It’s the first official day of PyCon: Friday, February 19th, 2010. In my experience, PyCon plenaries can either be really interesting or extremely boring. I’ve rarely seen one that was in the middle. The chairman of PyCon is Van Lindberg (The Python Software Foundation’s lawyer, I think). Steve Holden was the first plenary speaker.
PyCon 2010: Friday Plenaries Read More »
I was contacted this week to review a new book from Packt Publishing entitled “Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide” by Daniel Arbuckle (no relation to Garfield’s master as far as I can tell). I haven’t received the book yet, but you can read about it on their website. I also found the book on Amazon. Alas,
Book Preview: Python Testing – Beginner’s Guide Read More »
I do a fair amount of technical support in addition to my software development. In our small shop, we get to troubleshoot anything that is related to technology, from networks to software to printers. I think one of the most annoying aspects is trying to get printers to work the way the user wants. Another
Python, Windows and Printers Read More »
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about some scripts we use at work for creating shortcuts to various programs in Windows. Well, we also push out updates to some programs which change the paths of the programs and then we need to change the user’s shortcuts to match. Unfortunately, some user’s will change the name
Using Python to Edit Bad Shortcuts Read More »
Roaming Profiles are a blessing and a curse. If the user uses the internet, their browser’s cached files will grow like mad. If the user downloads programs to their desktop or creates large Powerpoint files anywhere in their profile, then they have to be managed whenever the user logs in or out. There are several
Using Python to Reduce the Roaming Profile Read More »
A few months ago, my employer needed to lock down some of our workstations to be compliant with some new software we were installing from another government organization. We needed to force those machines to lock after so many minutes elapsed and we needed to make it such that the user could not change those
Enabling Screen Locking with Python Read More »
Almost four years ago, I was tasked with converting a Kixtart script to Python. This particular script was used to lock down Windows XP machines so they could be used as kiosks. Obviously, you don’t need Python to do this. Any programming language that can access the Windows Registry will be able to do this
Lock Down Windows with Python Read More »
Last month I wrote a post about getting Windows system information and I mentioned in one of my comments that there was another script that did some of this as well as other stuff, but I couldn’t find it. Well, today I went digging for it and found the script I wanted. So we’re going
More Windows System Information with Python Read More »
In the first part of this series, we went over what some might call the “SQL Expression” method of using SqlAlchemy to interact with your database. The theory behind this is that we should learn the less abstract way of doing things before we get to the higher level (and more abstract) methods. This is
Another Step-by-Step SqlAlchemy Tutorial (part 2 of 2) Read More »
A long time ago (circa 2007 if Google serves me right), there was a Python programmer named Robin Munn who wrote a really nice tutorial on SqlAlchemy. It was originally based on the 0.1 release, but updated for the newer 0.2. Then, Mr. Munn just disappeared and the tutorial was never updated. I having been kicking around the idea of releasing my own version of this tutorial for quite some time and finally decided to just do it. I hope you will find this article helpful as I found the original to be.
Another Step-by-Step SqlAlchemy Tutorial (part 1 of 2) Read More »
Another script I had to come up with for my employer dealt with getting various bits and pieces of information about each of our user’s physical machines. We wanted to keep track of the CPU speed, hard drive sizes and the amount of RAM they had (among other things) so we would know when it
Getting Windows System Information with Python Read More »
At my job, I do a fair amount of system administration scripting in Python. For example, almost all the login scripts are written in Python (with some of them ported from Kixtart). Over the years, I’ve been tasked with creating shortcuts to new applications that need to be placed on the user’s desktop or in
Using Python to Create Shortcuts Read More »
A few days ago, I wrote an article about using ConfigObj with wxPython. The first question I was asked about the article regarded using a configuration file to generate the dialog. I thought this was an interesting idea, so I took a stab at implementing that functionality. Personally I think it would be probably be
Generating a Dialog from a File Read More »
I recently starting using Michael Foord’s ConfigObj for one of our internal wxPython applications at work. When I wrote my other ConfigObj tutorial, I wanted to show you how I was using ConfigObj with my preferences dialog, but I didn’t want all my posts to include wx. In this article, I’ll just show you how
ConfigObj + wxPython = Geek Happiness Read More »
PyCon USA 2010 will be held in Atlanta, Georgia this year, from February 19-21. There are also tutorial and sprint days that precede and follow the conference. Last year, I was told that my employer wouldn’t pay my way next time. So this year I had to decide if I would go all on my
PyCon 2010 is Coming Read More »