Original noisy exhaust

New Exhaust

You want to make sure the engine is cool when you do this because you exhaust system can get quite hot.

Take off the rear bumper and the rear engine tin. Once you have that completed follow the exhaust pipes back to where they connect on the motor. There could be up to six connection points, though mine only had four hooked up. Take all the bolts out and put them into a safe place. I use a magnetic mechanics bowl just for this purpose. Now pull straight backwards on the exhaust and it should slide off. All the carbon and such coming from your motor may have it locked on there tight, but a couple good yanks should allow it to come right off. This is what it should look like once your exhaust is off.

Rear view of motor without exhaust

My original exhaust was all one piece, but my new exhaust was two pieces, headers and a muffler. If you have a single piece you are almost done, if you have two pieces pick up the headers and slide them on where you just took the old exhaust from and put the bolts in. If you ordered a kit you should have some new gaskets, don't forget to put those on. It helps seal the exhaust and prevent leaks. Here is a shot of the newly installed headers.

New headers installed

Now the final item to complete the new exhaust is the muffler. Slap on the gasket and bolt it up to the headers.

New exhaust

Congrats, you have new exhaust! Just bolt up the tin, replace the bumper, and put away your tools and you will have successfully changed you own exhaust.

SirGecko PHP Autoloader

Tools I used:
17mm wrench
13mm wrench

Now before we start it is very important that you disconnect the battery. Also make sure the VW is out of gear with the emergency brake on and the key off or out of the vehicle altogether. These precautions will help to ensure your safety while working on the vehicle. It is entirely possible to start the vehicle while you are underneath it and I am sure your ribcage would appreciate not getting highly compressed today.

First let's roll under the dub and take a gander at what we are going to be removing. Put down your drop cloth right in front of the rear passenger wheel. Slide your head under there and look up and maybe a little to the rear of the car. You should see something resembling the following.

There should be several wires sticking out of the solenoid. The top wire comes off your ignition switch which sends the signal to power the starter. The large wire with the bolt on it goes to the positive battery post, and the small wire on the bottom is the ground wire. There should be one more wire on the right heading off the solenoid to the starter.

The top starter bolt is a dual purpose bolt. Not only does it hold the starter to the transmission, it also holds the engine to the transmission. So let's roll out from under the dub and head back to the engine compartment. I did not take a picture of this part because it has to be done by feel and if you are going to wrench on an aircooled VW you need to be able to feel it out. Squat down behind the motor with you 17mm wrench and reach around the right side (passenger side) of the motor. Feel around in the lower region and you will eventually encounter a bolt with a nut on it. Stick the open end of your wrench on the nut and loosen it up. This nut may be difficult to move, as it should be as it holds your motor in your machine. I personally recommend a good set of ratcheting wrenches to help speed up the removal of nuts and bolts in hard to reach or see areas.

Okey dokey, that side is all done. Poke yourself back under the dub. Take your 13mm wrench with you and take the nut off the solenoid. When the wires are off stick the nut back on for safe storage. The ignition and ground wires need to be unattached as well, they may be push on, or held on by a nut. The wire from the solenoid to the starter can remain.

Pull your 17mm wrench back out and remove the bottom nut from the starter. You starter is now loose. You should probably use two hands to pull the starter out as it has some heft to it. Grasp the starter and pull it straight back, be careful not to drop it. Work it through the hoses and all the miscellaneous items until it is safely on the ground.

Your starter may be greasy as mine was, after a little cleanup you should have something looking like...

Congratulations, your starter is now out!

First off, this is the entirety of the fluid that came out...notice something missing...like most of the fluid that should be there?

After rolling out from under the bus with the drain plug in hand I found this nice big chunk of metal stuck to the magnetized plug surrounded by metal shavings...another bad sign.

If you find this in your transmission you might want to think about looking around for a new one, soon. That said, I did make it almost 500 miles a couple weekends after finding this.

Cheers

 
function parseTwitter(text) {
        // Parse URIs
        text = text.replace(/[A-Za-z]+:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9-_]+\.[A-Za-z0-9-_:%&\?\/.=]+/, function(uri) {
		return uri.link(uri);
	});
 
        // Parse Twitter usernames
        text = text.replace(/[@]+[A-Za-z0-9-_]+/, function(u) {
		var username = u.replace("@","")
		return u.link("http://twitter.com/"+username);
	});
 
	// Parse Twitter hash tags
	text = text.replace(/[#]+[A-Za-z0-9-_]+/, function(t) {
		var tag = t.replace("#","%23")
		return t.link("http://search.twitter.com/search?q="+tag);
	});
        return text;
}
 

To use it simply toss in any string with a Twitteresque format and viola, links!

I took pictures of almost every car there. You can view the full gallery by clicking any image below.

Because I am constantly loosing my CURL code and being forced to look it up again I decided to post my favorite CURL function for future reference for myself. I hope that you may get some use out of this as well.

 
/**
 * Get a web file (HTML, XHTML, XML, image, etc.) from a URL.  Return an
 * array containing the HTTP server response header fields and content.
 */
function curlFile($url) {
    $options = array(
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,     // return web page
        CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,    // don't return headers
        CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,     // follow redirects
        CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",       // handle all encodings
        CURLOPT_USERAGENT      => "blob curler 1.2", // who am i
        CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,     // set referer on redirect
        CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,      // timeout on connect
        CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,      // timeout on response
        CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,       // stop after 10 redirects
    );
 
    $ch      = curl_init( $url );
    curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
    $content = curl_exec( $ch );
    $err     = curl_errno( $ch );
    $errmsg  = curl_error( $ch );
    $header  = curl_getinfo( $ch );
    curl_close( $ch );
 
    $header['errno']   = $err;
    $header['errmsg']  = $errmsg;
    $header['content'] = $content;
    return $header;
}
 

Additional Reading:
Reading a Remote File Using PHP
How to get a webpage using CURL

For ease of development purposes I have downloaded the jQuery library, version 1.4.2, to my local machine.

