Backing up a Microsoft SQL Server database from a shared host?

How the heck do you grab a backup of a Microsoft SQL Server database? All I want is an SQL export of all the tables (schemas and data) in the database, like I can get with phpMyAdmin's SQL export feature.

The host I'm trying to get this off of doesn't provide any kind of control panel for this, and the only way I can really access the server is through FTP and ASP. Why is this so hard? (Why anyone would choose to host on a Windows host -- besides ignorance -- is beyond me.)

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: Programming | id 5355

19:35 (utc-4)

 

Re-opening the wounds of Vietnam

I've heard a lot of people pointing out that Kerry is opening up the nation's old wounds about Vietnam. As Matt Wretchard poetically puts it:

The original accusations by the Swiftvets group against John Kerry's Vietnam service claims have set off a chain reaction, which is at one level about the past, by restarting an unfinished civil war in which neither side won a decisive victory, but settled for an indefinite armistice. That truce may now be broken. Tensions began to rise in the political demilitarized zone between the two halves of America with the War on Terror, but when first Kerry and then the Swiftvets crossed the lines the battle may once again be in full swing. The story the Mainstream Media refused to acknowledge is threatening to push every other headline below the fold, a blasting cap dismissed as insignificant before everyone realized it was connected to the main charge.

Roger Simon has some comments along the same lines, here and here. Simon links to what is so far a great article (I have to finish it) by Herman Jacobs at the Wall St. Journal opinion page on Kerry's Lost Opportunity, subtitled "He could have healed the wounds of Vietnam. Instead, he tried to exploit them."

Now, Country Store links to this column by Mark Steyn: Who's to blame for nation's Vietnam wounds? Kerry. I have to quote the entire section he quotes, because it fits so well together:

So when John McCain sternly warns the swift boat veterans of ''reopening the wounds of Vietnam,'' it's worth asking: Why is Vietnam a ''wound'' and why won't it heal? The answer: not because it was a military or strategic defeat but because it was a national trauma. And whose fault is that?

Well, you can't pin it all on one person, but, if you had to, Lt. John F. Kerry would stand a better shot at taking the solo trophy than almost anyone. The ''wounds'' McCain complains of aren't from losing Vietnam, but from the manner in which it was lost. Today Sen. Kerry says he's proud of his anti-war activism, but that's not what it was. Every war has pacifists and conscientious objectors and even disenchanted veterans, but there's simply no precedent for what John Kerry did: a man who put his combat credentials to the service of smearing his country's entire armed forces as rapists, decapitators and baby killers. That's the ''wound,'' Sen. McCain. That's why a crummy little war on the other side of the world still festers. ... Because Kerry didn't just call for U.S. withdrawal, he impugned the honor of every man he served with.

In his testimony to Congress in 1971, Kerry asserted a scale of routine war crimes unparalleled in American history -- his ''band of brothers'' (as he now calls them) ''personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.'' Almost all these claims were unsupported. Indeed, the only specific example of a U.S. war criminal that Kerry gave was himself. As he said on ''Meet The Press'' in April 1971, ''Yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I used 50-caliber machineguns, which we were granted and ordered to use.''

Really? And when was that? On your top-secret Christmas Eve mission in Cambodia? If they'd taken him at his word, when the senator said ''I'm John Kerry reporting for duty,'' the delegates at the Democratic Convention should have dived for cover.

But they didn't. So Kerry is now the first self-confessed war criminal in the history of the Republic to be nominated for president. Normally this would be considered an electoral plus only in the more cynical banana republics. But the Democrats seemed to think they could run an anti-war anti-hero as a war hero and nobody would mind. As we now know, a lot of people -- a lot of veterans -- do mind, very much. They understand that, whether or not he ever mowed down civilians with his 50-caliber machinegun, Kerry is responsible for a lot of wounds closer to home.

He also posts this link to a comment from a Vietnam veteran that's very much worth a read:

There is a reason that some of those veterans turned their backs to Kerry and that many others sat with arms folded, refusing even polite applause. A reason that non veterans can, perhaps, know intellectually but not feel in their guts.

Like all veterans of all wars, regardless of branch of service or duty stations, we all lost friends there. Some of those we lost were closer than brothers. Unlike other wars in our history we didn't go over together and come home together, our individual wars ended individually.

Unlike other wars we came home branded by a large segment of our society as war criminals, by another segment as losers. Then, as most of us were already home, one of our own officers branded us all, including the dead that we were just beginning to mourn, as war criminals, murderers and rapists.

We later discovered that many of those that he was quoting as witnesses to our 'crimes' had not spent one day in uniform. Others had never served in Viet Nam. None of them, not a single one, would testify under oath, even if granted immunity. Yet our 'crimes' became part of the common knowlege. Our children were given that testimony as fact in their history classes. We all knew soldiers, sailors,airmen and Marines that had died, leaving children behind, we know that those children were taught those same lies as fact. Who sat with those children as we did with ours, explaining that those were lies told for political gain?

