darkness

euphorik and I were talking about how we needed a website to keep our gift selections for Christmas on. Today I went out searching on Google. Google has a whole “Gift Registry” category in their directory. I’m going to go through and review some of the top sites listed there.

• Organized Registry: This site is OK. No clear way to make a direct link to your registry, but if you go into (for example) your account information page look for unipad.php in the source. Near that you should find a hidden field called acctid. Take that number and use http://www.organizedregistry.com/unipad.php?acctid=12345 as the direct link to your registry, where 12345 is whatever number you found for acctid. No login required for gift buyers, though you can apparently password protect the registry. The site has a very simple, if a bit unpolished at times, design. There’s big happy “+1″ buttons when you want to buy something for someone. Please don’t use the option to play a MIDI song when someone comes to your registry. All options — including real name, user name, and password — from registration time can apparently be changed after logging in. When I was building my registry I didn’t see the “shopping frame” that I think was promised. Could be Mozilla, could be Privoxy, could be they’re just broken. In short: nothing astounding, but it seems to work well enough.

• What To Get.Net: This site is also kind of ugly, but it works. This site has all the features of Organized Registry and more, it seems. They both have this bookmarklet you can add in that’ll pop up a window from which it’s easy to add an item (that you’re currently browsing) to your wish list. WTG.NET allows multiple registries. Also, the URL to get to your wish list is nicer: http://www.whattoget.net/view/username. (You can find this URL when you go to the “e-mail people” link on the menu at the left after logging in. Or something like that.) It also lets you enter in some important personal information, like shoe size, etc. The registry page has pictures of items, and frankly I suspect it might be a bit more annoying than, for example, Organized Registry’s listing; the listings are now huge, so I question if it separates them into pages for your or what. New windows pop up when someone clicks the link to an item. The registry also has a “printable version” button at top. It has a “visitors” counter at the bottom of the registry listing too. In summary: probably the nicest one yet. Which means the nicest of two.

• FindGift.com: OK, we’re getting better and better. This site has a much simpler and shorter registration process for you. Again, you can apparently change all information you enter when you register later, including user name. The registry list is easy on the eyes and concise. You can click the box next to an item to buy it, which may not be the most intuitive thing in the world; there are instructions there to help the less adventurous gift buyers. Neat feature: you can assign a code word to your purchase, then go back and “undo” the purchase using your code word if you make a mistake, couldn’t find the item, etc. Gifts can also have categories. I don’t know how much the registry listing lets you sort/filter by these categories; it doesn’t appear to have any interaction WRT to categories so I suspect the answer is “not at all.” The URL to get to your registry is a bit longer, but does contain your username at least. They’re a bit more strict on searching for registries, too: the require you enter a bit of the first name, last name, and the state where the person is located (or at least registered at). Summary: probably the best yet.

• Postwish.com: Lots of questions in registration. (I don’t have a fucking “Barangay”.) You can change everything except user name after registration, it seems. “Events” like “Christmas Day” are handled a bit differently from other sites. Lots of categories, but I don’t see a way to add/remove categories. The e-mail it sends people is kind of ugly. Then again, so is the URL it gives you to go to. It’s not even easily dingus-clickable. No quick way to click from the registry to see a gift, no visible way to get more than all of the requested quantity of an item, and the form you have to fill out when you buy something has way too many fields (too intimidating). Verdict: stick with FindGift.com so far.

• Swagbag.com: Decent interface, however it doesn’t seem to work quite right through Privoxy: I suspect it’s using more than just session cookies, because when I added an item I got kicked to some weird screen afterward. (Follow up: I just tried it with Privoxy off and it worked fine.) It doesn’t ask too many questions, and the interface isn’t too bad; that is, it’s pleasing on the eye if not too clear at times. The registry listing is OK, if a bit bulky. One positive is that it lets people easily leave “notes” on items, which appear to show to everyone. No easy bookmark for adding items in Mozilla/Linux, or so they say. (Maybe Mozilla everywhere.) Has a nice feature of adding multiple wish lists, unsurprisingly called “swagbags”. Can’t change user name, but all other registration information looks easily modifiable. The URL to get there isn’t too bad, but is a GET query to a CGI an ID for your wish list. Verdict: OK, but I’m still thinking FindGift.com is better.

• Stepcast: Easy to sign up. User interface to registered users looks like a power-user kind of interface, with few frills and a useful-looking toolbar down the left side. You can have multiple lists it seems. (After changing the name of one, it won’t show up immediately on the left; go click on something else and it’ll update.) Nice privacy settings on registries. Adding URLs for items is kind of weird: you have to add the item, then point a merchant to it. I suspect it isn’t meant to link directly to items, though you could make it do it. Going to view a registry, the listing is concise. The links may be a bit small. When you click “buy online” it makes a new browser window with their interface at the top to mark the item bought and the merchant’s URL in the bottom (main) frame. When I went and marked an item as bought, it listed my only item as “item with no description.” This site is no longer pretty to me, and is in fact becoming sort of intolerably bare to look at. Verdict: looks promising, but needs some sprucing up so it doesn’t remind me of a Sears outlet mall, and needs some bug fixes.

