Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

It had been in the air for a long time now, but today I finally received word from Google that Google plus had been opened for brands and businesses. This is what it said:

Google+ Pages are a way for brands and businesses to have a presence on Google+. Pages bring you closer to your audience, letting you have real conversations with the right people, connecting you face to face with your site’s visitors, and letting current fans recommend new ones.

This morning I did a small test to see if I could watch TV on a tablet PC, now let's take a look if this also works on a smart phone:

The interface is somewhat different. It was to be expected that it would be a little bit harder to use because of the smaller screen, but the quality is still amazing (don't let the reduced resolution of the movie fool you).

I've been postponing this final blog about the film festival because writing positive blogs such as Film Festival Ghent 2011: my personal top 10 is much more fun than writing negative blogs.
However, I did make a list of movies that disappointed me. Again: this is a very personal list. I know that some movies on this list aren't bad at all, but I was just too disappointed to put them in my additional list of good movies, let alone in my top 10:

I was browsing the Android market to see if I could find any interesting apps when I stumbled upon the "TV Overal Tab" from Belgacom. I didn't know Belgacom TV was available on tablets yet; I don't watch TV that much, so I must have missed all the commercials about it. I did a quick search on the Belgacom site, and I found the TV Partout page. As we have Belgacom TV, we can test TV on the tablet for free until the end of the year. This is what it looks like:

Yesterday evening I went shopping for Android tablets. We've been selling the Android port for iText to several customers now, but apart from a simple Hello World example and a Calls2Pdf app for Android smart phones, we didn't do much Android development. I didn't even own a tab, in spite of the fact that I knew from the start that iText on Android would be more useful on a tablet than on a phone.

After a very long soap story about Google Analytics, we saw a sparkle of hope, and now we've got the confirmation:

I'm really curious: will they still be using iText? I've read that they'll be offering a paid version of Google Analytics, next to the one provided for free. That's exactly what we did when we moved from the MPL/LGPL to the AGPL.

It's the first of the month, so let's take a look at last month's statistics:

The film festival is always a good opportunity to watch quality documentaries. This year wasn't any different. It's no coincidence that there are three documentaries in my top 10 of "best movies" at the festival. Actually, we like all these movies very much, except maybe the Morgan Spurlock documentary about product placement.

1. Senna (Asif Kapadia) (4.77 ; rank 1)
2. Life in a Day (Kevin MacDonald) (4.39 ; rank 22)
3. Eenentwintig + Zeven (Kenneth Michiels) (KASK Docs)
   

A couple of days ago, I published my personal top 10 of movies I really liked at the film festival. Now let's take a look at 25 feature films that didn't make the top 10, but that weren't bad at all.

1. Win Win (Thomas McCarthy) (4.15; rank 37)
2. The Future (Miranda July) (3.71; rank 72)
3. The Help (Tate Taylor) (4.70; rank 3)
4. The Descendants (Alexander Payne) (3.44; rank 80)
5. The conspirator (Robert Redford) (4.34; rank 28)
   

When we go to the film festival, we discuss the movies we've seen with plenty of people. It's always surprising how opinions can differ. For instance: many of the people we know really liked Once upon a time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan). We thought it was boring and the audience agreed: the film received a score of 3.27 out of 5 (ranked 84 of a total of 89 new movies). Many people we talked to didn't like The Future (Miranda July), but we appreciated the movie very much and the audience didn't agree, they gave it a score of 3.71 (72nd place in the top 89).

We've attended 52 screenings, but I've made a top 55 because one of the screenings (KASK Docs; 4.62/5; rank 4) consisted of four documentaries of half an hour. I've counted these four documentaries as separate movies.