Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Today is my birthday (41), and my wife doesn't want me to work much today. I don't know if blogging about the work that was done yesterday counts as work. Let's pretend it isn't.
It has been three weeks since I posted a development update. Back then, the word NOW was written in upper caps next to the topic XML Worker. We've released the first production-ready version of XML Worker last Wednesday. We'll continue working on XML Worker, but we've reduced the priority of this project because we're now awaiting user feedback. The whiteboard shows what we'll be doing next:

My son has spent almost a year of his life (2008) in hospital where he was treated for Osteosarcoma.
During that time, he became a huge fan of House MD:

You Can't Always Get What You Want from Net COP on Vimeo.

On June 30, he needs further surgery: the cancer has cost him his knee. In a couple of weeks his old prosthesis has to be replaced with a new one. He'll be confined to his wheel chair for months...

But that's not what I wanted to blog about. I wanted to talk about House MD and what the series can teach us about doing business.

A while ago there was an article about famous Belgian Twitter users. The article gave an overview of the "most influencial" people based on their Klout score. Although these metrics aren't always accurate (he who shouts the most and the loudest gets the best score), I found this graph interesting:

In the past I've posted some slideshows on SlideShare, but never before did I receive a mail like this:

I wrote these slides to prepare for my talk at GentM (chapter 9: "Business Angels").

For those who couldn't make it, this is what I talked about:

iText^® XML Worker is no longer in beta. You can now start using XML Worker 1.0.0 in a production environment to create PDF files using HTML created using CKEditor or TinyMCE as input. We're simultaneously releasing iText 5.1.1 because XML Worker 1.0.0 depends on some new functionality that was added to iText.

For a full overview of what has changed, please consult the changelog.

Can I have a tax cut?

If not, could you please buy a license for your use of my software?

Thank you in advance!

Almost a month ago, I wrote Enforcing your Trademark: not that simple. I was complaining about the fact that somebody had claimed the @iText Twitter account, but hadn't been posting anything but absurd non sense (6 status updates on 3 different dates between November 8, 2007 and February 10, 2010).

Another month, another Google Analytics blogpost. Let's take a look at the Google heartbeat (this is the overview of the number of visits, not the number of hits):

Looks OK, doesn't it? No sign of the arrhytmia shown in the Alexa stats:

Did we have better results in May compared to (the slow month) April. the Alexa stats already gave away the answer: Yes!

Those who missed my talk about iText at Devoxx, also missed a cool demo about Geomajas, but no problem: why not test the demo yourself?

I just read this tweet by @hinssen:

Interesting. The 7 signs of failure for internet startups. http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/30/the-7-signs-of-failure-for-internet-startups/

It would be interesting to check if the iText companies show any of those signs, so let's take a look.