Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Over the years, we've outlined a number of rules when using the free mailing list for support. As newbies aren't always aware of these rules, it's necessary to repeat them once in a while.

Last week, I did a dry-run presentation of my talk for W-JAX (Münich) and it took me 75 minutes to explain everything I wanted to explain about digital signatures in PDF. Now I've updated my slides:

Yesterday, I received a LinkedIn invitation from an iText user. I accepted the invitation and was pleasantly surprised when I read the description of his current job:

Apparently there were serious problems during the recent elections in Belgium. Why am I not surprised?

I'm seriously considering closing down the free iText mailing-list in favor of Stackoverflow.

My main problem with the free mailing-list: REALLY STUPID QUESTIONS. When we were kids, our teachers told us that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Now that we're grown up, we know that our teachers weren't always right.

Dag in, dag uit worden we geconfronteerd met documenten. Veel van die documenten hebben een juridische waarde. Ze leggen beslissingen vast, ze bevestigen overeenkomsten, ze beschrijven rechten en plichten. Daarom is het belangrijk dat deze documenten een zekere vorm van beveiliging krijgen.

Zo spreken we van:

• Integrity: het document moet beschermd worden tegen al dan niet moedwillige wijzigingen.
• Authenticity: we moeten zekerheid hebben over de oorsprong van het document.
• Non-repudiation: het auteurschap van een document mag niet ontkend kunnen worden.

Van alle document formaten op de markt, is PDF dank zij het mechanisme van de digitale handtekening het meest geschikt om deze voorwaarden (integrity, authenticity, non-repudiation) te garanderen.

Looking at the sales for 12Q3, I'm very proud of what we've achieved at iText. We started to invest in people and development in the Summer of 2011, and this translates in better sales in the Summer of 2012: the billed revenue for the iText Group (ISB + ISC) in 12Q3 was 124% of the billed revenue in 12Q2, 235% of the billed revenue in 11Q3, and 60% of the total billed revenue in 2011. With one quarter to go, the volume of sales for 2012 is already 1.45 times the volume realized in 2011. We've been growing for 11 quarters in a row.

As read on Stackoverflow:

So you've written a piece of software that is going to change the world.
What are you going to do? Here are some options:

I've just read a great article entitled Open Source, Software Hygiene and STDs on the Outercurve blog. I wrote a comment, but I don't know if I submitted it correctly. In case I didn't, this is what I wrote: