~vijaykumar

Chennaipy met again on the 25th of February, with talks and videos on a wide range of topics. This time around we had about 7 people.

The meeting started off with the GStreamer talk by Abdul. Abdul first explained GStreamer basics. It seems that GStreamer uses a pipeline similar to the Unix shell. While pipelines in the shell do text processing, GStreamer pipelines do audio and video processing. He showed the various elements that can be used in a pipeline like sources, decoders, format converts and sinks. He also showed how each of these elements have pads through which they send and receive data. To top it off he created a pipeline that extracted the video alone from one film song and audio from another, to create a parody!

The next talk was on LDAP by Vijay. Vijay started off by explaining the need for a centralized database of usernames and passwords. He then explained the LDAP data model, and how the data is organized as a tree of objects. He compared the LDAP data model to the filesystem. He explained, just as directories group related files, LDAP objects called organizational units group related objects. Each object in the tree has a bunch of attributes (like username, password, home dir, etc.) associated with it. He showed a web application that graphically displayed the LDAP tree structure. He also demonstrated how to query the LDAP database. He used the Python shell to connect to a LDAP database and perform a query.

He also said that additional attributes like blood group, date of birth, etc. can be added to the database. The power of the centralized information was then demonstrated using a Python script, that generated an ID card using a SVG template and data from the LDAP database.

This time around we had decided to play the "Game Development Tutorial" from thenewboston.org. The tutorial is in fact a series of videos. The first part showed how to install pygame. The second and third parts showed to create a window and display a bitmap on it. The fourth part showed how to read, check and handle events. The fifth part showed how to use these events to build a custom cursor, by displaying a bitmap at the mouse cursor position.