Oily Rag 1: Introduction: Difference between revisions

Like a car you would not recast an engine block or camshaft, these are fixed components similarly DLLs and exe files are pre-complied hence are fixed components. In both scenarios you can tweak, move components around, add little extras, even move the air intake to act as a vacuum cleaner, this blows your engine apart as it sucks up a puddle of water.

Leads me onto component reuse, buried within 3.5’s architecture are some very elegant, standalone components just asking to be reused, perhaps in other projects however I am thinking more in terms of tweaks saving extra work when coding.

Ever purchased a brand new car, sat there looking at the dashboard wishing you could remove or add a new switch.

Not a chance for fear of devaluing the car, however take a look at 3.5 admin’s panel and reek your revenge; it won’t be devalued when you break it, just install a brand new one.

Well if you are feeling opulent you can have a model 3.5 for every day of the week.

I purposefully neglected to state what the model refers to, thus giving me the opportunity to empathise that Uniform Server is much more than a web server.

If I were reading this article, by now I would be screaming! Show me something new and shut up. OK at least it’s not full of those irritating adverts.

'''After a time become so irritating'''

'''Bandwidth is valuable don't waste it'''

For this series I could not think of a better title, '''oily rag''' seemed appropriate.

Anything you read in this section requires you to roll up your selves and get your hands dirty.

Skills required, knowledge of CSS, HTML, be a competent programmer preferably in C++, PERL, PHP, MySQL and machine code and that’s only to service a car.

To complete any topic in this section I found copy and paste more that adequate.

For once in my life I will be very serious no mater what fancy titles or terminology you see it all boils down to one thing, '''manipulation of text files'''. If you know where to find these text files you can hack them to your hearts content and make them work for you.

The bug count has increased slightly I have consolidated these in a separate section [[Bugs 3.5-Apollo: Introduction |3.5-Apollo problems and bugs]]

I have retained this in the Oily Rag section because various pages require changing however installing and running see [[Oily Rag 1: Running 3.5-Apollo Service| Running 3.5-Apollo Service]] remain easy.

Check out [[Bugs 3.5-Apollo: Combined bug fix|Combined bug fix]] it includes all pages that need changing.       

Introduces techniques required to convert Uniform Server to run from a CD. Highlights files which pose a problem these contain functions that require read/write access. These are modified to produce a working example no frills check out [[Oily Rag 1: CD Part 1|Part 1]]   

The example in Part 1 although functional is a one way process [[Oily Rag 1: CD Part 2|Part 2]] introduces the concept of file switching which greatly enhances the plugins functionality. Concludes with a down loadable plugin USCD1.  

[[Oily Rag 1: CD Part 4|Part 4]] consolidates all the ideas to produce something resembling a usable plugin. You can download [[Oily Rag 1: Downloads#CD Part 4|plugin USCD2]] this provides a reasonable starting point that you can tailor to your own application.

Running Uniform Server on a [[Oily Rag 1: Dedicated drive USB|dedicated drive]] is extremely easy. No need to run as a service, removes the need for a virtual drive. This gives it a slight speed advantage when run on a USB stick or separate partition on a hard drive or even a separate hard drive.

This [[Oily Rag 1: Wait for process |proposes a solution]] to prevent the dreaded error message connection was refused when starting 3.5-Apollo. I have also included a batch file progress bar.