~vijaykumar

We had about 12 members this time. And I hope people got a good opportunity to discuss, share and learn Python.

The meeting started off with the XBee talk by Bala. Bala described the ZigBee, a low power wireless communication protocol. He showed a ZigBee USB Adapter, which uses the XBee chipset from Digi. He then explained the XBee python module, used to communicate with the adapter. The talk ended with a short demo, in which the a python script was to transmit a message to a remote ZigBee LCD display.

The next talk was Operator Overloading by Vijay. Vijay first showed how the operators are mapped to member functions like __add__, __mul__, etc. He then moved on to implementing a Vector class, which implemented vector addition. He also showed scalar multiplication, and the need to implement __rmul__. He then showed how to implement in-place addition using __iadd__.

The next talk was on Decorators by Roshan. Roshan showed the decorator notation, and how it was just a syntactic sugar. He then showed a simple example, to add tags around a functions return value. He then went a step further and showed how to generalize the tag decorator, by accepting arguments.

The PyCon 2011 talk "Everything You Wanted To Know About Pickling, But Were Afraid To Ask!" by Richard Saunders. Richard first described the origin of the term pickling, and that it is equivalent to serializing. He then showed how to use the pickle module to save and restore program state. He also showed the alternatives to pickling and their pros & cons. He then described the various pickling protocols, and how the list is pickled and unpickled. He also showed how the same object will not be pickled twice.

Towards the end of the meet, Vijay raised the point that we should be conducting Python workshops. The intention is two fold

It was decided that a discussion thread be started on the mailing list for this purpose.