Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

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Yesterday:

Source: Uploaded by user via Bruno on Pinterest

Yesterday I found this mail in my INBOX:

I had completely forgotten about go.to, but now that I received this mail, I remember I once used it to create shortened URLs. That was long before I made my own short URLs using the 1t3xt.be domain.
This is already the third mail I received this year informing me that a long-forgotten service I once used is discontinuing its service because the owners "simply cannot continue to subsidize the free service at this time."
I visited go.to and currently I don't see any message confirming what is said in the mail. Maybe this is a bad joke, a hoax, or even a smart marketing stunt. I've send a mail to support at go.to to find out if the mail is genuine.

Last week I received the sales reports for 12Q3 from Manning Publications. My first book is over 6 years old now (for sale for 25 quarters), and 12Q3 was the first quarter with a negative result: there were more books returned than sold. This brings the total number of copies sold to 11,540. My second book has been for sale for 8 quarters and has been sold 6,741 times. I think the paper version is about to go "out of print".

No matter which business you run —a large corporation with thousands of employees and ditto clientele, or an SMB with only a handful of employees and a hundred customers—, there’s one thing all companies have in common: they all implement business processes, and every business process involves data as well as documents.

The following figure shows an example how iText can automate such processes, combining machine-readable XML with human-readable PDF documents:

We've been very successful in 2012: in 2011, our goal was to double the revenue, and we succeeded. Compared to 2009 —our first year in business— our revenue increased with a factor 15. Contrary to most of the other companies I know, we've been profitable from year one. We didn't need any external money to bootstrap our business.

This doesn't mean we're starting to get lazy. On the contrary, it makes us very excited to work on new business models!

This is what happens if Christmas and New Year's Day are on a weekday instead of in a weekend:

I'm going through some archives today, and I found this Dilbert dated September 7, 2007:

Less than a week ago, I wondered if we would reach 750,000 absolute visitors on the iText web site. Today, we've reached that goal:

In 2011, the itextpdf.com site had 680,581 unique visitors. Today, we're already at 743,493 unique visitors. I had hoped to reach 750K unique visitors, but I don't know if that's feasible. We'll see in about a week. Traditionally, statistics go down seriously in the holiday season. Let's take a look at the numbers for December right before the holidays:

Today I earned my first gold badge on StackOverflow: