Articles

Can a Condo Corporation in Alberta ban renters?

by Robert Thivierge
No, in Alberta, the owner of a condominium unit is always allowed to rent out their unit.  There is nothing a Condominium Corporation can do prohibit this.  Section 32(5) of the Condominium Property Act makes clear no bylaw can restrict a unit owner’s freedom to rent out their unit. Often there’s a desire to restrict … Continue reading Can a Condo Corporation in Alberta ban renters?

Should we hire a condo management company?

by Robert Thivierge
For larger Condominium Corporations its a pretty simple and a pretty obvious choice.  You practically need to have a professional management company to run things.  But, for smaller condos its a tough choice.  This post is about that question. It’s important to keep in mind what a management company does and doesn’t do.  While this … Continue reading Should we hire a condo management company?

Secure Site with SSL Certificate

by Robert Thivierge
This site now has an SSL certificate.  That means any communication you, as a user, have with the site is transmitted securely between you and the host.  You’ll notice the address on the web browser starts with “https”, and typically shows a “locked” green lock icon, to indicate the site is secure.

Mixing OpenOffice/LibreOffice, MySQL, MacOS/Windows, and ODBC/JDBC

by Robert Thivierge
This post is about some difficulty I had in making an Apache OpenOffice Base “odb” front end work with an MySQL database backend on Mac OS X, and how I got things working. I originally had an Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Base “odb” file working on Windows, accessing MySQL with ODBC.  The “odb” file had a … Continue reading Mixing OpenOffice/LibreOffice, MySQL, MacOS/Windows, and ODBC/JDBC

Importing bank transactions

by Robert Thivierge
Like many, I’ve often downloaded financial transactions from my bank’s web site.  The options for my bank (in Canada), is fairly typical, and limited to “Microsoft Money”, “Intuit Quicken”, “Intuit QuickBooks”, “Simply Accounting”, “Spreadsheet (CSV)”. Now, I don’t use any of the above accounting programs.  I want the data to play around with, and use … Continue reading Importing bank transactions

PHP/MySQL Multibyte Characters

by Robert Thivierge
While using PHP to display web pages drawing on a MySQL database, I’ve had some difficulty with strings in non-English characters.  In my case, it happened to be Inuktitut syllabics.  Most text seemed to display properly, but some didn’t.  Ultimately, I found the simple solution, was I needed to enable the “mbstring” extension in PHP, and … Continue reading PHP/MySQL Multibyte Characters

Importing Excel spreadsheet into MySQL

by Robert Thivierge
I’ve recently had to import a large Excel spreadsheet into MySQL.  Of course, there’s lots of ways of doing this, and most of the time, it’s a rather trivial thing to do.  That is, it’s easy if you have English characters and single-line text fields. Approach 1:  CSV.  This is often the “go to” approach … Continue reading Importing Excel spreadsheet into MySQL

MySQL can’t insert without default val on auto-increment

by Robert Thivierge
So, I had a weird error with MySQL 5.6 Win 64 server.  Every time I tried to insert a record, I got an error that a field didn’t have a default value.  I was using Apache OpenOffice, with an ODBC driver, but the same underlying problem occurred with MySQL WorkBench, so it was a MySQL … Continue reading MySQL can’t insert without default val on auto-increment