Some time after getting a new phone or after wiping and reinstalling the phone's OS (or upgrading to a new version of Android), the phone starts to bog down and feel laggy compared to before. The hardware is the same (well, maybe the phone's battery has lost some charging capacity but the memory and CPU are still as good as when they were manufactured), so it must be something software-related, right? I mean, this problem happens with Windows PCs too (but not with Linux/OpenBSD...).

Not the thousands of stored SMSs and phone call logs

At first, I thought it might be the thousands of SMSs (and hundreds of phone calls) stored on my phone, which I keep for convenience. On my old Symbian OS Nokia these SMSs would really slow the phone down and so I would have to delete messages every month. But there's no good reason a modern phone can't handle nearly unlimited messages as easily as just a handful. But I gave it a shot, deleting all SMSs (first backing the messages and call logs with SMS Backup & Restore app) and phone calls, but it had no effect.

Not task killers

So then I wondered what mobile apps might be slowing the phone down. There are various task killer apps in the app marketplace and they will help you free up memory. I kinda of wanted to see a more granular view of what resources the various apps were using, like Task Manager or Activity Monitor. So I opened up Terminal Emulator and ran 'top' which doesn't redraw the screen like it would in other terminals, but simply writes out all processes to the screen again on each refresh. So it's slightly harder to understand.

Using an automated task killer is controversial. It's possible that using an automated task killer will confuse Android's memory manager.

Not the version of Android

Upgrading Android. Right after you load a fresh ROM onto your phone it is probably going to be as fast and responsive as it ever will be. Then some months down the line it's running slowly.

Remove widgets, V6 Supercharger your memory mangement, and turn off GPS

Here are the things that do help speed up your Android phone.

1) Remove some widgets and live wallpapers.

2) Advanced users: V6 Supercharger Script

3) In the end I think turning off GPS helped the most. This is likely due to location apps polling your location nearly constantly when it's on.

Problem: In your blog posts you have a lot of links to other pages on your site, then one day you decide to change the URL pattern for all nodes on your site, or you change the pattern and slowly update paths to nodes by editing and saving them. Unfortunately, you had hard-coded paths in your content bodies and now they are all leading to 404 pages. What to do?

1) Link checker (linkchecker) module will find the broken links. This is something you may need to use.

2) Path Finder is a module that turns your node links into permalinks with node id (slug) at the front of the URL so that any future change to title which results in a different URL still leads to the same node via the node id. Example: http://www.example.com/837/latest-news/my-descriptive-seo-friendly-url

Of course, this doesn't help you once you already have a bunch of nodes and content linking to them, but it's one strategy to start with. Then if you do change the titles or patterns of your nodes, as long as the node id / slug is still at the beginning of the url, then you won't get any 404 errors, although you'll then have multiple URLs pointing to the same content. So this isn't ideal.

3) Turn on Pathologic: "Pathologic is an input filter which can correct paths in links and images in your Drupal content in situations which would otherwise cause them to “break;” for example, if the URL of the site changes, or the content was moved to a different server. Pathologic is designed to be a simple, set-it-and-forget-it utility. You don't need to enter any special “tags,” path prefixes, or other non-content noise into your content to trigger Pathologic to work; it finds paths it can manage in your content automatically."

4) If you just need to remove a base path (like http://www.domain.com:8080) from all URLs, then URL Replace Filter (url_replace_filter) will suffice.

5) If you need to do more complicated search and replace on URLs, and want to use regular expressions, then use Search and Replace Scanner (scanner).

Finally, use Global Redirect to always have a single canonical path for each piece of content.

Drupal has many SEO features built in and available as contributed modules. One main one being Clean URLs. But it's often said that Drupal gives you "just enough rope to hang yourself".

Drupal has a powerful module called Pathauto that lets you create powerful URL patterns based on Tokens. Any number of modules can provides tokens via the Token API for you to use to construct URLs and you can easily create your own tokens with a bit of PHP code. With Path Auto you can also easily change the URLs for all your nodes, users, and taxonomy terms at once. This is the rope.

