Geoffrey Thomas
I'm a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working towards an S.B. in Computer Science (6-3) in 2010 / M.Eng. in 2011, and currently living in Next House. I graduated from Lafayette High School, Lafayette, LA, in 2006.
This summer finds me at Ksplice, a small startup with big technology: we can apply source code patches that usually require restarting a system into a running system. Our first application of this ability is in the field of Linux security: a service that eliminates the need to reboot for kernel upgrades.
I like computers, and in particular I like Linux, security, computational theory, and very occasionally web stuff.
I'm involved with a handful of organizations at MIT, including:
- the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB), MIT's student computing organization.
- I'm the current technical architect of scripts.mit.edu, a user-friendly and secure wiki/blog/CGI/procmail/SVN/git/anything hosting service run by SIPB.
- The Debathena project, an implementation of MIT's Athena computing environment for Debian and Ubuntu, currently occupies a lot of my time. In particular, I was heavily involved with the summer 2009 upgrade of all the Athena cluster workstations on campus to Debathena on Ubuntu 9.04.
- I've contributed various improvements, including IRC support, to BarnOwl, a curses-based multiprotocol IM client quite popular at MIT, and I've helped with the XVM virtual machine hosting service.
- the MIT Cross Products, an a cappella group singing contemporary Christian music.
- DormCon (the Dormitory Council), the student government group representing the undergraduate dormitories.
In the past I've also worked for Akamai as an intern in Linux kernel security, and as a UROP for CSAIL, working on porting Linux drivers and utilities to smartphones. I've also been part of MIT's chamber chorus and College Bowl team, and taught for ESP's high school enrichment classes a couple of times.
I am a Christian, particularly a Methodist. This means I believe that we are inherently imperfect, fallible (“sinful”) people, but there is a gracious God who freely offers us forgiveness and redemption.
My MIT username is geofft, which you can use to contact me by e-mail (@mit.edu) or Zephyr (@ATHENA.MIT.EDU), or find me on Launchpad or IRC (Freenode). You may also see me go by my older username geoffreyerffoeg, especially on Google's services (Gmail, Talk, Calendar, Docs, etc.), as well as on AIM. If you like security, my GPG key is B8EC3AC9.