Something fresh

In: Uncategorized

27 Nov 2009

Yesterday I decided to use another design for my blog. I think the old one was more that a year old ;-)

I hope you like it!

Yesterday a friend of mine told me that he received an error message while trying to install the BlackBerry Desktop Manager 5.0.1 under Windows 7 64 Bit. I told him that the Desktop Manager installed and runs correctly on my system (which is the same) so we tried to find out what caused his problem. The error message said something like:

An error occurred while registering the module C:\Program Files (x86)\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\IS71 Connectors\OE Connector\OLKExpress5.dll. HRESULT -2147010895. Please contact support.

After looking into the Connectors folder I found out that it contains various dll for connecting to different applications to sync with. I always had Outlook 2007 installed on my systems which he had not. So it seems like the BlackBerry Desktop Manager tries to install the connector dll for Outlook Express – which does not exist on Windows 7 anymore – it is called Windows Mail now.

I will try to contact RIM to tell them that the Desktop Manager installer is not fully compatible with Windows 7.

I was happy the first time I used the built in backup feature of Windows 7 RC1. It was a very easy tool that allowed me to backup my whole system (or just selected partitions) to another external disk or a network share.

Today I tried to backup my current Windows 7 installation before updating the firmware of my Intel Postville SSD – but I was not able to creat the backup. I always got the following error message:

There is not enough disk space to create the volume shadow copy on storage location. Make sure that for all volume to be backup up, the minimum disk space required for shadow copy creation is available. This applies to both the backup storage destination and volume included in the backup. Minimum requirement for Volumes less than 500 megabytes, the minimum is 50 megabyte of free space. For volumes more than 500 megabytes, the minimum is 320 megabytes of free space. Recommended at least 1 gigabytes free of disk space on each volumes if volumes size is more than 1 gigabytes (0×80780119)

I figured out that the hidden volume created by the Windows 7 setup caused this error. It is only 100 megabytes of size and has only 37 megabytes free. I was not able to deselect it or to free space on it. So now I am giving Macrium Reflect – Free Edition a try – I hope this does the trick, so far it looks pretty nice.

Some weeks ago I tried to install the android client of our time tracking system timr on my HTC Magic using Eclipse. Normally the Android Debug Bridge (adb) recognizes connected Android phones and the dialog in Eclipse allows you to select on which device you want to install the application you are trying to debug.

In the case of the G1 this works very well but the HTC Magic did not appear in the dialog and I could not select it. Some research showed that the driver that was installed from Windows for the device was not correct. I head to use the great USBDeview tool to remove the installed driver. This allowed me to install the driver from usb_driver directory in the Android SDK. After that the device showed up in the Eclipse dialog and I was able to select it for installation.

Today I noticed that the new iTunes version 9.0.1.8 shows three small media control buttons in the preview window of the Windows 7 task bar. That is a nice feature because I to not have to aim at the small icon in the notification area for pause/play/forward/previous:

itunes

As I stated out in one of my last posts I am using cygwin a long time now and I am using it more and more within the last months. This is mainly caused by switching to git as my new favorite source code management tool and using maven for every Java project I am currently working on.

Today I fixed some small issues I had with cygwin that kept the true excellence of the bash command line, I was used to from my Linux systems, away from me.

One of these problems was that the Umlauts did not work in bash. I was able to fix this by adding the following lines to my ~/.inputrc

set meta-flag on
set output-meta on
set convert-meta off

The second thing was that navigating with the cursor keys did not work in vim. This was fixed by creating a vimrc file using the sample by issuing the following command

cp /usr/share/vim/vim72/vimrc_example.vim ~/.vimrc

Another benefit of the vimrc file was that syntax highlighting and colors were now enabled. I also had to make sure that the TERM environment variable was set to cygwin to get the cursor keys working. I did this by adding the following line to my ~/.profile file:

export TERM=cygwin

Now I am really happy with my console setup under Windows 7.

Today I had problems running my newly installed cygwin 1.7 beta and minTTY after updating BitDefender. It only took me some minutes to find out that BitDefender was the cause of the problem (much faster than the last time).

After fidling around with some settings and trying some workarounds from various web resources I decided to uninstall BitDefender. Now I am looking for a good replacement. Any recommendations for a Windows 7 antivirus program?

I am using cygwin for a long time now. It is one of the first tools I install on the Windows systems I am working on.

The bad thing about cygwin is that it uses the Windows Command/Console to run the bash. Selecting text, copy and paste are really hard to do inside the Windows Console so I searched for a better solution.

I came across puttycyg which is basically a manipulated putty that allows to make a “connection” to the local cygwin installation. This is the perfect way for me to have a real bash functioniality under Windows. Working with maven, subversion and git got a lot better for me.

There are already some posts out there discussing this issue which git in cygwin has under Windows Vista. It will be no surprise if I tell you that the same problem still exists under Windows 7.

Microsofts UAC looks for executables with “install”, “update” or “setup” in their name and requires user account elevation to execute them. This does not work for git-update-index.exe under cygwin and so the command fails with “Permission denied”.

The workaround of creating manifest files for each of the “suspicious” files as described here worked for me.

Cygwin_medCygwin is one of the first things I install on my Windows systems and lately I added some more tools to my cygwin setup for the use of distributed SCM systems. Luckily both mercurial and git are included in the cygwin packages and I hope I find the time within the next days to write about my experiences with those systems.

One problem I ran into when using git svn under cygwin was the following error message:

[main] perl 5940 C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe: *** fatal error - unable to remap C:\cygwin\lib\perl5\5.10\i686-cygwin\auto\File\Glob\Glob.dll to same address as parent(0x8C0000) != 0x950000
[main] perl 5328 fork: child 5940 - died waiting for dll loading, errno 11

After some research I found out that I had to run rebaseall to solve this problem. This tool seems to clean up the versions of the various installed components. But rebaseall can only be run when no other cygwin process is active. So I had to go to the bin directory of my cygwin installation and start the ash shell. Inside ash I was able to run rebaseall.

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