Last night, we had our May 2010 Pyowa meeting. It is the only Python Users Group in Iowa and we welcome anyone who is programming in Python (or interested in learning Python) to come and be a part of our group. At this meeting, we had three good presentations. The first was given by Jim […]
May 2010 Pyowa Wrap-up Read More »
It’s been a while since I wrote about Pyowa, the Iowa Python Users Group that I founded. Our first meeting was September 24th, 2008 and I had high hopes for the group. However, it hasn’t grown much at all in almost two years. For some reason, we have meetings scheduled through July of this year
Pyowa: The Iowa Python Users Group Read More »
The other day, I received a request to create a script that could tell how long a Windows XP machine had been idle and to alert the user if it had been idle for a certain amount of time. I did a little research with Google and found a couple of ways to accomplish this
Python: How to Tell How Long Windows Has Been Idle Read More »
Last month, I started a series of articles on creating simple applications with wxPython. The first couple of articles were on an Image Viewer program. While I won’t abandon that project, I thought it was time for us to delve into something new. In this article we will start a journey into the wild and
wxPython: Creating a Simple MP3 Player Read More »
Have you ever thought that it would be cool to have your wxPython code take a screenshot of itself? Well, Andrea Gavana figured out a cool way to do just that and between what he told us on the wxPython mailing list and what I learned from other sources, you will soon learn how to
How to Take a Screenshot of Your wxPython App and Print it Read More »
The other day, we created a simple image viewer. Today we will create a secondary dialog to display the image’s EXIF data, if it has any. We will make it in such a way that this window will update as we change pictures using the cool pubsub module. We will use the version that is
Adding an EXIF Viewer to the Image Viewer Read More »
Last month I mentioned that we would go on a journey to learn some tips and tricks for wxPython’s Grid widget. Well, the coding is done and I thought it was time to actually do this thing. In the following article you will learn how to: Create a right-click pop-up menu in a cell How
wxPython: Grid Tips and Tricks Read More »
Soon after getting hired at my current job, my boss sent me a script (which I think was based on this article) about Python and a certain text-to-speech module called pyTTS. This was right after Python 2.5 had released. Anyway, it’s basically a nice wrapper over the win32com module which can communicate with the Microsoft
Python Text-to-Speech: Making Your PC Talk Read More »
Have you ever wanted to restart your Windows PC with out pressing Start, Shutdown or CTRL+ALT+DEL? What about restarting your annoying co-worker’s PC…the one who just doesn’t know when to shut up? Well, Python has the answer and this blog will tell you how to do it!
Restarting PCs with Python Read More »
The other day, I was chatting with some wxPython newbies on the wxPython IRC channel and one of them wanted to know how to display images in wx. There are lots of different ways to do this, but I had a pre-made solution that I’d cobbled together a couple of years ago for work. Since
Creating a Simple Photo Viewer with wxPython Read More »
Python’s standard library is known for including lots of handy modules and packages that can be used without installing anything else. That’s one of the primary reasons that its standard library is called “batteries included” so often. So it should come as no surprise that Python includes a Windows only module for editing the Windows
Python’s _winreg: Editing the Windows Registry Read More »
Yesterday, I received a request to create a GUI with Tkinter or wxPython that had an image for the background with buttons on top. After looking at Tkinter, I discovered that it’s PhotoImage widget only supported two formats: gif and pgm (unless I installed the Python Imaging Library). Because of this, I decided to give
wxPython: Putting a Background Image on a Panel Read More »
The grid widget in wxPython is one of the most complex GUI elements that you’ll work with in this toolkit. In this article you will learn the basics of grid creation and usage. One of the major uses for a grid is to display tabular data. Another use is to create some kind of spreadsheet.
wxPython: An Introduction to Grids Read More »
The subtitle for this article could easily be “How To Create PDFs with Python”, but WordPress doesn’t support that. Anyway, the premier PDF library in Python is Reportlab. It is not distributed with the standard library, so you’ll need to download it if you want to run the examples in this tutorial. There will also
A Simple Step-by-Step Reportlab Tutorial Read More »
Before PyCon, I was approached by a representative from Packt Publishing to review one of their books. They wanted me to read Daniel Arbuckle’s Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide. I’m not really into testing frameworks or test driven development and thought this would be a good excuse to learn the methodology and see if it was
Book Review: Python Testing Read More »