tl;dr - moved to new servers, should be faster, less troublesome inshallah.

OK, after a few weeks of choppy performance on the previous hosts, I have moved the site over to a new host.

This should mean both a faster site and less issued.

However I had not moved earlier as the old providers provided more hands on support for managing the server and I had gottne used to being lazy. Not only that, moving servers can always uncover issued and problems.

The new virtual server is a lot faster than the old one, but I will now need to brush up my skills on how to manage it - and today went a long way with that as since a few things did go wrong, I had to figure out how to fix things myself.

This website (http://www.therevival.co.uk) is built using drupal 6.

It has been based on drupal since early 2008 - within a month of the launch of Drupal 6 and one of the few early sites at that time with moderate complexity that could use Drupal 6 that early (Drupal sites generally use the base CMS as a framework with other modules used to add finctionality - the new version 6 of drupal had been released, but some big and important modules were not compatible for a few months).

Now almost 3 years later, more later than the people involved with Drupal expected, the next major version of Drupal, Drupal 7 is close to being released.

This leaves me with three options:

1. Ignore Drupal 7 completely - don't fix what aint broken

It has been a while since I talked about my phone.

Today, I got impatient with T-Mobile releasing the latest softweare update for my phone, so I debranded it to generic firmware and then updated it to the latest released version for my phone - Android 2.1 (Eclair - all the android versions are named after deserts) to get all the new goodies.

There is the live walpapers that other android phones have now had for yonks, updated web browser, and an updated lock screen that shows more information.

An unexpected thing is that the theme for the phone is slightly tweaked making the text size larger, and that will take some time getting used to.

Today while at work I read that the google maps that can be downloiaded for android (and this update has been available since before I got my phone) now comes with navigation.

So I thought I would test it out.

But before I get onto that, a couple of other things. I think google is spying on me...

In the maps app, for "from" I accidentally hit the letter "i" and the very first suggestion that popped up was "Islamgarh, Mirpur, Azad Kashmir" or something close.

Secondly, google mail has built in chat and the phone has a gtalk app. Today, freakily it suddenly started talking to me. Well, not it but someone who I have emailed (revival related) who needed to get some things done. I had thought if the app was shut, I would be unavailable.

How do we know which direction we should face when we pray?

There are ways of calculating this - you need to know your current location, the location of the qiblah and also some way to determine direction.

Most android phones have built in GPS (and most/others can also use other means to determine a good approximate of the location), and a built in compass. This should be enough for some app to combine the data and let you know which direction to face.

I am not the first with that realisation - there are a few apps on the Angroid Marketplace which say they can locate the qiblah/direction to face when praying. I tested the free options.

I wasw going to write a blog full of innuendo and stuff, but I cannot remember what most of it was :/

And then I briefly considered taking a picture of the phone to accompany this blog, but again that would be weird since the photo would be taken with my old phone...

Ok... so... the phone.

Its got a nice and large screen (am I compensating for something by buying a phoen with such a huge screen?) and it looks nice enough.

It is an "Android" phone, meaning it has the android Smartphone OS on there - version 1.6 at the moment, which is sort of ancient, but I decided to accept the information that they will update it to the lastest version something in the near future.

The iProduct. you know you want it.

Image courtesy of a boy and his computer. (licencing terms unknown)