G’day!

Have you been worrying about looking for new share mate? Have you been tired of posting rent ads everywhere? Have you been upset about posting your Ad in some forum and soon could not find it again? So, what are you waiting for? Go to PostXDays now!

Have you been worrying about looking for a room for yourself? Have you been spending too much time browsing the forum but hardly find anything useful to you? So, get on to PostXDays right now!

PostXDays is one of the biggest and the most professional classified advertisement website in Australia for rent.

Do you know?
Everyday, PostXDays has more than 1000 visits, and more than 5000 ads be browsed!
PostXDays automatically provides Google map, which will help you to locate your rental property!
You can upload up to 8 photos for your rental property in PostXDays.
PostXDays has more than 30 descriptive items to describe your property, including around condition, furnitures, and so on, to show every feature of the property detailedly.

It takes only 2 minutes to post rental information on PostXDays.
On XYZ, you can search the rental information you want according to suburbs, price, and even more.

Thank you for all your support and we hope you enjoy the service from PostXDays!

www.postxdays.com.au

Now, this bit of spam actually pissed me off a little. There’s a certain level of arrogance required to spam direct competitors (I’m guessing by the nature of their site that this was no accident). So I wrote a bit of a response*:

Hi,

I don’t know why this email has been sent to me — I’ve neither heard of nor contacted any business called PostXDays nor its apparent parent company Tangram Trading Pty Ltd.

In light of this, you should be aware that it’s now illegal in Australia to send an email of this nature without the consent of the recipient (see the Spam Act 2003).

I find it particularly offensive to receive this email in light of the fact I go to certain lengths to obfuscate the email address(es) used on my web site. Even more bizarre is that you’re advertising a service that is in direct competition to the site I run.

Hopefully this is just a misunderstanding, but I’m CCing turboservers.com.au (which appears to be hosting postxdays.com.au) on this email to be sure that you’re not scraping email addresses off sites like mine: I don’t want my users annoyed nor the reputation of my site damaged by garbage like this.

Cheers,
Tom

Unbelievable. I’m *hoping* that this was just a one-off email and he’s not scraping email addresses off the site trying to directly divert users. It sholdn’t be too much of a concern, because ausroomies members communicate with one another using a contact form, so their email addresses are never made public unless they enter it into the listing description field (which some users unfortunately do). Still annoying though.

Anyway, more updates when and if they come.

UPDATE PostXDays was responsible for this spam. The following is a series of emails between myself and the hosting provider of postxdays.com.au which leave me wondering if they’ve got any reason to actually change their practices:

From: Turbo Servers Info
Date: 2009-03-07

Hi,

The email is definately not sent by Net Logistics. Was the sender indicated that the email sent by Net Logistics? Could you please forward the whole message (include the host header for us) to investigate further?

Regards,

Thu Nguyen, Support Technician
Net Logistics Pty. Ltd.
http://www.netlogistics.com.au

<My response to this email has somehow disappeared off the face of the planet, but it was something to the effect of “look at the headers, it came from postxdays.com.au — right down to the path of the PHP script that generated it”">

From: Turbo Servers Info
Date: 2009-03-07

Hi,

It is true that postxdays.com.au is one of our clients. It is violated our Term of Service that client hosted on our servers is sending out spam emails.
I will chase up our client on this matter. Thank you for informing us.
Regards,

Thu Nguyen, Support Technician
Net Logistics Pty. Ltd.
http://www.netlogistics.com.au

From: Thomas Lee
Date: 2009-03-16

Hi,

Do you have a status update? I’m concerned that my own users are still being affected by this, and have no real way to be sure.

Can you confirm whether or not your client’s script was scanning for email addresses on my site? Were other share accommodation sites impacted by this spam?

Cheers,
Tom

From: Net Logistics Support
Date: 2009-03-16

Hi,

I have already contacted our client and given them warning about this issue.
Could you please get back to us if you still receive those spam email?

Regards,

Thu Nguyen, Support Technician
Net Logistics Pty. Ltd.
http://www.netlogistics.com.au

Not exactly comforting.

Mail headers from the original spam:

Return-Path: <nobody@reventon.turboservers.com.au>
X-Original-To: xxx@xxx
Delivered-To: xxx@xxx
Received: from reventon.turboservers.com.au (reventon.turboservers.com.au [122.201.72.110])
	by ausroomies.com.au (Postfix) with ESMTPS id B422854173
	for <xxx@xxx>; Thu,  5 Mar 2009 02:28:53 +1100 (EST)
Received: from nobody by reventon.turboservers.com.au with local (Exim 4.69)
	(envelope-from <nobody@reventon.turboservers.com.au>)
	id 1Let4p-0006k8-FP
	for xxx@xxx; Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:32:07 +1100
To: xxx@xxx
Subject: PostXDays -- Advanced Classified Ads Network
X-PHP-Script: postxdays.com.au/_admin/utility/dailyTask.php for 122.201.72.110
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
From: PostXDays <info@postxdays.com.au>
Message-Id: <E1Let4p-0006k8-FP@reventon.turboservers.com.au>
Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:32:07 +1100
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - reventon.turboservers.com.au
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - ausroomies.com.au
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [99 32002] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - reventon.turboservers.com.au
X-Source:
X-Source-Args: /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -DSSL
X-Source-Dir: postxdays.com.au:/public_html/_admin/utility

The site was originally written using Merb but a nasty DataMapper bug combined with lacking documentation lead me back to PHP, which sucked. On the plus side, this is my first project using the Symfony framework which really is quite nice as far as PHP frameworks go. I’m a little dubious about the direction in which the framework is headed in the medium to long term, but for this little project it was great.

