Aperture on a 12″ Powerbook (with an unsupported graphics card)

This hack should let you run aperture on a 12″ Powerbook with CPU faster that 1.25Ghz and more than 1GB of RAM. It fools Aperture into thinking that it’s running on a supported video card. It will not help if you don’t have the RAM or CPU required.

The procedure consists of two steps. First we have to actually install Aperture. Next we have to modify the executable to make it ignore the fact that our graphics card is unsupported. I should warn you that this is something that Apple definitely does not support. Should anything go wrong don’t blame me! Your computer may explode. More realistically it will corrupt all your image files and then you’ll be sorry.

Once you have the Aperture DVD in the drive, you have to get the contents of the aperture package. The folder with the packages is hidden in Finder. You can get to it trough command line, or in Finder, in the “Go” menu, the “Go to Folder…” item. Enter “/Volumes/Aperture/Packages/” or at least that’s where it was for me.

First install the “ProAppRuntime” package. That should happen without any coimplaints. Now right-click on the “Aperture” package. Choose “Show Package Contents”. Now click the “Contents” folder and you should see a file called “Archive.pax.gz”. Copy it to some temporary folder on your hard drive. Go to that folder and double click, it should unpack. In this folder a new directory called “Applications” would appear with “Aperture” in that folder. Step 1 is complete.

Step two involves right-clicking on the Aperture application icon, choosing “Show Package Contents”, then going to the “Contents” folder and then “MacOS” folder. Now backup the Aperture executable. Open it in your favourite editor (I used emacs). Search for the string “5200″. You should see “NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra OpenGL Engine” followed by “NVIDIA NV34MAP OpenGL Engine”. Replace every single charcter in the above strings by say number “1″. Including spaces. Save the file, close the editor. And that should be step 2 done.

Now you should be able to run Aperture without getting any complaints. It may crash, delete all your photograps and your 12″ PowerBook might explode.. You’ve been warned.

Please let me know if you had any luck with the above procedure. It has worked for me and Aperture is importing my image library as we speak. Check out this photograph, showing my 12″ PB with Aperture running. It wass taken with a mobile phone so the quality isn’t brilliant.

No comments and please accept my apologies

While I’ve been concentrating on dealing effectively with the SPAM that comes through my email system, I’ve been totally overwhelmed by the SPAM that’s appearing as comments to my blog entries. So far I’ve just disabled comments on new posts, until I figure out a better solution. This would probably involve modifying some PHP code and since I haven’t done much PHP programming before, it might take a while. So that’s one reason why I need to apologize.

The other reason is that I’ve deleted pretty much all the comments, because over 99% have been spam. So I’m awfully sorry if some of you have written anything interesting and now it’s gone because of me. I will let you know as soon as I have the SPAM problem under control.

Trusted digital signatures for Mail in OS X

Having read this nice article, I decided I also want a digital signature certified by a certification authority (CA). Most of them you have to pay for, but Thawte is offering personal email signatures for free.

The process of applying for one is straightforward enough. You first register with Thawte, provide them with details like date of birth etc. and choose a password. Choosing a strong password is important, as you will be reminded anyway. Now you need to request the certificate and that’s where things get a wee bit complicated for Mac users. First, you should use Firefox or Mozilla for dealing with thawte.com, from now on. When you request a certificate, choose a netscape one and then follow the instructions. Once it’s ready an email will tell you so. Now, on the website in “view certificate status, click on the certificate. A new page will load, at the bottom of which you can press fetch. Firefox won’t appear to have done anything. Then in Firefox Preferences, go to Certificates, find your certificate, export it to a file and double click on it in Finder. This will import it into your Macs keychain manager. Now delete the file and the certificate from firefox.

And that’s it, you can now use Mail to sign your emails. For more details see this lengthy tutorial

Matpack again this time with OS X 10.4 Tiger

I’ve updated my Matpack patch to work with Tiger. It’s right here. In the previous post I mentioned a problem with void ftime(timeb* tb). That has been fixed and so random number generation should work as advertised.

Oh yes and one has to have the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variable set so that it contains the directory where the matpack dynamic library is installed.

Matpack and OS X Panther

Matpack is quite nice and user friendly c++ library for doing some numerical computation and visualisation. Unfortunately it won’t compile on OS without some (minor) changes. I’ve made a patch against the most recent version that at least compiles.

The good:
- uses the native VecLib framework for doing linear algebra computation (e.g. matrix inverse), so it should be reasonably efficient in that respect. On other OSes it would use BLAS, but I would expect the native framework to work better.
- compiles as a dynamic library

The bad:
- assumes libpng is installed (I used fink)
- it introduces a small bug, namely axes in 3D plots will have the numerical values displayed only in the exponential format, see mpaxis.cc
- Random number generators might be a bit dodgy (even though it passed the tests in the test directory). See void ftime(timeb* tb) in compat.cc

If you give it a go, comments are welcome.