Suzuki Bandit in the snow

When I went away on holiday the other year I left my Bandit standing for about 3 weeks and it must of had a bad batch of fuel in the tank. The bad fuel turned into jelly in the carburettors and of course the bike started running like a dog. In the back of my mind I had thought I should drain the float bowls before leaving, but it got forgotten in all the excitement of the trip.

If you suspect you have left your bike too long and that the fuel will have turned to jelly do not start it. Before getting into details I also strongly suggest you purchase the Suzuki GSF600, 650 and 1200 Bandit Service and Repair Manual: 1995 to 2006 as it contains a lot of very useful information including the all important tightening torques.

Anyway so the bike now would not run a week after returning and I desperately wanted to ride so I stripped the fairings off, drained the fuel tank by pulling the fuel lead and opening the petcock, removed the fuel tank, removed the battery, pulled the airbox out and finally released the carburettors. This involved disconnecting the throttle cable, the fuel hose and the fuel overflow hoses not forgetting the choke cable of course.

Once you have the four carbies out you need to set about pulling the float bowl covers off and inspecting them and cleaning with carb cleaner as needed. Also pull out the pilot screw/needle remembering how many turns it takes. Pop the diaphragm cover and remove the rubber diaphragm checking for any problems. Don’t forget to hang on to the spring that is under the cover and remove the fuel flow needle.

Give it a good blast of carb cleaner and then blow out with compressed air and you should see gunk come flying out. Use further cleaner and air blasts for stubborn rubbish.

Carefully reassemble and attach to the motorbike in reverse order.

The following video illustrates this process fairly well (bare in mind it was not made using Bandit carbs so they differ slightly). Video

Say you have a development environment setup using SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and your customer has a SQL Server 2000 database accessible only via ODBC and you can only run a DB import via a script. How would you do it? Easy you might think just run msdbdump.exe on the command line, well this isn’t MySQL so you are not so fortunate.

Backing up your DB is easy with SQL Server using the following commands:

http://gist.github.com/294721

But this just gives you a binary file that can be restored if you have access privileges to the live database for restoring. If you are in a shared hosting environment or one where the paranoid admins won’t give you remote desktop access and the only access you have is to run a PHP script to import the data and schema via SQL you will need to export the DB to T-SQL format. For more information on T-SQL I recommend the following two books Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft SQL Server T-SQL in 10 Minutes and Microsoft SQL Server T-SQL Fundamentals.

Microsoft have a little program to perform this very function: Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard 1.1 It is difficult to find on the web so I aim to save you the time I spent hunting for it. When you run the wizard make sure to set:

• Drop existing objects in script to false
• Schema qualify to false
• Script for target database to SQL Server 2000

It does seem to chew on the cud for quite some time so grab a beverage.

Now for the PHP portion of the process. So you have uploaded your lovely T-SQL dump file to a PHP accessible location on your webserver and now you are wondering how to get into your DB via ODBC. Well you will need a PHP script like the one I have supplied below.

A couple of the complexities to be aware of before you continue. It seems that the T-SQL dump file comes out as UTF16 and we need it in UTF8 so you will need to convert it to UTF8 before you can import. I used a neat little function available from Modular.org for this purpose. This may or may not meet your needs. If you need a more accurate conversion method then I recommend you start your search with the PHP module/function mbstring . T-SQL contains reference and keywords that ODBC/MS SQL cannot understand. I have included some regex to strip these out.

My script is by no means perfect or factored down so feel free to make suggestions or improvements.

http://gist.github.com/294720

Say you have a development environment setup using SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and your customer has a SQL Server 2000 database accessible only via ODBC and you can only run a DB import via a script. How would you do it? Easy you might think just run msdbdump.exe on the command line, well this isn’t MySQL so you are not so fortunate.

Backing up your DB is easy with SQL Server using the following commands:

But this just gives you a binary file that can be restored if you have access privileges to the live database for restoring. If you are in a shared hosting environment or one where the paranoid admins won’t give you remote desktop access and the only access you have is to run a PHP script to import the data and schema via SQL you will need to export the DB to T-SQL format.

Microsoft have a little program to perform this very function: Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard 1.1 It is difficult to find on the web so I aim to save you the time I spent hunting for it. When you run the wizard make sure to set:

• Drop existing objects in script to false
• Schema qualify to false
• Script for target database to SQL Server 2000

It does seem to chew on the cud for quite some time so grab a beverage.

Now for the PHP portion of the process. So you have uploaded your lovely T-SQL dump file to a PHP accessible location on your webserver and now you are wondering how to get into your DB via ODBC. Well you will need a PHP script like the one I have supplied below.

A couple of the complexities to be aware of before you continue. It seems that the T-SQL dump file comes out as UTF16 and we need it in UTF8 so you will need to convert it to UTF8 before you can import. I used a neat little function available from Modular.org for this purpose. This may or may not meet your needs. If you need a more accurate conversion method then I recommend you start your search with the PHP module/function mbstring . T-SQL contains reference and keywords that ODBC/MS SQL cannot understand. I have included some regex to strip these out.

My script is by no means perfect or factored down so feel free to make suggestions or improvements.