So that’s how ausroomies came to be. The site’s not perfect and I’m especially worried about whether people will actually stay long enough to play with the search engine to see what it can do. My logs from the first day are indicating the answer is a big, fat “no”. Somewhat predictable I guess. Maybe it’ll become more useful as we get more data. I think the dodgey programmer design currently leaves a lot to be desired, too. I hope to resolve that in a month or so. Outside of that, I can’t convey how much of a relief it is to finally get it live and to finally have something to show for it compared to all the usual throw-away experiments and prototypes I usually play around with.

Anyway, now that this has launched I should hopefully be able to return to a relatively normal sleeping pattern. I’m keen to hear the good and bad, so please drop me a line if you have any feedback regarding the site.

I’m seeking somewhere new to live. It’s kind of come on short notice, and I was hoping to find somewhere to move before the end of the month but it’s looking less and less like that’s going to be a possibility. The housing situation here is pretty harsh at the moment. It seems every man and his dog is looking for somewhere to live around here (and that includes share accommodation!).

This means I might be spending a few weeks with my girlfriend and her family out in the suburbs with internet access effectively restricted to work. Until I find somewhere stable, my blog posts are probably going to be a little slow in the making.

So does anybody in the inner suburbs of Melbourne have a room for rent early June?

Anyway: Hello! I’m back!

I’ve just read an article by Jonathan Rauch which was both reassuring and, at the same time, a little offensive. As an introvert myself, I could very much relate to what Jonathan was saying and I think a lot of what he had to say was spot on. However, his assertion that introverts (<em>innies</em>)are somehow more intelligent, reflective and all-round more intellectually and emotionally sound than their extroverted counterparts is a great big pile of blathering crap. I was embarrassed to hear him say as such and apparently truly believe it. So in response to his sweeping generalizations, here are a few of my own:

We’re NOT implicitly more intelligent, we’re just private

Innies think a whole lot. And we keep it all to our quiet little selves. Every single living day, thoughts occur to people – irrespective of whether they’re introverted or extroverted. These thoughts may range from, “What colour shirt will I wear to work today?” all the way through to doozies like, “Why are we here?”. Extroverts are not talking puppets, and most definitely have ideas and thoughts as deep as any introverts. The simple difference is that an extrovert is likely to mention such thoughts in passing as part of a larger conversation. Meanwhile, an introvert may take private joy in contemplating the colour of his/her shirt or the meaning of life all to him/herself.

Extroverts are not necessarily idiots. They’d probably tell you so, too.

We’re not always level-headed

Sometimes people get angry and annoyed. Sometimes they overreact, or get embarrassed, or hurt, or cry. You’ll find this true for all types of personality – wallflower, social butterfly and in-between. Emotionally volatile introverts may give the impression of level-headedness by virtue of the fact they don’t necessarily interact if they’re not “on” in a social sense.

Maybe we’re slightly more independent than the average extrovert (in a very loose sense)

I know as many needy introverts as I do needy extroverts. I’ve seen the extroverted go introverted when in emotional pain, and the introverted tell anybody who’ll listen about their dog dying. I guess the introverted may come off as a little aloof and detached, but it’s not because we care about you any less.

Perhaps one thing that may be true about introverts and extroverts, though, is the innie’s comfort within themselves: to be perfectly happy in silence and solitude.

Does that make us more independent? Too deep for me to think about at this time of night

We’re not more refined (or at least I’m not)

Often my awful Aussie drawl creeps out (I got that from my mother – imagine an Australian version of Fran Drescher). I sometimes struggle to use “proper” English when speaking. I rarely shave (I try, I really do!). On weekends, showers become an optional chore. My shoebox apartment is a fucking mess. No, it’s not because I’m a programmer – I know plenty of refined programmers! – it’s because I’m a bit of a slob. So are lots of people, introverted and extroverted alike. Extroverts are not slobs, wankers or rednecks by default.

More sensitive? Pah!

Rubbish. What about drama queens?

One might argue that introverts are more sensitive because we think about our feelings so god damn hard. The fact is everybody has feelings and we all experience them to varying degrees. How we express these feelings is another matter entirely. To designate introverts as somehow being more susceptible to human emotions shows both ignorance and a little narcissism.

Off-the-cuff tips for understanding an introvert

1. Just because we don’t come to dinner doesn’t mean we hate you, nor is it necessarily because we’re lazy. Sometimes we just feel like we need a day to ourselves because we spent yesterday with Bert and last night with Betty. It may surprise you, but this takes a certain amount of effort from us when we’d really like to just sit down and relax for a few hours.
2. Chances are your introvert loves to party, but being guilt tripped into going to a party when they’d prefer to be doing something else damages the introverted soul.
3. If an introvert says he’ll come to your shindig and then pulls out at the last minute, it’s likely that such a decision wasn’t made lightly. Either something important is keeping him away, or he feels like his presence would be detrimental to the party.
4. We love to talk – really, we do – it’s just not always so easy for us to know what to say. (Disclaimer: Other innies may feel differently!)
5. Sometimes we just like time to be with ourselves and our own thoughts. Nothing personal.

Please don’t get the wrong impression of us innies from Jonathan’s article. He almost hit the nail on the head, but instead just wound up stomping mercilessly on the toes of pretty much every extrovert who might happen upon his somewhat harsh article.

I’ve started writing my Ocaml tutorial after tinkering further with the language over the past few days. I was hoping to have part 1 sorted out tonight, but it’s late and I’m exhausted. Sorry for the delay. It is coming. Honest.