Work

 

 

Brief

This was my final year work at college. The project was implemented for a company  - Dimension CyberTech Ltd, of Techno Park Trivandrum. It consists of two major modules :

• The first a simple scripting language that could organize data in a structured way, much like XML
• A Data Definition Language that could retrieve data from arbitrary file structures

Both these sections were useful in different ways by themselves and thus form two independent pieces of work clubbed together. These were also part of my first ventures into compiler theory.
The work is incomplete in the sense that the code is not very clean. The code has some known memory leaks that I have never ventured to finish. It seems to work otherwise though it has been subject to little stress testing.

Avionics Project Page (old writeup)

Docs:
Most of the following are word doc files, will put up htmls when I have some more time

		Entire Documentation (zip file)	472 kb Contains both the DDL and SCR docs
		Data Definition Language (DDL)	483 kb
		The Generic Script (Scr)	358 kb
		Dimension and the Project	38 kb

toy .Net Garbage Collector

Brief

A Garbage collector written on the lines of the .Net garbage collector. This has been written out of my own imagination after reading Jeffrey Richter's article in MSDN magazine. This need not be factually correct about the actual .Net GC in any way.

The write up consists of the description of the GC, the data structures I have used. Most of the time I was trying to imagine the thought processes of the guys who designed the real GC.

 

Brief

This was planned for the final year college implementation but was never really done. 
Reasons

• Time - shortage of it
• Lack of Support  - not (m)any people thought it was possible
• Obscurity - hardly anyone (tho(/e)se days) understood what we were up to
• The pile of things we didn't know

The following are documents that were simply written together mostly as wishful thinking about how we planned the thing. Maybe somebody could carry on the work.

Start Page 

Linux Messaging Server, a Client and an MSN Client

Brief

The following jumble of things was implemented for my college mini project in my third year, in a rather hurried 2 weeks. The initiative originally started as an effort to write an integrated client that can talk to multiple chat servers. To avoid using harsh words, we thought we would gently nudge the original clients till they told us their protocols and we could build them into a single client.

What did get implemented was a MSN compliant client, a chat server that I was independently writing (not originally with the intent of contributing it to the college project) and a client for my server.
Both the clients are windows executables while the chat server is linux based. I was largely doing that to get familiar with linux rather to write the server itself, in effect my first proper linux application (and so far the last).

Our original project report can be downloaded here

(not worth it)

MSN Client

This was largely worked up by my friends Rakesh and Tony. I don't know much about the implementation details. They sat down together and got the protocol and coded the client. I wonder if it still works, MS keeps changing things.

 

Chat server 

The chat server is written for linux. Since the official project was centered around clients, the server didn't have a large official role to play. 

However the server did have :

• multiple user support
• registered and anonymous users
• chat rooms
• ability for users to create rooms and set permissions and protection for their rooms
• private chat in a room, request for p2p
• timeout based deletion of unused resources
• a message bulletin board
• ability for users to create message boards and post messages, read them, post replies
• permissions and protection could be set for the message boards
• rijndael encryption for private user information
• backup of server state, which could be reloaded after a crash

The server seems pretty stable, though it is not very well tested. I don't think it would stand stand the hardships of teh internet though. Further it works well in limited parameters, it doesn't have very thorough  bound checking. Please take it with a pinch of salt.

		Some Notes about the implementation Word doc format
		Chat server protocol A brief description of the server protocol. This is included in the archive below
		Chat Server Source + RHL Binary + Protocol Doc IDE used was rhide, please get a copy if you want to use the project file.	276 kb

Client

The client for the server kept getting delayed as the server was unstable and to the added difficulty that none of us had two machines on which to run the server and client simultaneously, so developing a windows client was tough. Pooja handled the development of the client.

Many features like message boards are almost non existent and altogether, just about functional, but not very user friendly. Actually we got to use server + client for a few weeks recently (Nov 2002), it seemed ok then.

		Docs about the client implementation Word doc format
		Source Download The client src went on to suffer a version control problem, so I hope this is the latest version.	78 kb