Did Info Card help?

I like InfoCards... I like the idea that I will not have to remember the usernames and passwords. I am confident the MS will work out how to solve the 'portability issue'... BUT.... I just went through InfoCard hell!! I'm still shaking as the adrenaline that built up is trying to drain from my body... this can't be good for me. Let me tell you what happened.

After a long week at IIW and Data Sharing Summit and OpenSocial Spec meeting, I am finally checking in on the blogosphere at 5:30 am on Saturday morning and I see this really cool thread on Kim's blog. It's all about the qualities of Distributed Data Management that I have been talking about for years, but, it's Kim and Dave and Clayton Donley, who is the Senior Director of Development for Oracle Identity Management.... I get so excited, I have to add a comment and tell them about ooTao's work in the space (although Kim is meant to know :-) ).

And that's when the problems started...

I can use digitalMe on my mac to log into our RPs and even to Mike's blog, but it will not work on Kims blog. I spent a while restarting things; browsers, selectors, OSs, this is just habit as a long-time Windows user, nothing helped.

So I upgraded and downgraded the versions of DigitalMe and tried to log in to no availe. For any who care the error I get is: 'unknown option privfile... blah blah'.

Then I remembered, my old XP PC that is now the kids, should still have InfoCard selector installed so I put aside my mac and power up the old PC. First attempt to login at Kims blog tells me that 'InfoCard isn't installed' which seems strange, since I remember installing it. So I poke around and find that I DO have it installed but I don't have any cards defined... I add a card... I return to Kims blog... I click and YES, the selector invokes and I can see the card and I select it... and I am asked if I want to be redirected to an error page... which isn't exactly what I want but, what the hell, I've come this far.

The error page informs me that the temporal offset of the requesting token is larger than the requisit 300S. Those aren't the exact words but believe me the error message did not say... 'The Client and Server Clocks don't match'... So I unpacked the message and realized that I needed to change the time on the PC so that it matched Kims server within 5 minutes.. I just had to hope that Kims clock was close to right. So I changed the time a few times and yes.... finally... I logged into Kims blog and left a comment.

Unfortunately by the time I got there, my enthusiasm and excitement for the topic had been morphed in to frustrated anxiety so my comment is no-where near the 'tone' I originally intended. There should probably be some joke I can make here about 'Claims Transformations' as this STS certainly transformed my claims... BUT... I have now been trying to write, writing, writing about this damn post for 3 hours...

I think it was worth it though if I can finally get these guys to understand what it is we have built.