Mike Benner

My blog is going to take a turn for the month of November.  I am participating in the PragProWriMo and will be writing a series on my experiences on starting up a new business.  It took me awhile to come up with a topic that I thought would be interesting, insightful and that I have enough knowledge to actually discuss in detail enough to fill a month worth of posts.  These posts will not be in a from start to finish order, but will rather be posted as individual "chapters" as I feel I have enough together to post them and will be followed with an interview the following day with a startup that fits the current topic.

You may wonder what makes me think that I know enough to help you through your start up.  I won't say that I do, but I will say this: Over the last 10+ years I have failed at business, been successful, been shocked beyond words and surrounded myself with others that share these experiences.  I have learned that no two companies are the same and what works for one will kill another and great things will at times come completely out of nowhere.  My hopes is that sharing these experiences will give you some insight into running a startup and help you not make my mistakes, recognize patterns without having to experience them and if nothing else maybe get some laughs at some interesting stories.

On a side note, I will leave the comments on (against the recommendations) as I feel your views and experiences can also help other readers.  So let's see where this wild ride takes us and who knows, maybe at the end of the month we will have the foundation for something to continue pursuing or I will realize writing a book is not for me but I will know that I gave it my best shot.  See you tomorrow when I will write about my first startup experience in the crazy days of the dot com craze.

My daughter has become very passionate about the charity Pennies for Peace.  So much so she has made signs and asks for pennies daily.  The latest was making me a sign for my "office".  But I don't have one, so I surprised her and posted a page here for her.  Please check it out and if you giving make a small donation (we are talking pennies).  OK, back to working.  Thanks for looking.

Since the days of MX7 I have always had issues with CF's ability to properly build a dynamic PDF. FlashPaper always seemed to work better (made sense when Macromedia was in charge) but I thought for sure that PDF would "just work" when Adobe took over. I have been sadly mistaken in my thoughts and have experienced nothing but bug after bug. This most recent bug, is something that I have ALWAYS experienced but thought it would have been fixed moving to CF8. It is the issue that when placing images in the header and trying to size them. They just scaled willy nilly. Seriously, no rhyme or reason just scaling, I can refresh the page with the same data and get a different scaled image.

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Ray Camden, with the help of Dan Switzer, pushed out an update to the BlogCFC engine tonight.  You can get all the juicy details and download it here.

OK, we now have a web server running and a database running.  Wouldn't it be great if we could output the data on the web?  That's what I thought, so let's get Railo installed and start publishing some CFML.  This section of the series is when we get to compile our own connector between Apache and Resin.  It is also the piece that was difficult to track down what went wrong.  The actual compiling and installing isn't difficult, it is more the knowledge of the arguments needed to make it work on this set up.

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