A big part of SEO is the link building you do outside of your site to get other sites to link to your site and your inner pages within the site. The problem is when you've done all this and have thousands of links to hundreds of your pages and then you decide to change all of your URLs. Suddenly, visitors to your pages are seeing 404 error pages and Google also no longer thinks you have any linked to pages.

So what can you do if you ever want to change the path of a node after you've already created the node and saved the URL? What can you do once you rebuild your paths from a new pattern? What if your maximum URL length limit was too short and now you need to fix all the long node URLs.

Fortunately, new versions of Path Auto integrate with Path Redirect, which is a module for managing lists of 301 URL redirects. So by hand, you could manually create 301 redirects from the previous alias to a new alias, but luckily you can also do this automatically now. A new option was added to Path Auto to "Create a new alias. Redirect from old alias." Choose this instead of just deleting old aliases and your new node paths should have old paths pointing to them, managed by Path Redirect.

Just remember that bulk update from within Path Auto isn't the only way to update URLs. You can also bulk update selected nodes from the default content management page and also edit the URL from each node's edit page.

To use this, just install both Path Auth and Path Redirect.

Related Issues: http://drupal.org/project/issues/pathauto?text=redirect+from+old+alias&status=All

When manually changing titles and thus URLs make sure to check "Automatically create redirects when URL aliases are changed." in Path Redirect's settings.

Regarding Path Redirect's fixes and Path Auto's fixes:

http://drupal.org/node/629742#comment-4336624

In short: the two work independently.

The option "Automatically create redirect" (on the Path Redirect admin screen) only governs situations where you manually change a path setting. Whether pathauto is or isn't installed, does not change this behavior.

Detail: when saving a node from the edit screen, the Path Redirect code executes before Pathauto does. It has no knowledge of whether Pathauto will or will not change the path alias, later on.

If pathauto runs afterwards and decides that the path needs changing, it will look only at its own "Update action" to determine what to do. If that is "Delete the old alias", it will indeed get deleted, and no redirect will be created (regardless of the "Automatically create redirect" option in the Path Redirect admin screen).

Vietnam is blessed with free wifi at nearly any cafe even if it doesn't always work as advertised, like most things in Vietnam. Vietnam is also blessed with cafes on nearly every block. So finding a wireless access point to get online is pretty easy for anyone traveling or living in Vietnam.

Hackers can see what websites you're visiting and then log into those websites as you

The problem is security. Many times cafe owners will leave their wifi access points completely open without needing a password to get on. This makes it basically trivial for a hacker to sniff the airwaves and see everything on the network. If you are on such a network you should secure your connection with an SSH tunnel or a VPN.

If they do have a password, they may be using older security schemes like WEP or WPA, rather than WPA2. Without WPA2 or more secure systems that require the network owner setting up an authentication server (too much to ask for any cafe owner) it is also possible to break the encryption.

Security setting: WPA2

For now, insist on at least WPA2. If you're setting up wifi at your house and you don't want people to sniff your traffic, use WPA2 with a long random password and be sure to change the SSID from the default network name provided by the manufacturer. (The reason that using a default SSID is less secure is that rainbow tables exist for these, making password cracking potentially easy.)

Using WPA2 means that it's harder for crackers to guess your network's password and then either use your network connection or sniff your traffic. But if you give out your password, anyone with the password can do the same. With WPA2 it's harder for other people to sniff your traffic, but there are ways (ARP poisoning) around it. You should thus still create an encrypted connection (for normal people I would recommend using a VPN) to an outside server and tunnel your traffic over that connection.

Besides sniffing your traffic, a hacker who steals your cookies can then login to websites which you're currently logged in by pretending to be your computer. So they could post on Facebook as you, send emails as you from Gmail, or worse.

MAC Address Filtering

What else can you do on your home wifi network? Since you usually know what computers you want to allow to access the wifi router, you can set it so only known computers are allowed on the network by using MAC address filtering. The MAC address the hardware address built into your wireless card or in the wireless hardware of a laptop and it's very difficult to lie about what your MAC address is so this will help keep the riff raff out.

Advanced users can install DD-WRT or OpenWRT firmwares onto their wireless access point, thus enabling tons of extra features and the ability for finer grained security controls.