• TheThingsIWant.com: I looked at some people’s registry listings first on this site. The links on the list I was looking at brought me right to Amazon’s page, which is good. Site is a bit ugly, but usable so far. They give you a bookmark when you sign up, and the registration process doesn’t ask too many questions. When you click a link to buy an item you’re in a frame like at Stepcast. When you click “I bought it” you’re taken to a form where you can say how many you bought and who you are. It’s easy enough to create lists. You can change all registration information except for your user name. The e-mail it will send out to people for you got marked by my Spamassassin as spam (5.2/5.0). Nasty long link in that e-mail that doesn’t dingus click well. Eek, their mail host is listed in Osirusoft; don’t have them send mail for you, I guess. Verdict: functional site, especially if you like people to use those framed pages when they buy stuff for you. Worried about the spam thing; don’t really want to support someone that may be spamming. Probably the best since FindGift.com.

• Wishbox.com: Here’s a short one for you. I couldn’t click the “Update your Wishbox” link on the menu on the right because it uses Javascript, and Privoxy has rendered it non-functional (or it was non-functional to begin with). I’m just not going to bother. No way I’m going to be running around every dirty shopping site on the Internet with my pants down (a.k.a. Privoxy off and my cookies being unfiltered *gasp*). Verdict: HTML. Ever heard of it? (For the record, I went back to this site with Privoxy off, and it still didn’t work in Mozilla/Linux. Too IE-centric perhaps?)

• wishrepublic.com: Nice clean site. Fast, simple, acceptable to the eyes. Fatal flaw: apparently no links from the registry listing. It’s kind of an ugly registry listing at that. You can make an item available once you’ve bought it. No visible easy link directly to your registry; search for it and copy the link. Also, no multiple quantities on items. Items have categories, and they’re editable. Verdict: clean site, add a few more features and clean up the registry listing and it’d be great. For now, I rate it unusable.

• MyGiftList: UGH. Doesn’t work in Privoxy after you try to add an item. Also, lists aren’t easily public: you have to enter the e-mail address of everyone you want to see your list, then they can go to it from a URL in the e-mail. Each user you add has a set of categories like “boss” or “significant other” and gifts can be shown/hidden based on a person’s “role.” Verdict: Unusable! Bad site, no cookie.

So that’s my review. For now, I’m recommending FindGift.com or TheThingsIWant.com. I’ll probably try using FindGift.com first for my actual list. I’ll post here with any further findings. If anyone has any better suggestions for sites to use (quickly, now; I’m going to be making a potentially large list here for Christmas) please e-mail it to me.

Uneventful day for the most part yesterday. Went to darkho’s house to have dinner with her family. It was a good dinner, and darkho made good Chantilly Potatoes. I’ll also take this time to be random and mention that it’s currently about 59degF at the pad. This could explain the incessant running of my nose.

Got a call about 0130 last night from Time Warner Telecom (TWTC). They told me that one of the T1′s at one of our new sites was pegged for several hours. Upon checking it out I saw a nice flood of UDP packets. The contents appeared to include something like “+++ATH0″. They appeared to be attacking an IP belonging to an ISP in Israel. I think they’re a DSL provider, but I’m not sure; my Hebrew is, uh, a bit rusty. That is Hebrew, right? I recognized the selection for the Russian language on the first page, though.

I was immediately concerned that our new firewalls had been hacked and were now being used in a DOS. After checking things out though, I noticed the attack coming from the LAN side. Then I remembered that, while installing our last site on Wednesday (we have one left that didn’t get finished on Wednesday), I saw outbound IRC connections and alerted the technician that it might be a control channel for a back door/Trojan/whatever. There were two PCs causing the flood from the LAN, and I also saw outbound IRC connection attempts from those two PCs. I firewalled the target address (the flood is still going on AFAIK, probably will be until the PCs are rebooted, and possibly won’t stop even then) and any packets coming from a range of usual IRC ports. Alerted the administrator, told them to get the technicians down there working on AV software, which is probably out of date or missing.

Also reorganized my iptables rules so I could have the Corporate site route between two branch sites (packet in tunnel, then back out another tunnel). The src parameter when adding a route with iproute2 is mad useful.

I’m going to need to set up a WINS server on their network pretty soon so cross-domain browsing works. I’m not really looking forward to this, though. I was going to use Samba to do it, but last I heard Samba doesn’t do WINS replication. This means I’ll have to use their NT4 server at the Corporate site down south to synchronize with our Corporate server up here. It’s either that or make the whole enterprise rely on a single WINS server, which doesn’t seem like a particularly good idea to me. Also, I can’t help but suspect that Samba doesn’t checkpoint its WINS database to disk like (AFAIK) NT and friends do. If the server gets restarted, doesn’t this mean you’ll be having some WINS resolution issues for at least a while, until every host re-registers with the server manually? I guess some of this can perhaps be navigated by using dns proxy = yes and putting important entries in DNS? I’m really not sure how the DNS proxy works though.

No more sites turning up today, most customers probably still on vacation, and darkho is working until 1900 or 2000. This means work on DarkWiki today, likely.

Oh, BTW, semi-interesting (long) article on the development of TSO. Non-technical, unfortunately, but note the book titled something like Tru64 and Oracle 9i on the desk in one of the pictures.