Denver Dev Blog » Productivity

DevonThink for Managing Information Capture

Matthew McCullough — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:01:37 +0000

As part of my job, I need to capture and reference a lot of information from a lot of sources. DevonThink is one of the tools that helps me do that efficiently. This quick video showcases just 5% of what I use DevonThink for and focuses specifically capturing data from web pages and various RSS feeds, such as Delicious Bookmarks, Twitter, and ReadItLater.

IBM Podcast: Andy Glover interviews Matthew McCullough about Git

Matthew McCullough — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:37:05 +0000

Andy Glover recently interviewed me for his new series of IBM podcasts. I was able to share about 20 minutes of my experience with and passion for the Git version control system with his audience. It was an exciting opportunity. Thanks Andy!

Give it a listen and tell me what you think. But more importantly, give Git a try! I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Script for finding a class inside a directory of JARs

Matthew McCullough — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:43:02 +0000

In the spirit of automating anything I’ve done more than twice manually, here’s an incredibly simple yet useful little script to recursively search a tree of JARs for a class file. I most often use this against a local Maven repository.

#!/bin/sh

#Example Usages:
# findjars com/ambientideas/SuperWidget
# findjars AnotherWidget

CLASSNAMETOFIND=&quot;$1&quot;

echo &quot;Searching all JARs recursively...&quot;
for eachjar in `find . -iname &quot;*.jar&quot;`
do
  #echo &quot;Searching in $eachjar ...&quot;
  jar tvf $eachjar | grep $CLASSNAMETOFIND &gt; /dev/null
  if [ $? == 0 ]
  then
    echo &quot;******* Located &quot;$CLASSNAMETOFIND&quot; in $eachjar *******&quot;
  fi
done

iTerm Screencast

Matthew McCullough — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:46:22 +0000

I’m a big fan of iTerm as a replacement for Terminal.app for developers. It offers a host of productivity boosts. To name a few:

Named tabs
Favorite location bookmarks
Window, font, and background colors per-bookmark
Transparency levels and blur of the underlying windows
Middle click copy and paste
URL launching from any URL recognized text

I’ve put together a quick screencast to show off a number of these features and how to configure them.

iTerm Developer Tips from Matthew McCullough on Vimeo.

Mouseless Web Browsing

Matthew McCullough — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:14:00 +0000

I’m a keyboard lover. The productivity from keyboard shortcuts is just amazing. So I’m constantly keeping an eye out for new keyboard navigation techniques. Web browsers have been a sore point, because to click a link with the keyboard you first have to tab to it. This can be, on link heavy pages, 20 or more tabs before I can hit enter. Hardly productive if you ask me.

That’s where Mouseless Browsing for Firefox comes in. It puts a number next to each link and you just type the number on the keyboard, press enter, and away you go. It couldn’t be easier. Go forth and use the mouse no more for your web browsing efforts and watch your productivity take a leap!

No Fluff Just Stuff and Open Source in the Enterprise

Matthew McCullough — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:44:00 +0000

My attendance this weekend of the NFJS tour in Denver, CO proved once again to be as valuable as ever. With a heavy penchant for Open Source and its rapid innovation, the speakers showcased technologies that weren’t even on people’s vocabulary lists just last year. And take note, these are not just technologies for the sake of technology. The speakers such as Ken Sipe, Venkat Sumbramaniam, Stu Halloway, Neal Ford, and more served out a steady stream of reasons why each new technology is a game-changer in its given space.

A quick top 5 list of the best presentations (that I attended):

Hacking, The Dark Arts by Ken Sipe
Towards an Evolutionary Design by Venkat Subramaniam
Git by Stu Halloway
Failing with 100% Test Coverage by Stu Halloway
Mylin by Brian Sam-Bodden

If you have an opportunity to get your employer to purchase a seat for you to attend a stop on the NFJS tour, do it. If you are self employed, then don’t even think about not going. This is one of the best ROI’s of any conference going today. As Ken Sipe said in his keynote address, you must increase your networking, you must increase your knowledge portfolio, and you must continue to constantly change and improve as we IT professionals work in literally one of the most dynamic industry verticals in the world.

A very interesting article from InformationWeek also touches on the impact of Open Source, like TerraCotta in the Enterprise. With so much Open Source presented at NFJS, one can’t help but imagine the NFJS attendees are the drivers of this migration.

DNS, Tertiary SubDomain Tricks for Web 2.0 Apps

Matthew McCullough — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:03:00 +0000

Never really thought about this approach before, but if your DNS * record for your domain maps to your web server, you can use just a servlet filter or whatever other technology you want to use to capture custom tertiary level subdomains URLs and redirect to a user-specific page.

For example, if you want http://matthew.ambientideas.com to take your users to a user-profile page, there’s no need to wire in your DNS to your software app, constantly updating it per user. You just capture the URL, parse out the tertiary domain part, and redirect, say, to http://ambientideas.com/users/?user=matthew. Easy, straightforward and cool. Kudos to Jordan for the first implementation for an upcoming app from Ambient Ideas.

Ubiquity – QuickSilver Like Plugin for Firefox

Matthew McCullough — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:24:00 +0000

If you like Quicksilver for your Mac, then you should check out Ubiquity for Firefox. Same concept, with the power extended to the browser. Video review available.

QuickSilver for Linux

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:50:00 +0000

There’s a new Linux competitor to QuickSilver in town. It’s called GNOME Do, and it just reached version 0.5.

It offers the same quick keyboard shortcut commands that QuickSilver does. Noun-verb-directobject goodness abounds.

If you’ve never used QuickSilver on the Mac, use it for a week, and you’ll never be the same again. The keyboard takes on a whole new power.