Back in my system administrator days, we were thinking about setting the user’s Window desktop background to a specific image on login. Since I was in charge of the login scripts, which were written in Python, I decided to do some research to find out if there was a way to do it. We will […]
PyWin32: How to Set the Desktop Background on Windows Read More »
I was looking through some of my old code and noticed this old script where I was creating a log of all running processes every 5 minutes. I believe I originally wrote the code to help me diagnose rogue processes that were eating memory or pegging the CPU. I was using the psutil project to
Logging Currently Running Processes with Python Read More »
I recently saw someone asking how to bring a window to the front in Windows and I realized I had had some old unreleased code that might help someone with this task. A long time ago, Tim Golden (and possibly some other fellows on the PyWin32 mailing list) showed me how to make windows come
PyWin32 – How to Bring a Window to Front Read More »
This week we have Facundo Batista (@facundobatista) joining us. He is a Python Core developer from Argentina. If you happen to speak Spanish, then you might enjoy his blog. Let’s spend some time getting to know Facundo!
PyDev of the Week: Facundo Batista Read More »
The PyDev of the Week this week is Ben Rousch (@brousch). He is a contributor to the Kivy project. You should check out his blog here. You can also see Mr. Rousch give a talk about Kivy on Youtube. Let’s find out more about him!
PyDev of the Week: Ben Rousch Read More »
There are several 3rd party packages that wrap Twitter’s API. We’ll be looking at tweepy and twitter. The tweepy documentation is a bit more extensive than twitter’s, but I felt that the twitter package had more concrete examples. Let’s spend some time going over how to use these packages!
How to Connect to Twitter with Python Read More »
I’ve been hearing some buzz about a newish web service called Twilio which allows you to send SMS and MMS messages among other things. There’s a handy Python wrapper to their REST API as well. If you sign up with Twilio, they will give you a trial account without even requiring you to provide a
Python 101: How to send SMS/MMS with Twilio Read More »
My first book, Python 101 is on sale this month. You can get it on Amazon US for $2.99 or you can buy it for 50% off via my website. To get 50% off, just enter the following offer code at checkout: fall2014
Python 101 on Sale for September Read More »
Recently I wrote about the arrow project and one of my readers mentioned that another datetime related project known as Delorean. So in this article, we’ll spend some time going over the delorean project. This will be a high level article as there is no reason to rewrite the delorean’s documentation.
Python – Taking Time with Delorean Read More »
The wxPython GUI toolkit includes its own date / time capabilities. Most of the time, you can just use Python’s datetime and time modules and you’ll be fine. But occasionally you’ll find yourself needing to convert from wxPython’s wx.DateTime objects to Python’s datetime objects. You may encounter this when you use the wx.DatePickerCtrl widget. Fortunately,
wxPython: Converting wx.DateTime to Python datetime Read More »
The other day, I saw an interesting question on StackOverflow where the author asked if there was a way to serialize a Python dictionary into a human-readable format. The answer that was given was to use a package called jsonpickle, which will serialize complex Python objects to and from JSON. This article will give you
jsonpickle: Turning Python pickles into JSON Read More »
The other day, I came across an article about a fork of the pbs package called sh. These packages are wrappers for Python’s subprocess module. Basically sh allows you to import and use shell commands directly from Python. This article will go over a few examples to show you how to use this fun little
The new sh Package – A subprocess wrapper Read More »
The arrow project is an attempt to wrap Python’s time and datetime modules into a single API. It also claims to plug gaps in functionality in those modules, such as time spans, ISO-8601 and humanization. You can kind of think of arrow as a drop-in replacement for Python’s datetime and time modules, much like the
arrow – A new date / time package for Python Read More »
The Pony ORM project is another object relational mapper package for Python. They allow you to query a database using generators. They also have an online ER Diagram Editor that is supposed to help you create a model. When I first started using PonyORM, they were one of the only Python packages I’ve seen with
Python 101: An Intro to Pony ORM Read More »
I thought it would be fun to try out a few different Python object relational mappers (ORMs) besides SQLAlchemy. I recently stumbled across a project known as peewee. For this article, we will take the examples from my SQLAlchemy tutorial and port it to peewee to see how it stands up. The peewee project supports
An Intro to peewee – Another Python ORM Read More »