Archive for May 5th, 2010

Daily Archive

Wed 5 May 2010

Pyowa: The Iowa Python Users Group

Posted by Mike under Pyowa
1 Comment

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 anyway. We get 3-10 people at our meetings with an average of 4 or 5. Our next meeting is tomorrow, May 6th in Ames, IA. We’ll be meeting at the Ames Public Library from 7-8:45 p.m. Here’s what we’ll be covering:

  • Web Scraping
  • Mercurial source control
  • Trac: An Issue Tracking System

If you think you can come, let me know in the comments or by emailing me. If you have ideas for how to get more people to show up, please let me know. I could use some more good ideas. I hope to see you there!

 

Wed 5 May 2010

Python: How to Tell How Long Windows Has Been Idle

Posted by Mike under Python, Windows
[4] Comments

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 feat. The only one I was able to get working was a ctypes example, so without further ado, let’s check it out! (more…)