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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.