Patrick R. McElhiney has been working on learning how to program with the Linux Operating System, including processes and threading, including efficient programming for more efficient use of the OS for his Systems Integrations class taught by Professor Timothy Chadwick, a former database engineer at Dyn (now owned by Oracle). This is the third class that Patrick McElhiney has taken with Professor Chadwick, who is probably one of the smartest people that he has ever known. A general class includes off-topics such as exercise and sports, but is highly concentrated in detailed studies of the Linux operating system.

We are currently learning about middleware such as the AMQP protocol that deals with asynchronous messaging between different types of software programs that need to synchronize their data. The AMQP protocol was invented by a number of major companies, including Microsoft, for J.P. Morgan Chase and other financial service companies. It features complete encryption from endpoint to endpoint, and can allow connections to share different formats of data between different types of software, such as synchronizing customer data that can be changed at any number of different access points, with the need for software that can update all of the different data sets with the updated information, immediately.

When you start to think about how common this issue is with big companies, you can understand how much money gets invested into these types of middleware technologies to bridge the gap between intelligence. What would be interesting would be to know what the Federal Government uses for these types of situations where intelligence needs to be synchronized between the various intelligence agencies, such as from the National Security Agency's Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) gathering systems to that of other types of intelligence systems, such as the White House Communications Agency (WHCA).

Patrick McElhiney doesn't see himself going into an Intelligence Community career, however he often wonders how he could help to develop software and hardware solutions to help elected and career professionals in the Federal Government. You can read about many of his unclassified ideas on the MCE123 Company website under Technology Development. If you know anyone that is knowledgeable or interested in any of the topics, send them Patrick's way.