It’s easy to backup or restore your database directly with SQL.

backup database MyDatabase TO DISK=‘c:pathtoMyDatabase.bak’ with INIT

The syntax is pretty self-explanatory once you see it. Backup the database “TO DISK”, or to a file at the designated path. The “WITH INIT” specifies that any existing backup file will be overwritten.

The restore syntax is nearly identical. If the database you are restoring currently exists, be sure to drop the database before doing the restore.

restore database MyDatabase FROM DISK=‘c:pathtoMyDatabase.bak’

Simple as that.

The World of Apple site has posted some good screenshots of the latest build of Mac OS X Leopard.

These newest screenshots feature some of the new features that have been reported, such as (a) Improved firewall, (b) More convenient Spotlight features, (c) Lost file recovery, and (d) Improved UI, which (no surprise here) matches the new UI in iTunes 7. Included in this is resolution independence of UI elements. Apple is pushing the envelope, as always.

A while ago, I mentioned the release of a new web development IDE called Aptana. The cool thing about Aptana is that it can be downloaded as a standalone IDE or as a plugin for Eclipse.

Aptana is a really nice modern IDE for web development: It has excellent support for CSS and JavaScript and, consequently, AJAX. It also has decent built-in support for FTP and SFTP connections. Especially this last point is something where Eclipse is sorely lacking, and you can’t entirely blame it, since its original purpose was (and is) something larger than just web development.

Whether I end up using Aptana as the Eclipse perspective of choice for HTML or JavaScript or CSS is yet to be determined; however, I guarantee you I’ll be using Aptana for my FTP connectivity. The Aptana folks have a nice screencast demonstrating how easy directly manipulating files via FTP can be with Aptana. It is very reminiscent of the way Dreamweaver handles FTP connections, which is incredibly easy, especially when considering the lack of FTP support in Eclipse.

And regardless of whether you are in the Aptana perspective or not, a project that has a “Synchronized Connection” to an FTP connection will have a “Synchronize” group in the contextual menu that enables you to upload/download/synchronize your project’s files with the FTP connection in any perspective. Nice!

This is primarily a reminder for myself. If you’re not authenticating against a database or network directory store, your web app may need to just authenticate against a standard Linux password file.

Creating one is easy:

htpasswd -c [filename] [username]

After prompting you for the desired password for this user, it will create the file (or wipe it out if it exists), and insert the user with the password, naturally encrypted.

Go without the -c parameter to add additional users to an existing password file. Finally, use a -d parameter to delete a certain user from a password file.