension s7z which BetterZip, The Unarchiver, and Untar don't recognize and refuse to unarchive. Changing it to 7z allows these tools to open the archives. I don't know if this has ramifications on other platforms.
It's free and it works. I wouldn't discourage anyone who wants to use this format from trying this software, but if all you want to do is open some 7z archives, I'd recommend The Unarchiver which is what I use to open all the Unix format archives.
[alert admin]Read Comments (2) | More Info | 1 of 1 users found this helpful
Saturday, November 25 2006 @ 10:24 PM PST
Compression Master 4.0.1 (Mac OS X)
This app seems to have developed quite a mystique about it, but I suspect this is due mostly to its very high price tag, the apparent flexibility of export capability and the unashamed hyperbole of its developers. The fact is, output quality of its own mp4 and h264 codecs is well beneath what is achievable using the Apple supplied h264 encoder or any of the currently available QuickTime codecs from DivX™, 3ivx, or Xvid. I'm not a big fan of ffmpegX, but I do recommend MPEG Steamclip which has batch capabilities and allows quite a lot of adjustment as well as the use of all your QT codecs and MPEG exporting asnd editing. The scale and deinterlace functions in Compression Master are particularly disappointing, working very poorly in comparison to those found in freeware and shareware. Unless you really really need the ability to quickly apply presets and mix them in the queue, or need to export some very esoteric format, AND you don't mind spending lots of money for not much quality this might be for you. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 1 of 2 users found this helpful
Tuesday, July 11 2006 @ 07:37 PM PDT
Opera 9.0b2 (Mac OS X)
Opera has been my default browserfor a long time,
however, this beta has some bugs which don't exist in 8.54. There are some issues in this beta which sould be addressed before it's final and I am still continuing with 8.54 until then. This does look like it will be a nice step forward, though. [alert admin]
Friday, May 26 2006 @ 06:51 AM PDT
LightZone 1.2.2 (Mac OS X)
This is a fabulously intuitive and quite powerful way to manipulate digital images. I am especially pleased with how much easier it is for me to adjust my monochrome images. I am one of those who left the darkroom but have been having trouble finding the way... Very complex and effective adjustments are easy to make using LightZone and with some digging and thought, some very advanced techniques are also available. I have had some crashing issues, but saving after every step or two has reduced this to a minimum. It is obviously a very resource intensive app. I'm running a dual 1.3mh G4 (upgraded Sawtooth) with 1.5gb of memory. I highly recommend this app to anyone interested in traditional image manipulation. I bought it :)) [alert admin]
Read Comments (1) | More Info | 4 of 4 users found this helpful
Tuesday, March 28 2006 @ 01:47 PM PST
ABCLaunch 0.6.2 (Mac OS X)
I can recommend that anyone looking for a simple "quick-launch" solution try this. It works very well and doesn't require any app specific configurations. I love it :) [alert admin]
Sunday, December 25 2005 @ 09:31 AM PST
DVDRemaster 2.5 (Mac OS X)
Poor quality compression for large discs
For making a movie-only copy, eliminating the extra audio tracks and menus and features, etc., a high percentage of DVDs require no compression at all or only very little. The re-quanitsizer in this app is just fine for such use, but it does a poor job of compressing full discs or long movies. I bought this in version one and quickly threw it away in favor of DVD2one which offers very high compression quality while maintaining high speed. This version of DVDRemaster is no better in this regard. I'm not interested in tying up my computer using the SLOW resampling. I can do that in other apps that are far cheaper. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 6 of 10 users found this helpful
Sunday, November 13 2005 @ 08:16 AM PST
DVD2oneX 2.0 (Mac OS X)
can confirm through use on a G3 running 10.3.9 that the version of DVD2one compiled for 10.3 runs without crashing. This is the download link for that version. I can also confirm that it runs fine on 10.4.3, without crashes, and that the burn function works fine for me with incredibly low CPU usage when the app is hidden. You must hide from the Dock as the Mac convention of Command+h does not work and the app's menu also does not follow convention. Burned without error in the background while running other tasks. Note that the burn speed is set by the burner so if your combination of media/burner/player requires slower burn speeds, this is not the way to go. Everyone is entitiled to their opinion aboutthe esthetics of the interface, but to say it's confusing is just dumb. It's wizard style and goes step by step. How can anyone be confused??? You can not like it, but if you can't follow it after a try or two, there's something wrong between your ears. As far as the "toy-like" styling, I note with some irony that Toast, which seems to be very popular among the denigrators of this software, has a much sillier - imo - gui design. As I said, compression quality is extremely high and quite fast. Long movies and full disc copies can be compressed with little to no discernable degradation. It's difficult to justify the upgrade for users of the previous version because quality and speed have already been incomparable, but for new users, this is a great app and worth the money if you want great quality compression at high speed. I have been a DVD2one user since v1.1 or so and have always been happy with the software and this seems no less satisfactoy. [alert admin]
Post a comment | More Info | 2 of 4 users found this helpful
Friday, November 11 2005 @ 07:54 AM PST
Last 10 Comments by Rufus J [ Search for All ]
Uhhh he posted that he'd solved his problem. But, to inform you, this problem of software refusing to open is not all that uncommon in OS X. The solution he found is one that works with some regularity. Very frequently, however, the problem lies in some corrupt file that can be all but untraceable. A fact of life in OS X and it isn't because the user did something he shouldn't have or that there's…
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Thursday, July 03 2008 @ 04:00 PM PDT
That's very generous Delta... suggesting there might have been a brain involved in some part of that! gwaaaaahhhhhh!
