Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Saturday is book keeping day. It's the day I check if we have any unpaid invoices at iText Software Belgium, and also if other companies have already paid the invoices we've sent them. Lately, we get plenty of mails (and even phone calls) from offices who go after companies that are in default, so I took a look at the situation at iText Software Belgium (ISB), a company we started in August 2011.

... and why I continue loving Pinterest because I use it.

When I first heard about Pinterest, I thought: What is this about? Let's request an invite.

I thought it was something in-between FlickR and Facebook. I didn't see any use for it, but I loved the interface and its simplicity, so... why not give it a try?

On March 29th, iText organized a summit in Ghent to inform customers and users about the road ahead. Today, we're proud to present the videos that were made of all the different presentations:

The videos of the iText Summit are online!

Remember what I said last week about Spring break and the Easter holidays?
May 7:

May 8:

All the presentations from the iText summit will be available on Parleys soon, but in the meanwhile, please take a look at this movie to get an impression of what you missed ;-)

During my stay in Silicon Valley, I posted an angry (and very personal!!!) blog about "Evil Google" (it's MY opinion, not the opinion of the company I work for), and today I received a comment about it:

I think you should remember that this case isn't just about settling a dispute. Legal precedent might come out that will negatively affect all of us in the software community. One of the biggest legal questions is whether software interfaces and header files are copyrightable. This could terribly impact the open source community that frequently seeks to create open implementations of proprietary systems. I wouldn't think seeing Google pay for their sins would be worth that to you.

I have been thinking a lot about the legal implications, and I think people who are in favor of Google are shortsighted. As a developer (even a developer who has created an API that is used by many other developers), I'm slowly getting convinced that in the long run, APIs would benefit from being copyrightable.

I've just added two (of the three) iText companies to Geekplan.com, an IBBT and GentM initiative:

As predicted, the statistics for April aren't as good as usual because of the Spring break and the Easter holidays:

These vacation periods may not be visible in the heartbeat of the 'visits', you can clearly see it in the graph of the Alexa ranking:

We found a huge pile of mail after returning home, and now I'm going through all the letters, invoices and other mail we received in the last few weeks. One of the letters I received contained the book sales for 11Q4. For some reason, people are still buying the first edition. In the world of IT books, you have a bestseller as soon as you can sell 5,000 copies. And yes: the second book is now at 5,394 copies. That makes it official: I've written a second bestseller!