Remember S.E.T.?

The other day, while cleaning out some drawers at home, I found an old registration confirmation for S.E.T from VISA.
I must admit, I hardly remembered.
S.E.T. - short for Secure Electronic Transaction(s) - was an attempt by VISA (and others) to establish secure protocols for electronic payments.
I think we even implemented this in an online shop, around 2000. At least we had a plan to do so, not sure if we really did...

Anyway, if you want to get nostalgic, check it on Wikipedia.

And while you're at it, check out WAP as well, should go to the same drawer shredder.

Dryft Virtual Keyboard

Wow... if this virtual keyboard - just presented by dryft - really works, I need it...

Don't have an Android tablet yet, but I neeeeed this.

(via GigaOm)

OSCON 2013: John Graham-Cumming, "Turing's Curse"

The wonderful John Graham-Cumming debunks some new trends in IT as quite old... nice and excellent talk.

JSP/JSTL migration problem

While migrating some of my work stuff from my old WinXP laptop (ThinkPad T500... good old machine) to my new Windows 7 T430 (also fine iron), I switched from Tomcat v5 (yes, indeed, old) to Tomcat v7.
Tomcat v7 comes with a new servlet, JSP and EL spec. Not a real problem - I thought.

But once I got all the data sources etc up and running, my JSPs would not compile and gave EL parsing errors like "javax.el.ELException: Failed to parse the expression".

A bit googling revealed this nice post on Stackoverflow.

Turns out, that with the new EL standard, Java keywords are forbidden as variables.

And I had "static" as an URL parameter  in ${empty param.static} as well as "class" as a variable to hold css/style class-names.

Once I renamed those everything worked fine again.
The first once was nasty, though, because as an URL parameter the name was of course exposed externally... Had to change some other scripts as well.

No Key Lime Pie, take a break ^h^h^h^h^h^h Kitkat instead

So, Google decided to call the next Version of Android (4.4) Kitkat instead of Key Lime Pie (as has been rumoured).

Not a bad name, probably more (brand) recognition world-wide then key-lime-pie.
Also, they created a wonderful Apple spoofing ad. I just love it.

So I probably have to turn to my dear daughter to make me one of those...