tOMPSON’s blog

some personal, more technical – by Thomas Einwaller

Improving cygwin console (even more)

17 Sep 2009

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.

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Tags: bash, cygwin, vi

BitDefender failed me (again)

In: Security| Software| Windows

16 Sep 2009

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?

(3) Comments
Tags: antivirus, cygwin, Windows

Improving cygwin console

In: Software| Tools| Windows

9 Sep 2009

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.

(4) Comments
Tags: cygwin, puttycyg, Windows

git under Windows 7

In: Software| Windows

24 Aug 2009

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.

(1) Comment
Tags: cygwin, git, Windows

Perl problems under cygwin

In: Software| Windows

19 Aug 2009

Cygwin_med Cygwin 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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Tags: cygwin, git, perl, svn

Facebook 1.6 application and BlackBerry Enterprise Server

In: Blackberry| Mobile| RIM

7 Jul 2009

I am using the Facebook application on my BlackBerry Bold now for a long time … I think since the first version came out. Lately I upgraded to version 1.6 and I noticed that suddenly some of the features that were new in version 1.5 did not work anymore. I was not able to sync the contacts of the BlackBerry device with my Facebook friends and it was not possible to add events from Facebook to the BlackBerry calendar.

After some research I found out that there is a setting in the IT policy of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server named “Disable Organizer Data Access for Social Networking Applications”
that controls if applications like the Facebook application are allowed to access the calendar or the contacts of the BlackBerry device (see KB18427 for details).

We are using BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1.6 and this version does not include this setting so I had to use the instructions of KB15535 to import that policy direction into my server. After explicitly allowing the access to organizer data my Facebook application version 1.6 is now again able to sync my contacts.

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Tags: Blackberry, facebook

Certificate issues with openjdk under Debian

In: Linux| Security| Software

15 Jun 2009

Currently we are developing the connection to mPAY to handle payments for our online time tracking application timr.com. mPAY provides a https URL that takes the payment parameters and returns if the transaction was successful. When testing the call to this URL from our server we always got the following error message:

java.security.InvalidAlgorithmParameterException: the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty

A google searched showed some pages where errors like these were discussed (like here). It seems like there is a bug in openjdk-6-jdk 6b11-9.1+lenny2. The symbolic link /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/security/cacerts is directing to the file /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts which is missing. It should be included in the package ca-certificates-java but that package is unavailable under Debian lenny.

I hope this bug is fixed in a future openjdk version, meanwhile I copied the file from one of my Ubuntu servers.

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Tags: debian, Linux, ssl

Coding Contest review #ccc09

In: Eclipse| Fun| Java| Software

7 Jun 2009

As I tweeted I registered for this years coding contest hosted by the Catalysts at the JKU. It was a great experience and I will try again next year because I am not satisfied with my result.

I started very good and reached the third level first but then I misinterpreted the specification and worked more than and hour and a half on an algorithm that permutes the blocks. I realized to late that my results are wrong because the space between the blocks may vary and not the permutation is missing.

Another lesson learned: I should have removed the dust from my Sedgewick and took it with me because sorting, tree and backtracking algorithms are not in my brain anymore. I learned them at the university but I need them hardly in my daily work.

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Google Wave Presentation

In: Uncategorized

1 Jun 2009

If you did not see this already take the time and have a look at what Google thinks is the future of online collaboration:

Brilliant!

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BlackBerry Bluetooth Stereo Gateway Experiences

In: Uncategorized

31 May 2009

My new car has a line in connector for attaching external audio players to the HiFi system which I tried to with my BlackBerry Bold. Playing music from my 8GB microSD card worked well but I had the problem that calls were not redirected to my built in Bluetooth hands free equipment anymore. It seems that the BlackBerry identifies the line in cable wrongly as a headset.

So I decided to give the BlackBerry Bluetooth Stereo Gateway a try:

gateway

I tried it now for about a week and I learned the following: While the first couple of test drives my BlackBerry Bold rebooted unexpectedly after playing music for some minutes. I thought it could be a problem if I connect the device to two Bluetooth devices (the handsfree set and the stereo gateway) but I found out that it had something to do with the volume. If I set the BlackBerry to maximum volume the reboots happened, if I turned down the volume a little bit I was able to listen to the music for hours.

I am happy with this setup now, no more cable salad in my car.