Completed a course at BCIT: Relational Database and SQL

Back in December 2011, I just completed a 12-week evening course COMP 1630 at BCIT in downtown Vancouver. This was a great course worth 5 credits, and delved into database design, architecture, a little systems analysis, and a lot of SQL syntax. We learned about Crow’s Foot Notation in building an initial requirements design before translating that into actual tables, columns, indices, contraints, etc. It helped strengthen what I already knew of database systems and look forward to taking database administrator-type courses this year.

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MacBook Pro boots up showing a folder with a flashing question mark

This dreaded flashing question mark inside a folder means that the startup disk is no longer able to find a Mac operating system to boot from. There are a few things you can try to do to fix this yourself.

Reboot MacBook pro and then hold the Command (⌘) and R keys on your keyboard to startup from the macOS Recovery. I did this and was able to go through disk diagnostics telling me that there were some disk errors. I proceeded to fix what I could but found that on subsequent reboots to macOS Recovery showed different partition errors. Sometimes the disk utility completed successfully but other times it would stop repairing even if left overnight.

If you did have a failing disk drive, the marked errors would be consistent and multiple passes will bypass these marked errors. I had erratic results however which led me to believe it may or may not be a bad disk. The next investigation should be to look at the disk drive connections to the SATA controller.

Open the MacBook pro and take a l…

Troubleshooting Microphone Problems using Fortnite on PS4

My son has been playing the popular game called Fortnite www.epicgames.com/fortnite/ on PlayStation 4 for many months now. There is social component to the game where a team of players collaborate by using their headset and microphone in their party/group chats. One day, the microphone on my son’s headset stopped working in Fortnite. The troubleshooting that father-son had to go through to fix the issue is worth blogging about because I couldn’t stand seeing him get declined from Battle Royale party invites and just playing the game solo which isn’t as fun. For a few days, he would FaceTime his friends on our iPad so that they can talk on the side while playing Fortnite on PS4. You probably won’t want to go through that scene as well so I thought it’s time to put in some of the troubleshooting skills that we are so good at and put that to good use so that others can benefit from our experience. Here are 4 phases you will likely go through to try and fix this.

1) The first thing that…

Moving to a Different Hosting Provider

For close to a decade, our web hosting provider was with 110mb.com and byethost.com. This provider offered free hosting using MySQL and WordPress which was more than enough for our blog. However, a security flaw in one of the WordPress updates caused our site to be blacklisted on the internet and which resulted in getting our subscription revoked. We were provided a backup of the MySQL database and all the WordPress web server files, and then called it quits.

Using blogger.com seemed to be a good fit but we couldn’t restore the blog contents easily. Hunting around the internet, we found 000webhost.com which offered the same services as byethost.com. Tried it out a few months ago and have now just recently restored all the blog contents from a few years ago. We are now under way to getting all the pages back the way they were so stay tuned and thanks for checking back in with us.

Merry Christmas.

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