Compression

wrtlprnft · Post by **wrtlprnft** » Thu Nov 20, 2008 3:34 pm

Was the .sitx part really necessary?
You know, finding a windows box (no macos one available), deal with the freaking StuffIt site, install a bunch of other crap (namely the .net framework) to get it to work… That's been the most frustrating of all challenges so far.

Post by **adum** » Thu Nov 20, 2008 8:09 pm

this challenge sucks. i should probably just delete it.

tails · Post by **tails** » Thu Nov 20, 2008 8:15 pm

I like the idea of this challenge. What about changing the .sitx part to the ordinary .sit format?

wrtlprnft · Post by **wrtlprnft** » Thu Nov 20, 2008 8:17 pm

No, I think it was fun, actually (I'd never heard of BinHex before), and way more interesting than gzipping the same file over and over again. The company that sells StuffIt appears so evil to me (requiring an e-mail address and not providing an opt-out to their crappy newsletter, having a proprietary format their own tool can't decrypt on all platforms and generally making something as simple as an unarchiver so complicated that you can't easily run in in wine) that it shouldn't be included here, at least in my opininon.

Allosentient · Post by **Allosentient** » Fri Nov 21, 2008 12:14 am

If anything it is a good learning experience for dealing with that kind of crap

m!nus · Post by **m!nus** » Sun Nov 23, 2008 1:45 pm

creating an unpacker for some kind of compression (whether an invented one or some algorith like huffman) would be fun; maybe even for HVM?

Mütze · Post by **Mütze** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 2:47 pm

Today, I've installed Windows 7 Beta in a VirtualBox in order to solve this challenge.

I'm glad, I finally solved it. This looks like an easy challenge, but the sitx part was
very frustrating, as I have no Windows computer. I tried to install the sitx-Expander
in wine, but that did not work.

aurora · Post by **aurora** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 10:24 am

i'm glad, that i'm sitting in front of an imac -- no problems here with any of the compression formats

. the challenge was fun compared to the challenge i solved before this one (floating).

doomi · Post by **doomi** » Wed Sep 02, 2009 9:16 pm

I liked it : )

7-Zip did a good job on Windows, but hqx stopped me there.
so I continued on the Mac with StuffIt which was already installed.

moose · Post by **moose** » Wed Jul 27, 2011 3:14 pm

I did it on Linux. Simply installed StuffIt 2010 for windows and used wine. I was asked for an email, but I didn't give it to them.

The sitx-part was by far more challenging than all other compression parts of this challenge. Removing this part would make it too easy. (As long as StuffIt 2010 is available for free).

laz0r · Post by **laz0r** » Thu Jul 28, 2011 2:43 pm

moose wrote:I did it on Linux. Simply installed StuffIt 2010 for windows and used wine. I was asked for an email, but I didn't give it to them.

The sitx-part was by far more challenging than all other compression parts of this challenge. Removing this part would make it too easy. (As long as StuffIt 2010 is available for free).

Under Mac OS X, there's a free program called The Unarchiver which did all of it for me

Thu Jul 28, 2011 2:55 pm

laz0r wrote: Under Mac OS X, there's a free program called The Unarchiver which did all of it for me

There is also a beta version which has been compiled for Windows to be used on the command line. I think I used it for one of the steps

rain1024 · Post by **rain1024** » Mon Dec 12, 2011 3:52 pm

stuffIT is a suitable tool for this problem.

)

exomo · Post by **exomo** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 12:58 pm

Stuffit wnats payment data even for the trial version and charge you if you don't remove your trial version fast enough, no way I', going to install this.
Good enough Linux has an The Unarchiver , too that can extract all of this.

Grevas · Post by **Grevas** » Mon Jan 09, 2023 11:26 am

Yes, this challenge sucks. It's only challenging by beeing obtuse; the way to go atleast is straightforward (7z can just open the initial file, not much thinking there)...

But atleast currently it's somewhat doable.
- 7z has a plugin to deal with hqx, no mac necessary
- used "unar" on in a linux shell to unpack sitx