Brian Kroth

Welcome

Here's my sparse page identifying myself as a CS student at UW Madison.

I also worked as a Unix administrator at the Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) in the College of Engineering (CoE) and with the CloudLab project here at CS.

I'm currently at the Microsoft Gray Systems Lab which works with professors and students at the department here in Madison.

For school and research related things you can reach me by emailing my username at cs.wisc.edu.
See the URL for a hint on my username.

CV

Classes

Here's a list of some of the classes I've taken recently.

• Fall 2015: I sat in on CS 739: Distributed Systems with Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau while working with him on the UW CloudLab project.
  I mostly just read papers and discussed with folks (Remzi is a great teacher), but I also helped students get access to the platform for working on their projects.
• Spring 2014: CS 764: Advanced Database Management Systems with Jignesh Patel
  I did an evaluation of some NoSQL system integration with the campus Moodle service server platform I ran for my work at CAE.
• Fall 2013: CS 564: Database Management Systems with Jignesh Patel
  
• Spring 2013: CS 787: Advanced Algorithms with Shuchi Chawla
  I worked on a bin packing survey and a case study with respect to my work at CAE on how to size our VM infrastructure for our vhosting infrastructure. To do this I wrote a simulator to determine the number of active Apache processes/threads needed to service concurrent requests at any moment by replaying access logs and then used those values to evaluate some greedy heuristics. This became the basis of some larger work to help automate and improve that infrastructure, though it has several of the same load balance challenges that VMs on physical machines has.
• Fall 2012: CS 838: A Physical Introduction to Computer Science with Eric Bach
  This class follows Feynman's Lectures on Computation from basic digital circuits, to information and coding theory, to the thermodynamics of computation, and on into quantum computation.
  Since I haven't actually taken a physics course in over 10 years this has been some what challenging at times, but the wide range of people in the course (physicists, electrical engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, me, etc.), has lead to some amazing discussions. It is probably the best class I've ever taken!
• Spring 2012: CS 547: Computer System Modeling Fundamentals with Daniel Myers
  
• Fall 2011: CS 536: Introduction to Programming Languages and Compilers with Evan Driscoll
  
• Fall 2010: CS 736: Advanced Operating Systems with Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
  We are currently working on Ext4 with Parity and Checksums.
  Actually, we gave up on that and instead worked on Checksumming RAID.
  
• Spring 2010: CS 740: Advanced Computer Networks with Aditya Akella
  We worked on a system called OpenSAFE - a dynamic IDS system using OpenFLOW switches.
  

Interests

Here's some things that do or once did interest me that relate to my work, studies, and hobbies.

I also just started (was) trying (I'm really bad at maintaining my virtual presence) to keep some of these in a public Evernote notebook.

• Linux
  • Debian
  • Gentoo
• Systems Design and Programming
  • Bash
  • Perl
• Networking
  • iptables
  • tc
• Security
  • Gentoo Hardened
  • Grsecurity
  • PaX
• Encryption
  • Entropy
• Math
  • Abstract Algebra
    • Group Theory
    • Ring Theory
  • Logic
  • Set Theory
  • Graph Theory
  • Number Theory
  • Combinatorics
• Filesystems
  • Clustered
    • OCFS2
    • GFS2
  • BTRFS
  • ZFS
  • EXT4
  • FUSE
    • EncFS
• Virtualization
  • QEMU/KVM
  • ESX
• Keyboard Bindings
  • Vim
  • Screen
  • Vimperator
  • Mutt
  • Fluxbox
• Media
  • MythTV
  • MPD
  • NPR
  • PBS
  • Star Trek
  • Wii
    • Zelda
    • Final Fantasy
  • Comics
    • xkcd
    • Dinosaur Comics
    • Fowl Language
    • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
    • PHD Comics
• Camping
• Canoeing
• Biking
I currently have and ride regularly a
• Felt F65x cross bike for commuting and towing kids around in a trailer.
• Trek Domane 2.3 road bike for going fast and tooling around the country side.
• Baseball
  • Brewers
  • NL Central (ie: Cubs)
  • NL (this should be read "boo to the cheaters that don't make their pitcher hit")
• Beer
  • Bourbon Barrel Aged
    • New Holland's Dragon's Milk Ale
    • Rouge's John John Ale (turns out this is a rotational label from the brewmasters - the bourbon barrel aged Dead Guy Ale was my favorite)
    • Bluegrass Brewing Company's Bourbon Barrel Smoked Bock @2010 GTMW
  • Coffee Stouts
    • New Glarus's Coffee Stout
    • Furthermore's Oscura It's actually a lager!
  • Octoberfests
    • Sand Creek's Octoberfest
    • Great Lakes's Octoberfest
  • Dunkels
    • Franziskahner Hefe-Weisse Dunkel
• Pool