[Fsf-friends] News from the GLUG-T

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

An interesting report from South India... FN

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From: "Vijay Kumar B." <ec10052@rect.ernet.in>
Subject: [glug-t] Meeting Minutes
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 14:02:43 GMT

Every GLUG-T meeting is a different experience. But this one was a
_really_ different experience. By 10:00am the strength was around 7(4
boys and 3 girls). But the people at Accel who were to provide the
meeting place had not arrived yet. One of our speaker's Mr. Balaji had
also not arrived. We decided to start.

We sat down a flight of stairs in the Accel building.(There are no
barriers for the exchange of knowledge!) Luckily I had my laptop with
me which served the purpose of a digital black board. Manik borrowed
the watch man's chair to put the laptop on top of it. 
 
The meeting started with an introduction of the two new girls 8-)

Then we moved on to the first topic 'Game Programming in SDL' by me. 
I started off with crediting the author Sam Lantinga, and then showed
a few programs written using SDL, to get an idea of what we are going
to talk about. 
Heres a list of stuff I then started talking about:
1) Initializing the library, and quitting the library. 
2) Video modes, resolution, bit depth, and the flags available with
SDL_SetVideoMode.
3) Different bit depth formats and their details and functions
available to generate those pixel formats from RGB values. 
4) Drawing graphics on the screen either by directly accessing the
pixels or by blitting. Locking and Unlocking the surface.
5) Loading windows BMP files, using SDL_LoadBMP.
6) Keyboard event handling using SDL's polling function and reading
the keyboard status using SDL_GetKeyState. Did I say that you will use
SDL_PumpEvents before using SDL_GetKeyState?
7) Providing proper delay using SDL_Delay and SDL_GetTicks.

This was what I had prepared to talk about but Manik insisted that I
explain the logic used in my pacman clone(one of the demos I had shown
at the start). So I went on to explain state machines and the A*
algorithm.

We then moved on to the next topic of the meeting "Regular
Expressions" by Rams. 

By then another staff of STEP TREC had joined us. He also informed us
that Mr. Balaji will not be coming for the meeting because he was
stuck up with some web server problem.

Rams explained the history of the regular expression. It seems regexp
were used long back in Set theory and were latter adopted in the
computer world. Rams started off with repetition operators used with
regular expressions '*' and '+'. He used the grep program and the
dictionary file to demonstrate their purpose. He also explained that
their meanings were different from the ones used in shell
expansion. Here is a list of what he spoke about: 
1) '.' and '?' repetition operators.
2) Anchoring using '^' and '$' to match the beginning and end of line.
3) Subexpressions and the infix operator "|".
4) Back referencing. (I particularly liked the palindrome searching
example.)
5) Bracket expression using '[' ']'. Negating the
expression. Specifying ranges.
6) Character classes to be used within Bracket expression.
7) Repetition operators '{N, M}'
8) Operators(?) related to the edge of a word '\b', '\B'.
9) Operators(?) related to the beginning and end of a word '\<' '\>'.

On my request he gave us a list of tools that use regexp. extensively -
awk, sed, perl, emacs, etc. He also showed us how to use regexp search
in emacs.

I then told the new members about our mailing lists. We then discussed
about the topics for the next meeting. Muthu wanted to give us an
introduction on Python, I wanted to show everybody a demo on the One
True Program ;-), and Mr. Balaji would talk on clusters. We can
only hope that the next meeting's venue will not be a staircase but a
more glamorous hall at SASTRA.

I hope all the members carried back home great experiences of this
wonderful(?!) meeting. 

Non-free* software sucks. - RMS
* 'free' as in freedom.