Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Four months ago, I blogged about my son's surgery. The operation wasn't succesful, so they gave it a second try yesterday. As parents, we've been waiting by this door for hours:

This time, the surgery was successful: his old knee prosthesis was replaced by a new one. Now he's recovering. Just like the previous time, the morphine is making him ill, but the medical staff wants to keep him on this pain killer for an extra day because of the nature of the operation.

I received a new sales report from Manning. Apparently there are still people buying the first edition. I've now sold 11,454 copies (8,413 paper books and 3,041 eBooks; ebook sales are 26.55% of the total sales). Note that if you buy the second edition, you get the ebook of the first edition for free! These are the numbers for the second edition: 4,314 copies (2,497 paper books and 1,817 eBooks; ebook sales are 42.12% of the total sales).

Want to know more? Go to http://ifosslawbook.org/ and read it online for free!

In my previous Books I've read last month blog, I reported about reading a pile of graphic novels and comic books. Let's take a look at this month's covers:

These are some impressions of the reception after the closing film at the film festival in Ghent. Although the pictures aren't very sharp, you'll recognize the "friends of the film festival". Yes, that's an official title; we were even mentioned in the closing speech by Jacques Dubrulle.


We've seen 51 movie screenings in the last two weeks. We're a tad tired, because we've also been working during these two weeks (we've had meetings over lunch; I've even written code after midnight).

Some good news that may mean the end of the GA soap on this blog:

Check out the blog:

I'm really curious about it. Chances are that Google has now built its own PDF library. Or did they stick to iText? If so, which version?

Talking about the Devil (Google Analytics), here are the stats for September:

Very predictable, wouldn't you say? I told you that we'd lose some visitors during the Summer, but that we'd break another record in September:

Yet another episode in the Why Google's Corporate Politics Suck-soap:

Google can make all these people happy, simply by buying an iText license, and continue using iText for creating Google Analytics reports in PDF as was the case in the old GA. But as we all know: Google doesn't buy software, Google buys companies. (And we're interested in growing our business, not in selling out.)

Hibernate should be to programmers what cake mixes are to bakers: beneath their dignity. from JavaZone on Vimeo.

Does she also have a talk about Maven? (wink, wink)

The short bio on the back cover of my books tells readers that I'm the original developer and current maintainer of iText, but half a lifetime ago, I studied architecture. I graduated as a civil engineer in architecture. My goal was to design buildings, not software. Then again: in our field of engineering, we were indoctrinated to believe we could do anything. We were supposed to be generalists, with the potential to become a specialist on any subject we desired.