Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

I know the rules of SEO. A long time ago, when iText was hosted on http://lowagie.com/iText/ I succeeded in getting iText on the first place in the Google ranking when somebody searched for JAVA PDF, but in 2008, I wasn't able to spend much time on iText.

For those following me on Twitter, my most recent message may have been rather cryptic:

@googlejobs Who is Charles Nguyen, and why does he give Google Engineering a bad name?

Let me explain what I meant with that Tweet, and let's hope I get some feedback, because I really want to know the answer to my question.

I've been working at home for my own company for exactly two months now, and I really enjoy my sabbatical. Yet, there are times when I miss having colleagues nearby, especially: having lunch with colleagues.

A week and a half ago I wrote that I paid a visit to the Royal Library of Belgium because, according to a Belgian Law dating from 2008, I had to donate two copies of my new book (2011) and while I was there, I also took a copy of my first book (2007).

A couple of days ago, I installed a development environment for Android because I volunteered to review chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 9 of Android in Practice. I don't have much time to read for the moment, but I succeeded in finishing the first chapter today, and I've deployed my first "Hello Android" application on my phone.

After I installed different virtual hosts on my local Apache server, I noticed that my blog site (Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette) didn't work because I had enable clean URLs on my public webserver, but this wasn't possible on my local machine. I had to apply some extra, minor changes to the httpd.conf file. This is what was needed:

A couple of days ago, I explained how I installed Apache, mySql and PHP on my new portable. I use this local installation to develop different sites (one of them being itextpdf.com). I put the HTML, CSS and PHP files of these sites in different directories under C:/WWW/. This is how I tell Apache how to serve these different sites using different ports on the localhost.

I've installed the newest Eclipse version (Helios) a couple of weeks ago, but apparently I need an old version because the System Requirements warn me that "There are known issues with the ADT plugin running with Eclipse 3.6. Please stay on 3.5 until further notice."

Less than a week ago, I've set up Drupal to create a new blog. I used to have a blog a long time ago. I had written some PHP pages myself, and that was sufficient for me: I didn't need (nor want) comments added to my pages by strangers. Especially not when the comment sections are abused by people asking technical questions for which we have a mailing-list. Nevertheless I decided to give it another try: I enabled the possibility to register to my blog and to add comments.

My wife and business partner didn't accompany me to Devoxx last week, but it goes without saying that I gave her a detailed overview of what happened, who I talked to, what was interesting, and also what I didn't like.
One of the reasons why I was present at Devoxx was to do business. So were many other attendees, but not all. At least: they weren't doing business the way I'd expect them to do business. Yesterday, my wife and I had a discussion about one company in particular, and we still haven't found a way to explain why we think that company isn't a fair player in the market. Maybe an example will help.