Articles
Thoughts on buying a new condo in Alberta
Some thoughts for people thinking of buying a new condo, who haven’t done so before. It is based on my experience working for a condo development company, where I did walkthroughs with purchasers.
Can a Condo Corporation in Alberta ban renters?
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?
How can condo arrears be collected?
A fairly common problem for Condominium Corporations is collecting condo fees that have gone into arrears by the unit owner. In Alberta, the Condo Corporation is in a strong position on this matter, and has a few tools at its disposal. The most important fact that protects the Corporation is that condo fees are attached … Continue reading How can condo arrears be collected?
Should we hire a condo management company?
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?
What is an estoppel?
In Alberta an Estoppel Certificate is a document created by a Condominium Corporation which sets out certain information, such as amounts owing on a unit. This post discusses estoppels and more broadly discusses what a Corporation has to disclose to an entitled party (which is an owner, purchaser, or mortgagee). A potential buyer or mortgagee … Continue reading What is an estoppel?
CakePHP to Laravel
As mentioned in my last post, I tried out CakePHP, which is a PHP framework for web development. I like a lot of the ideas of it, and the structure it provides. But, it seems to not have enough of a user base to have a substantial “ecosystem”, which Laravel has. So, I’m giving a Laravel … Continue reading CakePHP to Laravel
CakePHP
My latest discovery in the world of PHP is CakePHP. It is a framework for developing web applications in PHP. I’m not an expert in it yet, but so far it’s looking pretty interesting. It seems to have a significant but not huge following. The neat thing about it, is gives a strong order to … Continue reading CakePHP
Secure Site with SSL Certificate
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.
Canada Day 2016 in Thunder Bay
Mixing OpenOffice/LibreOffice, MySQL, MacOS/Windows, and ODBC/JDBC
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
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
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
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
How to keep fixed width HTML tables/columns fixed
I wrote a little PHP script that shows data from any table in an HTML table, and I had a little frustration in trying to keep the HTML table and column widths fixed. I wanted to do this, because I want very large tables to appear to load very quickly, and not have columns “jump” … Continue reading How to keep fixed width HTML tables/columns fixed
Weird Characters in OpenOffice Base with MySQL
I’m using Apache OpenOffice Base 4 with MySQL 5.6. I noticed some question marks appeared where I should have seen some non-English characters (inuit characters). I had set up the database properly to use UTF-8. But, it turned out I used the ANSI ODBC driver. Switching to the Unicode Driver easily fixed the problem.
MySQL can’t insert without default val on auto-increment
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
