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.

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.

Brilliant!

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

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.

Lately I had some problems configuring my email adress on the Debian and Ubuntu systems. The logwatch process sent the mail to my system user every day even if I added a MailTo line into my /etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf file.

The reason was that the logwatch process was started from the script /etc/cron.daily/00logwatch with the following line:

/usr/sbin/logwatch --mailto tom

I got mail the morning after changing tom to my full qualified email address.

For my servers I am using Debian and Ubuntu in their current releases because I really like the package management system and how easy it is to install and update additional software. I periodically try the newest “desktop versions” of various Linux distributions and so I did with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) when the second Beta version came out.

I installed it on my Dell Precision M4300 and not just inside a virtual machine because I was seriously thinking about using it as my primary system.

After the installation finished I was really impressed about the progress Ubuntu has made since the last release 8.10. Every piece of hardware in my notebook was identified correctly and ready to use. The last time I tried Ubuntu I had problems connecting to my WPA secured wireless lan – this time I just had to enter the key and I was online. The internal bluetooth module was ready to use and it was easy to connect my Microsoft Bluetooth mouse. So far so good.

The first problems started when I tried to activate the restricted drivers for nvidia to get all the UI candy. On the display of the notebook everything worked fine but when I docked it and closed the lif nothing was displayed on the external screen. I had to remove the D-Dock from the monitor stand to open the lid. Then I was able to configure both monitors by using the nvidia settings tool. After that I could see something on the external monitor even when I closed the lid again. Other people had this problem too of course.

The D-Dock docking station emerged as one of the main problems for my Ubuntu setup. While the sound worked fine when undocked I was not able to hear anything when the notebook was docked. I found this forum entry discussing that problem and I was able to solve it by activating the IEC958 flag as described there.

I also experienced problems where I expected them before I tried it with the new Ubuntu version: standby and hibernate. I was able to set by Notebook to Standby and to wake it up again most of the time but it did not resume after hibernation.

All in all I have to say that I quite liked Ubuntu and I could image to use it as my main system. For some of my work I would still have to use a Windows in a virtual machine – like working on my BlackBerry applications.

This is a bit strange because I would assume that the Data Services settings is just configuring how the Mobile Network behaves. But without activating them the BlackBerry only connects to the Wi-Fi but does not download any messages nor can I make any other data connections. The WiFi symbol is gray and does not get white. After activating the Data Services the symbol gets white and the connection to the RIM server is established. Wow so many unread messages …

Invalid node type
definition: {http://www.troii.com/troii}Folder already exists:
{http://www.troii.com/troii}Folder already exists

I googled a bit and found other people having that problem too. I fixed that problem as suggested in the thread by surrounding the method call registerNodeTypes inside JackrabbitSessionFactory.registerNodetypes() with a try-catch statement.

What bothers me a bit is that the Spring Modules project was deprecated and stopped development somewhen in the mid of 2008. The successor of Spring Moduls should be Spring Extensions but their page does not mention anything about JCR. So what is up with JCR in the Spring environment?

Jungledisk runs a WebDAV server under http://localhost:2667/ – so I was able to connect to that with links and cadaver after starting jungledisk. All I had to do now was to include cadaver in my backup scripts, therefore I wrote a small help script webdavupload.sh:

#!/bin/bash
cadaver http://localhost:2667/ <<EOF
put $1
quit
EOF

Everything I had to do now was to add the line

webdavupload.sh mybackupfile.tgz

in my backup scripts to upload the file to my online storage.