It's bad enough that we couldn't mourn our dead then. Now we see the same man that stood over the open graves of our brothers and pissed on their bodies is back. This time he's dug up those bodies and is standing on them to give himself the stature for high office.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Opinions/Politics | id 5351

18:09 (utc-4)

 

Testing PRG

Testing a small change to my comment posting. I might as well explain what it is:

Using the POST-redirect-GET pattern (PRG) for web forms means that after a POST form submission, you then do a redirect so that the POST "goes away". By "goes away" I mean that if you hit refresh or go back and forward in your browser history it won't ask you to re-submit form data. This protects against duplicate POSTs and helps to prevent annoying the "user".

In addition, consider the case of my weblog comments. Unlike some weblog systems, the form to post comments is right on the weblog entry page itself. If you don't do a PRG then a person will not be able to refresh the page to see if anyone's responded to his comment without getting the POST resubmit popup. This is how it was on my site for a long time, and the only way around this was to navigate off the page and then navigate back to it. This is extremely inconvenient. So, I implemented PRG in my Formation library and then on my site.

The problem was this: the result of POST requests is never cached, so if you do a POST you'll always get fresh data. But, GET requests can be cached, so if your caching is set up a certain way you can do a POST to add a new comment, but then when you're redirected as part of the PRG you won't see the comment you just left. To get around this I added a kludge so that when you left a comment you were redirected back to the same page, except with "?newcomment=$comment_id" appended onto the URL. This is probably one of these cache busting techniques. That way, you'd be requesting a "new" page every time and be guaranteed to see fresh data.

At some point recently I've removed all caching headers from my site because I couldn't come up with a good caching scheme. Some of the things that made it hard for me to figure out the right caching scheme was that because my pages are mostly static I'd want them to have a pretty generous caching scheme, possibly even "public", but then if a new comment was posted people might not see it (in either the "recent comments" section on the right, as an increment to the comment count under a post, or as a new comment displayed on individual entry page). In addition, when I'm logged in to my site as an administrator, next to every post I get a little edit button that lets me easily edit that post. If I had very generous (like public) caching set up, after I logged in I'd have to do a "hard refresh" of the page contents to make the edit button show up.

I expected to go back and figure out the most appropriate scheme later, but it turns out the browser's default caching seems to behave exactly how I want it to. Back and forward don't cause the page to be refetched, so you get some of the benefits of caching, but when you navigate around it fetches a new page, so my edit buttons show up. There's even the case where you start typing in a textarea, go to another page, and then come back, and the text you typed is still filled in. With a stringent caching scheme (like no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate), that text would be wiped, but with the default caching scheme it's not. (Update: oops, I was wrong, it is wiped. However, I don't think you can have it both ways. i.e. have text not be wiped and have the behavior I describe next regarding my weblog entry form.) This also applies to my weblog entry form I'm typing in. With generous caching, if I edited an entry, saved it, and then went to edit it again, I'd get the entry as it was before I last edited it. If I made a change to the entry the second time the first change's changes would be overwritten. To get around this I'd have make sure to do a hard refresh on the weblog entry screen when re-editing posts, but with the default caching scheme this isn't a problem.

Anyway this post is here for me to do a test to see if I still need that "?newcomment=$comment_id" kludge to have new comments show up after you post them and you're redirected.

Update: And it works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but Opera seems to have issues. In fact, Opera is leaving the connection open even after it says "Completed request to keithdevens.com" in the status bar and is not refreshing the page. It's strange.

Update: I have no clue what Opera is doing. It seems to just be inexplicably leaving the connection open. If I preview (which doesn't do the redirect after post) and then post the comment it doesn't have the problem. Oh well, screw Opera. Incidentally, Opera uses weird headers I've never heard of, like Cookie2 and TE.

Permalink | 14 Comments | Tags: Programming, This website | id 5345

05:25 (utc-4)
edited: 06:02 (utc-4)

 

Sun-Times: Plot thickens after checking Kerry's records

Chicago Sun-Times: Plot thickens after checking [Kerry's] records. I wonder what else we'd learn if Kerry released the remaining hundred or so pages of his Navy records in addition to the six pages we have now.

Update: It gets stranger! His silver star citation was edited 3 times (including the original citation), which is highly unusual. Even more highly unusual is that it was edited during the Reagan administration, more than a decade after it was first issued. But now, former Navy Secretary John Lehman, whose signature was on the third edit, now says it's a total mystery to him how his signature got on it.

In Kerry's defense, maybe Lehman's memory is faulty. But I doubt that given that changing an award citation so many years after the fact is so unusual that he would have had to have a big reason to change it and he would have been likely to remember it. However, what's also strange is that Kerry claims his silver star has a "combat V", yet no silver star with combat V was ever issued by the Navy.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Opinions/Politics | id 5343

04:41 (utc-4)
edited: 12:28 (utc-4)

 

Steven Den Beste's hiatus

Steven, we'll miss you.

I was going to write this to you a while ago at the end of an e-mail I wound up not sending. I figure now is an appropriate time to say it: Thank you. In addition to informing me, you've helped shape my thinking. That's the best gift anyone can give me. I am in your debt.

(It's probably appropriate that I not send this through e-mail. I hope he'll see this in his referrers.)

Permalink | Comments? | id 5342

04:35 (utc-4)