Mike

wxPython: How to make “flashing text”

People keep on asking fun wxPython questions on StackOverflow. Today they wanted to know how to make “flashing text” in wxPython. That’s actually a pretty easy thing to do. Let’s take a look at some simple code: import random import time import wx ######################################################################## class MyPanel(wx.Panel): “””””” #———————————————————————- def __init__(self, parent): “””Constructor””” wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent) self.font […]

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Python Concurrency: Porting from a Queue to Multiprocessing

Earlier this week, I wrote a simple post about Python’s Queues and demonstrated how they can be used with a threading pool to download a set of PDFs from the United States Internal Revenue Service’s website. Today I decided to try “porting” that code over to Python’s multiprocessing module. As one of my readers pointed

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Python 101: An Intro to logging

Python provides a very powerful logging library in its standard library. A lot of programmers use print statements for debugging (myself included), but you can also use logging to do this. It’s actually cleaner to use logging as you won’t have to go through all your code to remove the print statements. In this tutorial

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Python Concurrency: An Example of a Queue

Python comes with a lot of cool concurrency tools builtin, such as threads, Queues, semaphores and multiprocessing. In this article, we’ll spend some time learning how to use Queues. A Queue can be used for first-in-first out or last-in-last-out stack-like implementations if you just use them directly. If you’d like to see that in action,

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wxPython: How to drag and drop a file from your app to the OS

Today on StackOverflow I saw someone who wanted to know how to drag a file from a wx.ListCtrl onto their Desktop or somewhere else in the file system. They were using the file manager skeleton from zetcode, but couldn’t figure out how to add the DnD portion. After a bit of searching and hacking, I

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Advanced Python – How to Dynamically Load Modules or Classes

Every now and then you’ll find yourself needing to load modules or classes dynamically. In other words, you’ll want to be able to import a module without knowing ahead of time which one you’re going to import. In this article, we’ll look at two ways to accomplish this feat in Python. Using the __import__ Magic

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Python PDF Series – An Intro to metaPDF

While researching PDF libraries for Python, I stumbled across another little project called metaPDF. According to its website, metaPDF is a lightweight Python library optimized for metadata extraction and insertion, and it is a fast wrapper over the excellent pyPdf library. It works by quickly searching the last 2048 bytes of the PDF before parsing

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