Sounds like it will be an interesting post, looking forward to reading it...

If I understand your scenario, it sounds like you just need a single thread looping, so you could probably use an AsyncTask here without much trouble. If there is no UI interaction, I might consider it overkill though, just a normal Thread object could suffice. Without knowing more about what your app is doing it's hard to give more specific advice. Either way, the most important thing to remember is to tear down your thread/task when your Activity is torn down and then resume it on the other side. Look here: http://code.google.com/p/shelves/source/browse/tr... for a good example of how to do this.

The HttpClient instance is not static, the method is static because it's part of my HttpUtils.java class, which is not obvious since I didn't paste the entire file.

Thanks for pointing that out, I've revisited this and other issues in a more recent post : http://foo.jasonhudgins.com/2010/03/http-connecti...

The tutorial was last updated on July 25th of this year, it for sure should work with 1.5, and probably 1.6 as well. The source is available via svn here : http://code.google.com/p/trivial-gps/source/check...

Could we organize an all night hackathon, like the SuperHappyDevHouse (http://superhappydevhouse.org/) ? Not sure if that would fly with the infomart security (having people in and out of the building all night), but it'd be fun.