Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

On May first, I made this screen shot:

Today, the screen shot looks like this:

THIS POST IS KEPT FOR HISTORICAL REASONS, BUT IT'S NO LONGER RELEVANT.
THE ISSUE HAS BEEN SOLVED (SEE ENFORCING YOUR TRADEMARK).

iText is a registered trademark by 1T3XT BVBA. This means we are now allowed to put an ® behind the word iText, and competitors can no longer buy the word iText from Google AdWords to lure customers to their sites (which was the main reason why I filed the trademark).

Once in a while, I read a comment from somebody who writes that iText is no longer Free Software. That doesn't make sense! People who write stupidities like that, don't know what they're saying.
Free as in Free Speech
iText has always been free software, and since we changed from the MPL/LGPL to the AGPL, iText became even more Free: in many cases it is now mandatory that software that uses iText is also made available as Free Software. When we say free, we mean free as in free speech, not as in free beer.
Free as in Free Beer
iText is Free Software, but that doesn't mean iText is gratis software. Why not? Because the original developer of iText lives in Belgium, and Belgian law has very clear restrictions about working for free.

The "iText in Action" book party was a success. We didn't take much pictures, but it was fun to bring the old and the new colleagues together, and have them meet with some of our business partners. This is a more personal photo:

From left to right: my father, my wife, our two sons, myself, and my mother.

I don't know what we were talking about in the above picture. I think I was making some kind of silly joke (as usual).

Another month, another Google Analytics blogpost. Let's take a look at the Google heartbeat:

Do you notice the difference with the normal heartbeat? Look at the days before and after Eastern. There's a small disturbance there. It's more subtle than during the Christmas holidays, but it's there for sure: people don't visit the iText site when they are on vacation ;-)

About a month ago, I reversed the experiment I started four months ago: I removed the Alexa widgets from the iText FAQ. I wanted to know if and how this would affect my Alexa ranking.
One month later, I can't really tell. My "3-month" ranking has improved by 2395 since I removed the widgets, but my "1-month" is down 14,640 places and my 7 day ranking fell out of the top 100,000 with a loss of 21704 places:

My last blog post about books dates from March 27. I continued reading The Chronicles of Narnia, but reading the seven books in a row feels like overkill, so I took a break after part 4 and 5 (or part 2 and 3 if you look at the publication order, rather than the logical reading order):

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian; 1951, p471-642 (from The Chronicles of Narnia; translated as Prins Caspian)

Imagine you're selling boats, and a potential customer enters your shop.
The potential customer doesn't say much. He only tells you he wants to buy something.
You're very passionate about boats, so you start praising your latest model.
You constantly ask feedback from the customer, but only after half an hour, he says:
Nice, but I don't see any boat with wheels...
You try not to look surprised, but you explain as gently as possible:
We don't sell cars, we're a boat shop, we sell boats. What did you have in mind?

On one of the mailing lists I follow, I've read that a lawyer from Augsburg has sent a warning to a person who downloaded Debian using BitTorrent: Abmahnung im Haus (Debian 5 Torrent)
I don't know the German language very well, but from a summarized translation in English, I understand this person has to pay 700 euro to the company "Media Art Holland b.v" for downloading software that is by nature free and not the property of "Media Art Holland b.v". In case of non-payment, legal costs could go up to 10,000 euro.

Dear Powers That Be at Google,

it was brought to my attention that the Google Analytics team considers PDF reporting to be <quote>a very hard feature to maintain and the GA team is considering leaving it out</quote>.

Imagine my surprise when I read this!