I downloaded an Epson printer driver the other day. It was a HQX file. HQX is an old mac format used for file transfers. It’s called “hex” for some reason. I don’t remember of it is compressed or just provides some sort of protection against corruption on mixed networks. It’s antique.<\/p>\n
I opened the HQX file and found a SEA file. SEA stands for Self-Extracting Archive. It’s a file format that provides both compression and an application to decompress. Wow, you don’t see many of those anymore. Also antique, but apparently still kicking as it was an OS X application. I downloaded an Epson printer driver the other day. It was a HQX file. HQX is an old mac format used for file transfers. It’s called “hex” for some reason. I don’t remember of it is compressed or just provides some sort of protection against corruption on mixed networks. It’s antique. I opened the HQX … Continue reading Epson Puzzle Box<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3362,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions\/3362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nInside the SEA, there was a folder and inside the folder was a DMG. A DMG is a disk image. These are very popular now and are the usual way that something like a printer driver would be distributed. DMG is a compressed format. I wonder why they felt like they had to compress a compressed format. Normally a DMG is the final layer, but no . . .
\nI mounted the DMG and within there was an install program, a Vise installer. As far as I know, the Vise installer also provides compression. This vintage of installing software is somewhat older than the DMG and somewhat newer than HQX. So they compressed a compresssed, compressed file, put two applications in there and added a funny format as the very top layer.
\nFortunately, when I double-clicked the installer, my drivers actually installed. I can only imagine that they were much smaller than the file I downloaded from Epson, who has a rather slow server. The drivers are fine, but the release engineer is an idiot. This process took more than half an hour.
\nTag: Epson<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"