Manohar Vanga

I'm just finished up my computer science undergraduate degree from the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University. My research interests are in computer systems, especially in the areas of operating systems, compilers, embedded systems and distributed systems.

I have worked on various projects over the years. They range from small scripts to more complex research projects. All of these are freely available to use for your own work.

I have also been a part of the Twincling Technology Foundation for over two years. I work as a community lead for them and tend to enjoy myself most of the time!

If you want to know more about me you can take a look at my resume which I have updated after about a year (which should itself tell you a lot about me!).

I have been playing the guitar for the last seven years. I recently started playing the piano and the harmonica (!). I learned carnatic classical music for over eight years of my childhood. I occasionally write on my blog, randomly twitter, and facebook once in a blue moon. You can email me at my first name dot my last name at gmail dot com.

Projects

• MiniServ is a minimalistic, lightweight web server that I wrote for fun. Its original purpose was to serve various documentation files on the college network. It was also used by me in a simple statistical load balancer I can't seem to find anymore. It has been adopted by the Twincling Technology Foundation and I now mentor students who want to take up projects in extending MiniServ.

• MiniOS was my first foray into the exciting world of operating systems! It is a simple operating system for the x86 that supports the GRUB bootloader, has some screen handling functions, a keyboard and timer driver and a simple memory allocator. It is written in C and x86 ASM.

• Tinker was my next attempt into operating system development. It is slightly more complex (clocks in at 4k lines of code). Its major subsystems are interrupt management, drivers for the screen/keyboard/timer/hard disk, paging, a slighly more dignified memory allocation algorithm, a simple in-memory filesystem, multitasking support and a small shell. It is written in C and x86 ASM.

• Scano is a source code annotation and management software that I prototyped for the Twincling Technology Foundation. It was a messy hack of the LXR software! I made a small screencast of the then-incomplete prototype.

• Tiny is a small expression based language whose statements consist of assignment, integer input and screen output statements. I wrote a compiler and interpreter for Tiny during the mundane labs in my all-too-theoretical compiler design course. Both compiler and interpreter are written in Java.

• Sub-C is a compiler for a C-like language that I wrote soon after Tiny. It support many popular programming language constructs and readily compiles with NASM (and MASM with a little tweaking). It is written entirely in Java.

• Ileor is an Ingenious Layout for the Engineering of Online Realms. It can be used as a framework for the development of massively multiplayer online games. I am one of the two primary developers of Ileor. It is written in C++ and we are using it in the creation of a proof-of-concept MMORPG called Ileor. This is my main project at the moment as it has a lot of exciting possibilities!

• S.H.a.R.K. is a real-time kernel that I partially ported to the ARM architecture (specifically the ARM926ejs compatible core on the Sheevaplug). I worked on this at the University of Pavia under the extremely enjoyable guidance of Tullio Fachinetti and Alessandro Rubini!

• MiniLog is a miniature logging library that is quite flexible and easy to integrate into existing applications. It supports multiple logging levels, message formatting, multiple log files etc.

• A bunch of shell scripts I use to automate mundane tasks in my bash shell! Anyone who types the same command over 3 times should really write up a small script to do the task! Just put it into a "~/bin" folder, add it to your $PATH variable and you're good to go!

• I use a QEMU image of Debian for testing out risky stuff. I SSH into the QEMU instance and mess around with whatever I need. You can use the image above along with these startup scripts to do the same. Especially useful for budding kernel hackers!

• I successfully completed the Google Summer of Code 2010 program! For my project I worked with the brilliant guys over at WorldForge (an open-source MMORPG framework). My work involved introducing a teleport feature that allows entities to be teleported between servers simulating different worlds.