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Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.
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2006-02-07The Ultimate Confirmable Incoherence ExperiencecoComment ExcitementAs the result of recent excitement in the Swiss Alps, I applied for an invitation to coComments to see how well it works. I love the idea of collecting the comments I leave on blogs in a place where I can find them again and also correlate with the comments of others. a I developed serious coComment Envy when Nancy White allowed as how she had used one of the invitations. For those who want to play with the comment coordination tool, you can leave your e-mail under the “Get Notified” dialog on the home page. So far, invitations have been returned within 24–48 hours. The site is in serious beta and you need to understand that the process won’t work for comments on all blogs for a variety of reasons. There are useful forums operating on the site and you can check out what others are saying. It is also fun to watch Scoble’s and Nancy’s posts where others are busily attempting to coComment them. Studying the Confirmability of Browser-Hosted Web Service HooksThe reason for this post is that coComment is not working for me. There appear to be problems with my browser security and privacy settings. I think I know what to do now, and I am going to screen-capture the whole process and add it to this blog entry when I succeed (or give up). This is an interesting challenge because I have noticed how difficult it is to harden a web-carried protocol when there is a tremendous variation of end-points. In this case, there are three parties:
This is challenge reminds me of the kind of difficulty that can also arise in the LID approach to single signon. It is representative of the problem of creating confirmable experience over the internet when so much of what is happening is out of the sight of at least two end parties (in this case me, someone at coComment, and sometimes the owner of a blog I want to coComment). It is easier to find cases where, because of the opacity of one or more players, it is near-impossible to perform end-user troubleshooting and even more difficult for end-point parties to figure out what is happening in the complex arrangement that is interposed between them. I have no idea how developers of these web systems are able to verify and troubleshoot them in the face of “it’s not working” reports. Snooping AroundSo I have my screen capture utility at the ready and I am now going to see how to get from coComment-not-working to coComment-working in a way that may or may not be helpful to the coComment folk. Aha, when I go to Scobleizer’s page I get three blocked cookies that amazon.com wants me to have (related to the Naked Conversations image on the page). I am not going to change that. When I have a comment ready, I click the coComment link in my browser. I get an invitation to log in. I am already. Ah, but wait, there are more blocked cookies now. Seven of them, all from www.cocomment.com. I begin to see the problem. Oh look, when I logged on from here, I can see my coComment user ID and password, in plaintext, sent as parameters to a www.cocomment.com/LoginServlet request. That’s thrilling. But I use the browser security pane to add cocomment.com to my approved sites for cookies. And it all works. I will try one with Nancy White’s site too just to make sure this is reproducible. Wow, I hadn’t realized how many links on her page attempt to deliver cookies to my computer. That’s awesome. I think I’ll tell her about it. So that’s easier than I thought, once I realize I can use my browser’s cookie detector to tell me what site to grant blanket permission to drop cookies on me. Excitement Excitement ExcitementNow that this is working I can see how it can be mildly addictive. First, for anything I’ve coCommented on, I can see all other coComments on the blog entry. This is an useful way to check on comment-chain conversations that I am part of. Even sexier than that, I can subscribe to a feed that carries all of my coComments. And I can subscribe to the coComments feeds of others as well as look at the conversations they are part of. I need to check if I have to grant permission for that. But meanwhile, here are Orcmid’s RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 coComment feeds. They appear to offer full content. I love to keep records and also be able to go back and see what others have said. There is a lot to learn in working with coServices like coComment. It is starting to be fun. Oh yes, for me the confirmable experience succeeded, and now I need to go tell them that. I wonder if I can coComment a forum submission on the coComment site … |
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