Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Yesterday, I filled out a survey that made me think about the period before iText. I was asked for my "failures" in the past. I wrote down two ideas that failed silently. Afterwards I remembered a third failure. I probably had more ideas that didn't make it, but these were the ones that were the most energy-consuming:

I just saw a tweet from a Flemish Governmental Organization saying "We stimulate enterpreneurship". The tweet contained a link to:

This is indeed an opportunity for Flemish companies to come up with a better web site ;-)

But there's more:

How strange, I've just received a mail dated April 14, 2011 in my INBOX. It was sent to my (and two other developers') users.sourceforge.net address, so maybe the delay is caused by a problem at SourceForge. In any case, there's RULE #1: DO NOT CONTACT DEVELOPERS PERSONALLY. Because of this rule, I won't reply to the mail, but I'll answer the question in a blogpost:

Greetings, developers all!
Is there an email address I should turn to/an email list I should subscribe to,
for questions and help pertaining to help for iText 1.5.4?

I can get really petulant reading the Flemish newspapers. Last Friday, there was an article about LinkedIn with "quotes from experts and analysts". They were amazed that LinkedIn is worth as much as the Belgian company Belgacom:

That's madness! Last year, the social networksite [LinkedIn] had a turnover of $243M and a profit of $3.4M. For comparison: Belgacom had a turnover of €6.6B and a profit of €1.27B.

So? Why is this relevant? They are comparing apples and oranges!

Last saturday, we formed an iText team for #appsforghent. Our goal was to learn more about open data. We didn't have the time to finish an application. Nevertheless, we received good comments from the jury:

... grow on trees, don't they?

The first couple of strawberries that were ripe were eaten by birds, hence the improvised net to protect them.

Last Saturday, team iText was one of the teams a the first #appsforghent event. The goal of this event was for the government to open up data (in this case, data about the city of Ghent and data from the Flemish bus transportation provider De Lijn). Our goal was to learn more about the data, especially the data about public transport, and, if possible, use this data to create cool maps.

This is what we did last Saturday (presentation in Dutch):

Today, North Bridge announced its findings from the 2011 "Future of Open Source" survey. This is the presentation of the keynote:
Future of Open Source 2011 Survey, Open Source Business Conference

Do you remember the trademark scams I reported three months ago? On that same day, February 17, I filed a complaint on the Belgian ecops-site. Up until today, I didn't receive any answer. I almost missed the answer, because this is the mail that I received:

As you can see, the mail didn't have any content! It just had one attachment: a Word document.

Ten days ago, itextpdf.com was ranked #102,746 based on the visits of one week.
In the week after the 5.0.1, the 7 day ranking gained 33,292 places:

The effect on the overal ranking (based on a period of three months) isn't that big.
We moved from place #80,491 to place #79,499. Which is nice ;-)