Let's start by creating a basic HTML file that we will manipulate as we go.

 
<html>
<head>
        <title>JSON Demo</title>
 
        <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
 
        <script type="text/javascript">
                // We will fill in our code here
         </script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
 

We could statically build our own JSON string here, but since we are building an app to retreive remote content why don't we use an external source. There is a weather module in the NNU iPhone app that will do nicely. You can find it here http://www.nnu.edu/iphone/api/weather.php and the output should look something like

{"temp":["70"],"condition":["Fair"]}
 

(At the time of writing this was correct, but the site is still in development and may change slightly)

Great, we have our source, now we need to pull the content from it. Luckily jQuery provides some handy tools for grabbing remote content, and specifically for JSON data. Here is where the first trick comes in, cross site scripting (XSS). XSS happens when a Javascript service attempts to pull content from another server. XSS has been used for malicious purposes in the past and is therefore tightly controlled. jQuery is supposed to be able to legitimately access remote content, but if you are having problems see my post Enabling XSS for iPhone apps with PhoneGap and jQTouch to learn how to configure your Apache server to allow the remote pull.

Let's see what the jQuery code looks like

$.getJSON('http://www.nnu.edu/iphone/api/weather.php', function(data) {
  $('body').html('
 
' + data.temp + '
 
'
    + '
 
' + data.condition + '
 
');
});
 

Using $.getJSON we can provide a callback for the returned JSON. I am going to use a dynamic function in this example, however you can also point it to a function name you define elsewhere. See http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.getJSON/ for more information regarding the $.getJSON function.

After previewing the index.html file in your browser you should see

73
 
Fair
 

Congratulations, you have successfully pulled remote JSON into your app!

You can download the complete source code here

 
<html>
<head>
        <title>JSON Demo</title>
 
        <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
 
        <script type="text/javascript">
                // We will fill in our code here
           $(document).ready(function() {
               $('body').html('
 
' + data.temp + '
 
'
                                + '
 
' + data.condition + '
 
');
               });
            }); 
        </script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
 

Complex Objects
Let's take it a step further now and work with some complex objects. We will be using the NNU iPhone app's JSON news feed located here http://www.nnu.edu/iphone/api/rssproxy.php?url=nnu_news . I am not going to post the JSON string because it gets quite long. You can view it by loading that URI into your browser.

Again, create your initial basic HTML index file. We will reuse the one listed in the above section.

Now the code for this section is going to be a little more intense. The object we are getting back contains multiple array of information. We will need to loop over the array in order to grab the individual news elements and display their contents. jQuery provides us with the $.each function (See http://api.jquery.com/each/) which we can hand the JSON data off to and get to the good stuff. Let's see what this code will look like

$.getJSON('http://www.nnu.edu/iphone/api/rssproxy.php?url=nnu_news', function(data) {
        $.each(data, function(i,item){
                $('body').append('<strong>' + item.title + '</strong>');
                $('body').append('<br/><span style="font-size: 85%;">Published:' + item.pubDate + '</span>');
                $('body').append('
 
' + item.description + '
 
<br/>');
 
        });
});
 

If everything was written correctly you should now see a listing of the news items when you refresh the index.html file in your browser.

You can download the full source here

Having Trouble?
If you are receiving a denied error from the server, or a 200 success message with no content you may be experiencing cross site scripting (XSS) issues. Take a gander at my post Enabling XSS for iPhone apps with PhoneGap and jQTouch to prevent this behavior in the future

PhoneGap allows me to use my current HTML, CSS, and Javascript knowledge to build a site. Then using the PhoneGap xcode project I simply drop the web files into a directory and PhoneGap transforms them into a glorious iPhone app.

jQTouch is a jQuery based library that makes the app look and feel like a real iPhone app.

This setup worked beautifully until I needed to connect to the school's webserver and retreive content. I began to run into cross site scripting (XSS) headaches. After days of pounding my head into my desk I ran across a neat little feature in Apache that allows you to turn off the XSS protection on the server. You may be thinking that sounds insecure, and you would be right, but if you are trying to pull content off your server with Javascript from remote locations it may be just the thing you need to get it working. This does not come built in Apache, it is a module you have to add in. It was pretty trivial. Here are the directions for setting up mod_headers in Ubuntu

To check and see if mod_headers was actually loaded save the following to a PHP file and view it from the server in your browser

print_r(apache_get_modules());
 

If that was successful mod_headers should be listed. You can now move on to the more fun stuff.

There are two ways in which you can allow XSS. The first is through a .htaccess file. This method works great, however it enables XSS for all files in the directory. The second is through PHP header(). The PHP method allows you to target more specifically what files are XSS capable, and even would allow you to do some other safety checks in your code before setting the XSS header.

.htaccess

Header add Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
 

PHP

header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');
 

Another thing to take note of is the *. The * means anyone from anywhere may do XSS. You can however specify specific hosts that have access. See the link at the bottom of this post for more information on that.

Congratulations! You should now have an XSS compatible website. Make extra sure that all of your security is in place because XSS opens up a whole new can of worms for crackers. Ensure all input from users is cleaned before it touches your database or anything else remotely sensitive.

Articles that helped me along the way:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin Multiple Origin Domains?
Configure Apache To Accept Cross-Site XMLHttpRequests on Ubuntu
HTTP Access Control
Server-Side Access Control
Social Javascript (cross-site ajax)