Finally after one year in Paris, I’m back in Zurich. It was a fantastic year for me. I’ve learned a lot, had plenty of time for myself, thinking about my life. I’ve also had the luck to find my big love. My Asia trip was possible just because I’ve decided to spend one year in the worldwide technical support of my company. It was generally very interesting to live in another country, different people, different language and different minds.

I wanna thank first everybody who has supported me during this year. My collegues from the L3 Technical Support in Paris, Jean-Marc from the R&D and all employes from Hong Kong. Thanks also my family for the support and a special thanks to my future wife. Going to Paris was the best idea I’ve ever had.

In my personal ranking list of the best cities to live in, Zurich is now on the 4th place. Hongkong, Paris, Tokyo and then Zurich. Right now I have a lot of work, because I’ve got a new position in my company. Pre-Sales for the german part of Switzerland. To get in this new role, I have to spend a lot of time with it and this is also the reason why I’ve a lack of posts on my homepage. Sorry!

Every chat you find is routet through a server in the WWW. This means for me, it can be recorded. Here I want present you the following product: OpenFire. This product is completely free and open source software. You can download it on the homepage of ignite realtime. OpenFire is the name of the server and if you click on download you can have it for windows, mac or linux.

The client from ignite realtime is called Spark which is also available in a Web-Version, called SparkWeb. You have some plugins to add additional feautures. For example the IM Gateway plugin to add AOL, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Google Talk and other contacts. And the big advantage of this client, it’s encrypted.

Take a PC, call it a server and install the OpenFire Server on it. In the Software there’s a built-in database for a small amount of users. If you exceed 50 users or meet speed problems, you have to install a MySQL database. I just installed it on my pc with the built-in one. If you wanna use the SparkWeb Client, you also have to install an Apache Web Server and put the files of the web client in the correct folder. If you wanna be able to open the SparkWeb Client out of the Internet, be sure to direct the port 80 to the PC’s IP address.

The installation is very easy and the administration is done in a web interface. Many plugins bring you a lot of functions and security. It doesn’t cost a thing and if you are willing to try it out a little bit, enjoy it. It’s really a cool App.

Everybody doesn’t like SPAM and I can’t understand why people can click on such mails. I also don’t understand why we aren’t doing anything against it. It’s a crime like stealing. The rule is very easy: Never click a link or open an attachment without knowing what is inside. You can also get a spam mail from your girlfriends address where “she” tells you to open a link and then it’s a Virus! Especially when you have a Windows PC you have to take care, because most viruses and trojans are written for Windows. Mac and Linux are not yet an interesting platform to create viruses.

To not get in the queue of Spammers, I suggest you as written in many manuals in the WWW, to have two email addresses. For friends and very important things you use your main address, which you protect like your mobile number. For example I gave it to my friends, relatives, my bank, my insurance and so on.. The other address I use for everything else I use in the internet. Some examples are facebook, MSN, Skype and all kind of forums, where you have to give a mail address. On every Anti-Spam Website this procedure is suggested. Change your mail address as soon you get several SPAM per day!

Japanese do that even they don’t have to, because it’s “cool” to change it very often, every few month. They like to take addresses which are “the-life-is-wonderful@xxx.jp”, “loveable-cat@xxx.jp” or “I-m-cooler-than-you@xxx.jp”. It’s smart because compared to SMS you don’t have to pay anything if you inform your friends and it’s also good to refresh your connection to them. As written in one of my previous post don’t use hotmail. For having multiple addresses, you can use many different providers like gmx.net, gmail.com or yahoo.com.

One very important thing: Never put your Email address on your homepage. Use a quiz “take my firstname, then the first letter of my lastname and put it with the mail symbol to gmail.com” or use a contact formular which is written in PHP (like on my site). I was stupid and have done it approx. 5 years ago. Then it started with 10-20 SPAM per day. These days it’s 50 SPAM per day. I didn’t care about it, because the Spam-Filter of Apple’s Mail is very good and I never had any problems. Since a week I have a new mail address and I realized how much time I spent to check all SPAM (some of them weren’t SPAM) and today I’m sitting in front of my PC and have nothing to do..