Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

I'm probably going to be very silent in the next few weeks. My son (see slides) needs major surgery on June 30. He'll be in a wheel chair all summer (maybe longer), and I've organized my work in a way that I won't be on line that much in July. For iText users: you shouldn't notice my absence if you follow the rules.

As promised in my previous blog post, here's a picture of the finished iText Office:

Finally, we have some curtains on the windows! I used to have my desk in the library (upstairs), but now we've reorganized this part of the office into a small off line meeting room (on one side a table and four chairs, on the other side four beanbags we can sit in to brainstorm).
We now have our workstations in the lower part of the office (I'm sitting next to the stairs).

It has been a while since I blogged about the iText Office. The cable for the office LAN were placed on in April, but nothing was connected yet. We were waiting for the walls to dry and for the painters to come. This happened last week.

It has been two weeks and one day since the latest iText Top 5 frequently asked questions post. It was my intention to write such a blog entry every two weeks, but I think I'll switch to a monthly list of the five most interesting questions of the month.
Today I'm only going to post my five most favorite answers on the Open Source Project Maintainer Sarcastic Response Cheat Sheet (written by Chris McDonough).

Even before my first book was printed, I found the first illegal copies on the net. So it goes.

The most annoying thing about illegal copies isn't as much the loss of revenue (at least not for the author who doesn't make much money writing books anyway), but the fact that your "metrics" about the popularity of the book are all wrong. For instance: I've sold 11363 copies of the first edition, but this doesn't include the 6230 views of the book on docstoc:

About a half year ago, I started an experiment with Alexa rankings, but I didn't know if my ranking improved because of the experiment, or because of the itextpdf.com site gaining more popularity. That's why I reversed the experiment about two months ago. Did removing change the ranking?

Answer: not yet, although the pattern looks slightly different: I don't see a clear heart beat anymore.

I didn't take notes at BizCamp, so I have to depend on photos to reconstruct the schedule. Thank you @kellblazek for the morning schedule:

Yesterday, I attended BizCamp. In the morning I presented a "Double Bill". That is: two presentations in 20 minutes. I started with my Three things watching House MD has taught me about doing business blog, and I used the "... sometimes you might find you get what you need" quote as a bridge to my why you (don't?) need a VC presentation (I did the same talk at GentM, but now I could finally use my slides).

I must admit, I've neglected the iText group on LinkedIn for a very long time. Only recently, I've opened up the group, and Balder Van Camp is following it more actively. His most favorite task right now is removing SPAM and keeping a list of the banned. (Isn't it, Balder?)