Matthew McCullough

Open Source Architect, Ambient Ideas

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 12 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is a member of the JCP, reviewer for technology publishers including O'Reilly, author of the DZone Maven RefCard, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His experience includes successful J2EE, SOA, and Web Service implementations for real estate, financial management, and telecommunications firms, and several published open source libraries.

Matthew jumps at opportunities to evangelize and educate teams on the benefits of open source. His current interests are Cloud Computing, Maven, iPhone, Distributed Version Control, and OSS Tools.

Matthew resides in Denver with his beautiful wife and baby daughter, who all are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado offers.

Blog

JavaZone 2009 Open Source Debugging Talk

Posted Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Open Source Debugging in Norway My Open Source Debugging talk that I gave at JavaZone, Oslo, Norway last September is online and can be watched in Flash format or downloaded as an M4V file. If you were not able to catch this talk at e more »

AppleScript to Re-Apply Finder Comments

Posted Monday, January 25, 2010

Finder Comments Lost When restoring from a backup, depending on the Mac-specific intelligence of your backup solution, or when copying files written by a 10.4 Mac, your Spotlight (Finder) Comments stored in the .DS_Store files might not more »

What’s the big deal about font choices in presentations?

Posted Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Fonts and Presentations Fonts, fonts, fonts. What’s this obsession? For those of us that share a passion for making presentation materials as comprehensible as possible for our students, sandwiched right between a great story and g more »

Denver JUG Hadoop and Encryption Presentations

Posted Friday, January 15, 2010

Denver JUG January Meeting I had the pleasure of hanging out with about 60 of my local friends at the Denver Java Users Group (DJUG to the locals) on Wednesday night and talking about Encryption on the JVM as well as Hadoop. I had the goo more »

Presenting at the Great Indian Developers Summit

Posted Wednesday, December 9, 2009

I’m very excited to announce I’ve been selected to present at the Great Indian Developers Summit in Bangalore, India in April. I just found out that my NFJS colleagues, Scott Davis and Venkat Subramaniam will be joining me ther more »
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Presentations

Encryption on the JVM: Boot Camp

Does your application transmit customer information? Are there fields of sensitive customer data stored in your DB? Can your application be used on insecure networks? more »

Information Alchemy through Remarkable Presentations

Developers are looking for venues to present at these days for the education of the community and betterment of their career. The goal may be to present at a conference, user group, or just a private company. Learn the techniques of the best presenters i more »

Git Better Control of your Source, Workshop

You've heard about Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and the Distributed Version Control System revolution. In this deeply hands on session, we'll load Git on participants laptops, build repositories and share out pieces of work. We'll explore the optimized agile more »

iBeans: The Simplest Service Integrations You've Ever Implemented

No app is an island nowadays and your bleeding edge Java & JavaScript apps demand that you integrate with Facebook, Amazon, Gmail, Google Search, Twitter or S3 just to name a few. Make your next integration project a breeze by leveraging the successfu more »

Encryption on the JVM: Advanced Techniques

Now that you have the basics of encryption under your belt, we'll advance to talking about where it is sensible and performant to add this level of security to your application. Symmetric key and public key encryption have various levels of processing ov more »

Encryption on the JVM: Boot Camp

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Matthew McCullough By Matthew McCullough

Does your application transmit customer information? Are there fields of sensitive customer data stored in your DB? Can your application be used on insecure networks? If so, you need a working knowledge of encryption and how to leverage Open Source APIs and libraries to make securing your data as easy as possible. Encryption is quickly becoming a developer's new frontier of responsibility in many data-centric applications.



In today's data-sensitive and news-sensationalizing world, don't become the next headline by an inadvertent release of private customer or company data. Secure your persisted, transmitted and in-memory data and learn the terminology you'll need to navigate the ecosystem of symmetric and public/private key encryption.


Information Alchemy through Remarkable Presentations

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Matthew McCullough By Matthew McCullough

Developers are looking for venues to present at these days for the education of the community and betterment of their career. The goal may be to present at a conference, user group, or just a private company. Learn the techniques of the best presenters in the industry through a dissection of what it takes to efficiently construct an engaging talk that offers solid insights and is memorable for the audience.



This talk provides tips, techniques, examples, and references: In short, a complete boot camp for building presentations that will capture the hearts and minds of an audience. This talk is largely tool-agnostic and you can use these techniques in Apple Keynote, Microsoft PowerPoint, or OpenOffice Impress. Specific points covered include stock photos, mind maps, presentation techniques, topic selection and diagramming.


Git Better Control of your Source, Workshop

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Matthew McCullough By Matthew McCullough

You've heard about Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and the Distributed Version Control System revolution. In this deeply hands on session, we'll load Git on participants laptops, build repositories and share out pieces of work. We'll explore the optimized agile workflows that Git facilitates, building branches for each story card and merging with our team mates, even when a network isn't present. We'll clone an existing Subversion repository, work on it in a Git fashion, and push just the "good changes" back to Subversion, showcasing the incredibly polished interoperability of this radical source code control tool.



This will be a hands on session and requires attendees to bring a laptop (Windows, Linux, or Mac).


iBeans: The Simplest Service Integrations You've Ever Implemented

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Matthew McCullough By Matthew McCullough

No app is an island nowadays and your bleeding edge Java & JavaScript apps demand that you integrate with Facebook, Amazon, Gmail, Google Search, Twitter or S3 just to name a few. Make your next integration project a breeze by leveraging the successful work of others from the iBeans Central repository, or if necessary, simply author a new iBean and contribute it back for the benefit of all.

iBeans a new ultra-light service integration framework written in Java, but targeting both Java and JavaScript. It provides a centralized mechanism for community contributions of beans to the most commonly used services such as Twitter, Flickr, Gmail and more.



iBeans encourages the higher level programming at the level of integrating such web based services without worrying about the underlying protocols or communication mechanisms. Services are beautifully abstracted in the form of JavaBeans, with JavaScript capabilities added like a cherry on top of a confectionary masterpiece.

This talk wil demonstrate iBeans usage in a real world Java application and explore how easy it is to write and contribute a new bean to iBeans Central for the benefit of the community in true Open Source style.


Encryption on the JVM: Advanced Techniques

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Matthew McCullough By Matthew McCullough

Now that you have the basics of encryption under your belt, we'll advance to talking about where it is sensible and performant to add this level of security to your application. Symmetric key and public key encryption have various levels of processing overhead, so you can't blindly just use the "best" encryption out there. What about password hashes? Did you know they are vulnerable with our "salt"?



We'll look at the performance metrics, security strength and weaknesses of various encryption algorithms. Given today's global economy, we'll also talk about what strength keys can and cannot be used across national borders. Lastly, we'll look at protocol-wrapping encryption techniques, such as VPNs, as a solution to abstracting away this difficult area of programming into a higher level service or device. We'll end with a brief peek at quantum and elliptic curve encryption.

Prerequisite: Encryption Bootcamp on the JVM