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Ever since the first time I read the blog post “Painless Threading” over on the Android Developers blog I have used AsyncTasks quite often in my code. Just about any time I have an operation that might slow down the user interface I just throw together an AsyncTask and have it run in the background. The class is extremely easy to use.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: June 27, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that Linux Essentials, which introduces new users and youth to Linux and Open Source Software, is now available at select LPI affiliate locations and IT events in Europe, Middle East and Africa. The single Linux Essentials' exam leads to a "Certificate of Achievement".

When I first got into IT back in the late 90?s as a teen, I was always baffled by the landscape in regards to infrastructure and software. And coming from a Linux background, who could blame me? When I went off to get my secondary education, I chose the vocational route and I chose to certify in Novell and Microsoft because they were the two major players at the time.

Saluki 022 was released. Saluki Linux is a new Puppy-based distribution (or, more precisely, a distribution built from Puppy's Woof build system). It is primarily designed for developers who wish to create highly customised solutions or specialist distributions, but it can be used as a standalone operating system as well. It features the Xfce desktop environment.

Dappled with Samsung S3?s launch, NVIDIA-Linus’s war, and Microsoft’s foray into the tablet world, June has proved to be an eventful month for techies. Many new announcements were made and many new apps were launched keeping tech bloggers always on their toes. On Android too, some great applications were released that geeks like us couldn’t resist installing on our phone. Of all the interesting ones, here are the 7 of the best apps June 2012 had to offer.

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. While this is a good thing, not all FTP clients support TLS. This article explains how to enable or disable TLS in ProFTPd based on the FTP user or group.

Qualcomm has announced the public preview release of Snapdragon SDK for Android. Snapdragon is Qualcomm’s single-chip, all-in-one mobile processor for smartphones and tablet computers.

Netflix offers another sophisticated cloud management tool to open source. This time it's Asgard, which you can use to deploy massive code projects to Amazon Web Services.

Gnome exists more than a decade but it seems that all great things are happening just lately. Gnome’s future feels safer than ever and promises for a competing OS outside the Linux ecosystem are rising, relying on genuinely realistic foundations.

Sean Catlin is at Google I/O for The Powerbase, and he is taking requests! Want to get a first glimpse at the Nexus 7? Let us know in the comments. We can hardly contain our excitement!

Jon "maddog" Hall wrote a beautiful essay in honor of Alan Turing that highlights the terrible, corrosive consequences of attacking people for who they are.

In MATE, the screen lock feature is disabled by default. After being idle for a while, the screen will be dimmed and you can re-activate it by moving the mouse or hit a key. For security reasons, you may want to enable the screen lock feature.

Microsoft’s Kinect technology was the next amazing step in gaming. Microsoft is constantly testing and improving this technology in an attempt to make it more useful for all its customers in any platform (gaming, desktop, research). What about us the Linux users? Is there a similar technology for us to enjoy? Apparently there is, and it is called Skeltrack!

Google proudly announced last evening, June 26th, that they have unleashed the stable and final version of the Google Chrome 20 web browser for Linux, Macintosh, Windows and Chrome Frame platforms.

EPhysics, a fresh new library is reaching Enlightenment project’s SVN repository today. It’s a wrapper between Bullet Physics and EFL to add physics effects in a simple way.

Open webOS logo Despite having shelved its webOS hardware months ago, HP continues to work towards finalising the open source version of its Open webOS mobile operating system by September. As part of this effort, HP has now cooperated with WebOS Internals developers to release further webOS 3.0.5 sources for the TouchPad as a "Community Edition" under the Apache 2.0 Licence. The final component required to compile an open source version of webOS was the Luna system manager (luna-sysmgr), which is now available to download as a 9MB source code archive.

The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) that power the Enlightenment window manager now has a physics component. Bruno Dilly of ProFUSION Embedded Systems announced EPhysics today to the Enlightenment developers list. EPhysics allows for physics effects to be added to EFL.

Red Hat is reaching out to Linux application developers and cloud developers, while strengthening a relationship with SAP. Indeed, the open source company has updated its Developer Suite for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift, the platform as a service (PaaS) offering. The moves are part of a bigger Red Hat partner and ISV (independent software vendor) push that’s unfolding this week in Boston, Mass.

It's fast, stable, has what I want, and does what I want. It's the best yet.

It has been a while since I had a look at Puppy Linux (www.puppylinux.org). so I thought I'd have another go to see how much it has improved over the past few years.