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Friday, June 27 2008 @ 04:58 PM PDT
Try the test of Version Tracker 'previous days'
It works fine for me, except that the VT scripts only go back one page and then attempt to return results from 1969 when any other previous day's list is called. It does this is Camino and Firefox and Safari, too. Your experience of crashing, etc. is definitely NOT universal. What do you base your rating of one star for features on? Haha! There is no browser that offers such a configurable interface nor a…
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Sunday, June 15 2008 @ 02:08 PM PDT
"Yes I do have a VALID argument" - BS
No, you didn't address the point. You alluded to it and then proceeded to refuse to respond to it. The problem is that it is up to the developers to provide the information. If they are failing to treat this with the urgency YOU demand, then take it up with them or simply stick with macupdate. I have a few applications where the updates have been consistently announced here at VT before I receive the…
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Tuesday, June 10 2008 @ 08:42 PM PDT
hmmm.... are you SURE it's valid?
Just a little question: How is the database maintained? Does VT have employees sitting around monitoring the version status of a zillion applications on a whole bunch of different platforms and then writing update info, etc., etc., or do the developers log in to their accounts and submit this information to the db??? If you think it's so critical that VT have updates listed in a more timely manner perhaps you should complain to the…
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Tuesday, June 10 2008 @ 02:13 PM PDT
No, it's not just you. This is a unique and stupid behavior. Furthermore, Sunrise does not autocomplete URLs for me. If I fail to enter a tld, Sunrise assumes I'm searching and returns se results. This is a very presumptious and unhelpful behavior and really irritates me. Some other browsers do this but offer a preference to change it, which Sunrise does not. Opera even allows you to create a list of tlds for…
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Sunday, March 30 2008 @ 07:53 AM PDT
what an utterly stupid rating!!!
I agree spring-loaded folders would (will?!?) be a great addition. I don't need to comment on your frothing rant, but I do not believe the lack of this feature warrants a one-star review. That this omission has soooooo peaved you makes your complaint about "excessive" features laughably ironic! I don't know if you need to get a grip or let go of whatever it is you're squeezing. Yes, the available FTP clients all have some…
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Friday, August 24 2007 @ 05:28 PM PDT
Uh....... this folder is nearly always empty and isn't even necessary! The DVD audio tracks are contained in the VOBs in the VIDEO_TS folder. It may have not properly transcoded the audio, but an empty AUDIO_TS folder is not a symptom of whatever problem there was.
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Sunday, June 24 2007 @ 11:55 AM PDT
Looking through the comments left by others suggests that for a lot of people the web interface is the main attraction and it is completely reasonable to point out that there are a number of very fully featured and easy to administer scripts available to handle a broad number of user needs without requiring the user to run the additional ftp service, which for a lot of these people doesn't seem to be necessary, and…
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Friday, June 01 2007 @ 10:44 PM PDT
Why not use Fink for free (can also install KDE, GNOME, etc.)
Neither fink nor DarwinPorts offer all packages of all softwares available. For that matter, neither do all Linux or BSD distros. In other instances, packages available for one distro will be very different from the "same" software package offered in another distro. Both fink and DarwinPorts offer several packages with out-of-date dependency versions which in some cases are very cumbersome to overcome, or strange and incomplete feature sets. One can build from source, but this…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Sunday, April 29 2007 @ 11:19 AM PDT
