Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Hmm... It was my intention to make a Top 5 of frequently asked questions, and to publish that top 5 every two weeks. I had even marked this in my calendar, but in the last two months, I didn't have the time to look at the forum. The last top 5 dates from April 4th.
Let's pick up the thread, and select five new questions that were posted recently (instead of listing the most popular questions):

What happens if we break our own rules and answer a question that was not sent to the list?

This is the answer:

A month ago, I wrote: I don't know what I'll read next, but I'll look for something entertaining. I found what I was looking for. Out of the 8 "books" I've read last month, 7 were graphic novels.

Hello,

You've sent the following message to my users.sourceforge.net address: I am interested in the project. I am new to programming and [Java | C#]. Could you pls add me in project [iText|iTextSharp].

My answer is: No, project members on SourceForge are experienced people who have earned the right to be a project member by contributing a significant amount of source code. They have also signed a Contributor License Agreement.

I'm not happy with the heart beat of the itextpdf.com domain. Sure, when I look at Google Analytics, there's no reason to worry, but I'm confused by what Alexa is showing me:

Yesterday, I filled out a survey that made me think about the period before iText. I was asked for my "failures" in the past. I wrote down two ideas that failed silently. Afterwards I remembered a third failure. I probably had more ideas that didn't make it, but these were the ones that were the most energy-consuming:

I just saw a tweet from a Flemish Governmental Organization saying "We stimulate enterpreneurship". The tweet contained a link to:

This is indeed an opportunity for Flemish companies to come up with a better web site ;-)

But there's more:

How strange, I've just received a mail dated April 14, 2011 in my INBOX. It was sent to my (and two other developers') users.sourceforge.net address, so maybe the delay is caused by a problem at SourceForge. In any case, there's RULE #1: DO NOT CONTACT DEVELOPERS PERSONALLY. Because of this rule, I won't reply to the mail, but I'll answer the question in a blogpost:

Greetings, developers all!
Is there an email address I should turn to/an email list I should subscribe to,
for questions and help pertaining to help for iText 1.5.4?

I can get really petulant reading the Flemish newspapers. Last Friday, there was an article about LinkedIn with "quotes from experts and analysts". They were amazed that LinkedIn is worth as much as the Belgian company Belgacom:

That's madness! Last year, the social networksite [LinkedIn] had a turnover of $243M and a profit of $3.4M. For comparison: Belgacom had a turnover of €6.6B and a profit of €1.27B.

So? Why is this relevant? They are comparing apples and oranges!

Today somebody brougth Jee's blog to my attention.
This blog contains two posts about using iText: