Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Starting tomorrow, iText Software Corp. has a new address. Snail mail should no longer be sent to San Carlos, CA, but to:

iText Software Corp.
2150 Portola Ave., Suite D-239
Livermore, CA 94551
USA

Thank you for updating your address book!

1T3XT BVBA wishes to communicate that the name iText has been Trademarked:

Trademark Application No.: 77/910,731;
filed: January 13, 2010
now Registration No.: 3,918,709;
Registered: February 15, 2011 for the mark: "iText"

From now on, please use the designation ® whenever you refer to iText®.

I just received a question from a non-technical person, asking me: what is all that Alexa stuff you're blogging about? Let's take a look at the definition:

Alexa provides information on the web traffic to millions of websites. It collects information from users who have installed the "Alexa Toolbar," allowing them to provide statistics on web site traffic, popularity and lists of related sites. Since Alexa's user base is a fair statistical sample of the internet users, Alexa's ranking may be considered quite accurate. You can use Alexa to compare your own ranking with the traffic of your competitors.

In other words: Alexa is an impartial means to measure the importance of your website in the world, compared to your competitors and your peers. As described in my previous blog post, you can tweak the results to a certain extent, but the best way to get a good ranking, is to provide good content: you need to be visited by as many people as possible from all over the world.

On January 3, I started an Alexa experiment. The goal was to bring itextpdf.com from place #117,702 into the top #100,000. To achieve this, I used some tricks described in the article How to increase Alexa rank for the website. My hope was to achieve this in three months, but look at today's ranking:

Two weeks ago, we introduced a Top 5 of frequently asked questions in an attempt to reduce the number of questions that have already been solved over and over again. This is this week's top five:

Managing the iText mailing-list is a boring job, but somebody has to do it. In spite of the RULES that are very clear and available on different places, there are still developers who refuse to subscribe before posting a question. Every day, I have to look at the list of mails sent to the list, and I have to determine which mails are genuine and which ones are SPAM.

Who needs opinions, when there are numbers:

Today Belgium broke a world record formerly held by Iraq. 250 days after the elections, we still don't have a new government. I'm not into politics, but being without a full-fledged government is annoying. As a business owner, I have to put some decisions on hold, because there's too much uncertainty about the outcome of some rulings that are postponed. We also don't make a good impression as a region, and we mainly have ourselves to blame—not personally, but as a regional community.

This blogpost is an answer to a follow up question on the iText forum. I deliberately disallowed the use of images on that forum, but I need some screen shots to show that the message "The validity of the document certification is UNKNOWN. The author could not be verified." isn't a real issue.
When I open a PDF that is signed using a CAcert public/private key pair, I used to get this message (click the image for more detail):

This is normal, because the CAcert Root Certificate isn't shipped with Adobe Reader by default. You need to add it yourself.

If I didn't know better, I'd almost had a heart attack when I opened my (snail) mailbox this morning. On one and the same day, I received three letters that looked as if they were invoices for a total amount of about $7,500 (click the images for more detail):

patentonline.org	RIPT	WDTP
$2,692.50	$2,662.50	1.629,00 euro

Fortunately, I immediately recognized the letters. I had already received one right after my application for a Trademark for iText®was published.